Disney is developing a live-action film about Medusa, and one of the producers is Dwayne Johnson. A man called the Rock overseeing a story about turning people to stone is the kind of synergy that normally takes a marketing department six months of away-days to arrive at.
Deadline had the story first on Friday. Michael Montemayor is writing the first draft of an original Medusa film for Disney’s live-action arm, with Johnson’s Seven Bucks Productions developing it under the first-look deal it signed with the studio in 2024. Johnson is producing alongside his Seven Bucks partners Dany Garcia and Hiram Garcia, with Melissa Fried overseeing the project for the company, and Matt Smith producing through Electro Corduroy Entertainment. Johnson isn’t attached to star, so you can lower the People’s Eyebrow for now.
Montemayor has form with difficult hair. He wrote Disney’s live-action Tangled, which Michael Gracey is directing for release on 31 March 2028, and he’s also writing Stepsisters, a live-action Cinderella spin-off with Akiva Schaffer attached to direct. Going from Rapunzel’s seventy feet of golden tresses to a scalp full of venomous snakes is quite the career progression, and suggests the Mouse House now has a dedicated department for problem hairstyles.
What he’s actually doing with the Gorgon is being kept under wraps, beyond word that it will be a very different take on the figure from Greek myth. In modern Hollywood that usually means one of two things: the monster was misunderstood all along, or the monster was misunderstood all along and gets a power ballad. Disney has previous here, having turned Maleficent from the Mistress of All Evil into a put-upon fairy with a fair grievance. Our guess, and it is only a guess, is that Medusa goes the same way. The myth gives a writer plenty to work with; in Ovid’s telling she’s punished for something done to her rather than anything she did, and modern retellers have been siding with her for years.
She’s been on screen plenty of times before. Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion Medusa in Clash of the Titans (1981), rattling her tail and drawing her bow in a firelit temple, remains the gold standard, and sent a generation of children behind the sofa. The 2010 remake swapped the stop-motion for CGI with Natalia Vodianova’s face, Uma Thurman ran a garden centre full of statues in the first Percy Jackson film, and Disney+ gave her another go in its Percy Jackson series. Whatever Montemayor writes will be measured against Ray’s, and quite right too.
Seven Bucks and Disney have worked together on Jungle Cruise and the live-action Moana, so the relationship is well oiled. Here at SFcrowsnest, we’d take an original story about a Gorgon over yet another live-action remake of a 1990s cartoon any day of the week. At least nobody can complain this one ruins their childhood, unless their childhood was spent in ancient Greece.
There’s no director, cast or release date yet. The first draft is still being typed, and if Montemayor has any sense, he’s doing it without looking up.
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