Disney to make Cinderella spin-off 'Stepsisters' in latest attempt to make villains sympathetic

Everyone knows Cinderella's evil stepsisters. They're not just the evil spawn of Cinderella's wicked stepmother, but vile in their own right. Now, Disney is planning to turn their story into a live-action film.

The film, Deadline writes, "focuses on the evil stepsisters who abused Cinderella and got theirs when her foot hit the slipper." The original fairytale from the Brothers Grimm describes the two sisters, Anastasia and Drizella, as "beautiful and fair of face, but vile and black of heart."

The film follows Disney's foray into villain stories, where the originals focused on the heroes or heroines of the tale. Emma Stone as "Cruella" paints a somewhat sympathetic portrait of the dog-killing villain in "101 Dalmatians." Series "The Descendants" is all about the children of the evil villains. 

Angelina Jolie's "Maleficent" makes the argument that the evil, beautiful queen in the "Snow White" story was actually just misunderstood. And that's just one element of the complete retconning of the "Snow White" story. Lead actress Rachel Zegler played "Snow White" in a recent remake and portrayed the character as more of a modern-day social justice warrior than an orphan girl cast out and left for dead in the woods until she found true love.

The stories of the villains, who represented the consequences of bad or immoral actions in the original Brothers Grimm fairy tales, are humanized and explained. Their evil deeds are justified and cast in a different moral light than in the telling of the hero stories. 

In both the original telling and the 1950 Disney animated version, the two sisters are mercilessly cruel to Cinderella. The badger and bully her, relegate her to the status of servant in her own home, take away her nice clothes, make her wear wooden shoes, and force her to sleep among the ashes of the hearth.

It's only when Cinderella meets her fairy godmother and is granted her wish to go to the prince's ball that the sisters take any real notice of her, and even so, seeing her shine at the party, they have no idea who she really is. When the prince comes around to the home of the evil sisters, wicked stepmother, and Cinderella, the Brothers Grimm show them trying to cut off parts of their own feet to try to fit into Cinderella's tell-tale glass slipper.

For decades, little girls have pestered their parents to let them dress up like princesses. Once Anastasia and Drizella hit the big screen, the next crop of little girls will likely want to dress up like and imitate those stepsisters who are beautiful but vile. Instead of aspiring to be good-hearted and pure, tempted only by true love, they will look for ways to elevate themselves above others, even if that means lashing out with the most horrific cruelty.

The new "Stepsisters" has tapped Akiva Schaffer to direct and the writing team of Dan Gregor and Doug Mand to rewrite a script from Michael Montemayor. Schaffer worked on the latest The Naked Gun, Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Gregor and Mand wrote The Naked Gun, among other properties.