Twenty-three years after the animated film became a hit, Lilo & Stitch is back as a live-action adaptation, once again exploring the friendship between a young Hawaiian girl and the blue alien she adopts.
Though Disney’s recent live-action remakes have had varying levels of success, Lilo & Stitch is estimated to be headed for a four-day domestic debut of $120 million over Memorial Day weekend, marking one of the best showings ever for the studio’s reimaginings. It opens the same weekend as Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (on course for an $80 million debut), which star Courtney B. Vance played into at the film‘s L.A. premiere on Saturday.
With wife Angela Bassett appearing alongside Tom Cruise in the latest Mission: Impossible, Vance joked to The Hollywood Reporter, “Tom, how are you gonna do bro? I don’t think you can compete with Stitch, Tom, but you’re gonna give it your best shot.” He then relented, “We love you, you know we love you. I’ll be there for MI8, I’ll be there.”
Vance, like several others in the cast, hadn’t seen the 2002 original, noting, “Everyone is shocked that I hadn’t seen it and I’m shocked that everyone has seen it. The head of the studio [Alan Bergman] came up to me when we first got here and said, ‘It’s gonna be huge.’” He added, “If you’re going to do a live-action version of something that’s so beloved, you had better do it right. So I think that we all did it justice.”
Eight-year-old actress Maia Kealoha plays Lilo in the film, while Chris Sanders reprises his role as the voice of Stitch. “I won’t lie, I was very anxious,” Sanders said of learning Disney was remaking the movie. “I think there’s a great deal of suspense when you hear things like that are going to happen. I was also very hopeful that I would be contacted to do it and they did, they reached out at some point,” after he has continually voiced the character for various projects since 2002. “It felt like the most natural thing in the world to step into this and make sure that they had that continuity.”
Billy Magnussen and Zach Galifianakis also star as aliens hunting for Stitch on Earth, as Galifianakis explained that during shooting, in Stitch’s place they were often acting opposite “tape or a tennis ball, sometimes they would have like a stuffed animal — but the three things that I mentioned still have more range than I do. You’re acting usually to nothingness.” He added when there’s no living creature to work off of, “It takes coordination. It takes, OK, look over there; now where is the thing? And sometimes actors are looking at eight different places so it’s just a little trickier that way.”
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On filmmaker Dean Fleischer Camp directed the film, noting, “On the surface the two projects seem very dissimilar, but the technical challenges of having an animated character at the center of your movie in a live-action world [are alike]. And I also think that Marcel and Stitch are not so dissimilar, they have a lot of the same DNA. They’re both these really unlikely heroes or protagonists who are trying to find their way in this world that wasn’t really made for them. Because of that, even though they’re really charming and funny and cute, they also have this deep well of sadness that you wouldn’t expect.”
And when it came to bringing Stitch to life on screen, “All of the expressiveness and humor that you can get in a traditionally animated film we tried really hard to make sure we weren’t leaving that behind as we translated it” to a live-action format, Camp explained. Executive producer Jonathan Eirich added getting Stitch’s look just right “was the thing that was so terrifying. We were at D23 last July unveiling it, and the moment we saw the online reaction that people were happy, you were like, ‘Oh my god, thank god.’”
Lilo & Stitch hits theaters on Friday.
Stitch, Chris Sanders, Zach Galifianakis, Maia Kealoha, Sydney Agudong, Courtney B. Vance, Kaipo Dudoit, Billy Magnussen and Amy Hill.
Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for Disney
