From O’Connor High to Hollywood, Muñoz’s Passion Project Has Disney Fans Talking About a Possible Atlantis Revival
Over the past few years, Disney has been churning out live-action remakes for many of their animated films from the 90s on, spurring a new generation of Disney fans to encounter these classics in a new light. One film in particular that hasn’t yet gotten the live-action revival treatment is “Atlantis: The Lost City,” but San Antonio native Jonathan Muñoz is set on changing that, and now he has the film’s original creators in his corner backing his idea after seeing the viral trailer he made.
Cult Classics Waiting for Revival
Many of Disney’s most beloved animation movies, like “The Lion King” and “The Little Mermaid,” have received live-action rebirths and met wild success, but there are so many more Disney gems hidden throughout the studio’s vast animated catalogue, and it’s just a matter of time before some of the lesser known Disney cult-classics get their due comeback in the live-action arena. Movies like “Treasure Planet,” “The Road to El Dorado” and “Atlantis” were adventure hits of the early 2000s that inspired legions of fans around the world – Muñoz is one of these fans, who fell captivated by “Atlantis” as a kid, inspiring him to pursue filmmaking as an adult.
Muñoz’s Journey from San Antonio to Hollywood
Jonathan Muñoz began his filmmaking career at O’Connor High School, where he had several of his short films screened at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin. Since then, he’s been working as an editor for Cosm Entertainment in Los Angeles, as well as an aspiring Hollywood director. In the early part of this year, he released a fan-made trailer for “Atlantis” on YouTube and it went viral. A lot of the people who saw it online at first believed it was actually from Disney – that’s how well made it was. Fan-made trailers are, lots of the time, either satirical or lacking in budget so they come out looking sloppy and inauthentic, but Muñoz’s trailer for “Atlantis” is full of flashy special and practical effects that look big-budget and like something Disney would put their name behind. In reality, Muñoz and his team (many of which are friends of his from San Antonio) funded the whole project themselves.
Original Creators Show Support
Upon the trailer’s release, and amid its viral moment, Muñoz got a message from the movie’s original creators, that they were impressed by his trailer and in full support of his idea for bringing “Atlantis” back to the big screen. As of now, no official plans to remake “Atlantis” have been announced by Disney, but Muñoz has apparently met with Tab Murphy (the original film’s screenwriter) where they discussed ideas to possibly adapt a series modeled after Muñoz’s vision, so who knows what the future may hold.
