Luke Evans has opened up about the future of Disney+’s Beauty and the Best prequel series.
Back in 2020, the streaming service revealed that Evans and Josh Gad would be reprising their roles as Gaston and LeFou in a series based on the 2017 live-action film.
However in February, Deadline revealed that production on the project was put on hold due to “creative reasons.”
According to an unnamed source, the “scripts and original music” were not coming together in the “direction expected or running behind schedule.”
Shortly after the news circulated headlines, Gad and Evans took to Twitter to confirm the news.
“This is a very sad message for us to tweet. We are devastated. Goodbye, for now, from Gaston and LeFou,” Evans tweeted.
Gad added: “Sadly, ‘Tis true. We tried to make it all work, but under the gun, it wasn’t meant to be… for now. These characters and this story will live on, but sometimes the best intentions & reality collide & nothing can be done.”
After months of silence, Evans finally gave fans a new update regarding the highly anticipated project during his recent interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“We just wanna make sure that it is absolutely the best it can be, and if that means we just have to wait a little longer to finesse certain pieces of it, then that’s what we’re going to do because this is a very important legacy,” he told the news outlet.
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“We want to honour these characters with the best story we can possibly deliver. It’s just on hold. It is gonna happen. We’re very excited about it. At some point in the near future, it will happen.”
Evans also teased that the prequel series would explore different sides of Gaston and LeFou that weren’t previously shown in Beauty and the Beast.
“There’s so many things about these two characters that we don’t really know, about their origin stories. Were they always these creatures or were they different?” he explained.
“It’s a bit like, no one’s born bad. Things happen, you make wrong decisions, or you choose to make a decision that affects the rest of your life.
“I think that was where we were going with the idea and concept. So I hope one day soon we will be able to deliver that story for you guys.”
While the Disney+ series isn’t cancelled, it’s unknown if the current creatives, Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, will stay attached.
Tentatively titled Little Town, the show is set before the events of Beauty and the Beast and will follow Gaston and LeFou as they embark on an adventure with the latter’s stepsister Tilly.
EGOT winner and composer of the 1991 original film and the live-action release, Alan Menken, has signed on to write the soundtrack – while Oscar-nominee Glenn Slater is tapped to write the lyrics for the first episode.
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