For a decade Disney‘s live-action division has treated its animated library less as source material than as a set of blueprints, tracing each classic back onto film almost frame for frame. The most revealing thing about its plan for Princess Tiana is that it breaks the habit. The studio is not looking for someone to copy The Princess and the Frog; it is looking for two writers to compose a new work around its heroine.

As Deadline first reported, Colman Domingo and Robert O’Hara are in talks to co-write an original live-action feature inspired by the animated original — a spin-off in spirit rather than a shot-for-shot remake. Neither is attached to star or direct. The offer on the table is authorship itself, the quality Disney’s recent remakes have most visibly lacked.

The pairing reads as a thesis about where that authorship should come from. O’Hara is a dramatist and director whose staging of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play drew a 2020 Tony nomination and a reputation for handling American racial history without softening it. Domingo, a two-time Oscar nominee for Rustin and Sing Sing, was a playwright and stage actor long before the film academy noticed him. Both learned their craft in rooms where a story has to survive being spoken aloud — precisely the test a fairy tale rewritten for adults tends to fail.

The original, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker and sung by Anika Noni Rose, was Disney’s last hand-drawn musical and its first film built around a Black princess, a jazz-age New Orleans fable the company has quietly kept in circulation — most conspicuously by retheming a flagship park ride into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, a story set after the credits. An original feature could follow that logic, extending Tiana’s world rather than re-shooting her plot, and answering an old criticism that the animated film left its heroine a frog for too much of her own movie.

The timing sharpens the wager. Snow White fell well short of expectations, the live-action Moana underperformed, and a Tangled remake and a Lilo & Stitch sequel wait in the same queue. A studio that has spent years selling audiences their own nostalgia is, on this one title, proposing to sell them something it has not made before.

Plot, cast and director are still blank pages. But the shape of the bet is already legible: for the first time in a long run of remakes, Disney is asking what a princess might say, not merely how faithfully she can be redrawn.

Tags: Disney, Colman Domingo, Disney live-action, Robert O'Hara, The Princess and the Frog, Tiana