20 Surprising Facts You Never Knew About Your Favorite Disney Movies
Sir Patrick Stewart was almost in ‘Aladdin’
Did you know that Sir Patrick Stewart was originally offered a role in Aladdin? He wasn’t offered just any role. He was asked to play the part of Jafar! How interesting would that have been?! Jafar could have shared a voice with Professor Xavier. Unfortunately, he had to turn down the role because he was filming Star Trek: The Next Generation at the time. He’s even said that turning down the opportunity is something he really regrets doing. Sad day.
The vultures in ‘The Jungle Book’ were originally written for The Beatles to play
The vulture quartet that pops up toward the end of The Jungle Book was originally supposed to be voiced by The Beatles themselves. In fact, in case you haven’t noticed, the vultures were kind of inspired by the musicians. However, the story goes that “scheduling conflicts” kept them from participating, but it was really Lennon who opposed the project. Disney kept their likenesses anyway.
‘Tangled’ is the second-most expensive movie ever made (first for animated films)
Believe it or not, but Tangled was even more expensive than James Cameron’s Avatar. Seriously. A lot of the film’s budget went toward developing the CGI animation system (if you remember, Tangled pretty much marked the death of classic animation) as well as problems that popped up during the film’s six years of production (including complete project halts). To make it sound even crazier, Peter Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings trilogy cost about $281 million for all three films and Tangled cost $260 million for the one film. Whoa, baby.