Disney+ Develops Ella Enchanted Series With Hathaway
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- Disney+ has landed 'Ella Enchanted' for development as a TV series based on the 2004 Miramax film, with Anne Hathaway executive producing through her Somewhere Pictures banner alongside iGen Studios.
- Ilana Wolpert (Anyone But You) is writing the series, with Beth Schwartz (Dead Boy Detectives) as showrunner; Miramax Television and Paramount Television Studios are co-producing.
- Ella Enchanted shifts from the film's Cinderella-style romantic fantasy toward a coming-of-age boarding school setting, drawing on four chapters of Gail Carson Levine's original novel — a reframing the article compares to Wednesday's treatment of the Addams Family.
- The deal extends Anne Hathaway's long Disney arc from The Princess Diaries to her current Devil Wears Prada 2 starring role; she opened Disney's upfront last week introducing new CEO Josh D'Amaro.
- It's the second high-profile Miramax Television/Paramount Television Studios co-adaptation after Cop Land, as Paramount (now 49% owner of Miramax) intensifies library mining under new Miramax CEO Jonathan Glickman.
Why it matters: Disney+ is leaning into a recognizable playbook — fairy-tale IP reframed through a YA boarding-school lens, à la Wednesday — while formalizing the Miramax/Paramount TV co-production pipeline that has been mining the 2004 film library; for Hathaway, the project lands at the same studio where Princess Diaries launched her career, now bookending it with Devil Wears Prada 2.
