Gaston may not have gotten the girl, but he might be getting his very own movie. 

According to Deadline, Disney has quietly started developing a live-action film starring the brash and burly antagonist from the studio’s 1991 animated classic Beauty and the Beast.

There’s no director on board the project yet, but the co-writer of Sony’s Across the Spider-Verse (Dave Callaham) is penning the script, and Michelle Rejwan (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) is producing.

Gaston is a chauvinistic hunter who’s popular with all the local residents of his provincial French town, except one: the local bookworm Belle, who he’s obsessed with marrying, despite her obvious aversion. Gaston eventually plots to kill her true love, the Beast, only to (spoiler alert) fall to his death at the end of the animated film.

Disney+ had previously greenlit a Beauty and the Beast prequel series in 2020, focusing on Gaston and his bumbling sidekick LeFou. Set in the same world as the 2017 live-action film remake, Luke Evans and Josh Gad had been set to reprise their respective roles and executive produce the series, before it was scrapped in 2022. 

This new spinoff film will turn a fresh page, with a new actor taking up the role of Gaston.

How does this fit into Disney’s strategy?

Mining its animation catalogue for live-action films has delivered more hits than misses for Disney. Despite starting this year with the underperforming Snow White, the studio bounced back with a very profitable summer thanks to its Lilo & Stitch remake. With the market growing an appetite for live-action family movies, continuing this strategy with a recognizable IP makes a lot of sense.

But with many of its princess protagonists already adapted in live action, the studio could be turning to well-known but under-leveraged characters that haven’t had standalone projects. Disney’s previous villain-focused films have proven successful: The 2021 pic Cruella did US$233 million in ticket sales despite a hybrid streaming release during the pandemic, and two Maleficent movies in 2014 and 2019 grossed more than US$1.2 billion combined. Plus Disney Channel’s long-running Descendents franchise has proven that there’s still a lot to mine when it comes to the studio’s iconic scoundrels.

In fact, the lore of Disney’s baddies has also been expanding in publishing, thanks to Serena Valentino’s bestselling Villains book series, the second (The Beast Within) and 11th installments (Kill the Beast) of which both suggest the Beast and Gaston were once childhood friends.

What could the spinoff be about?

Deadline reports that the film will have a “swashbuckling” tone, but there are no other plot details available yet.  

Disney could tell a straight-up villain origin story that explores Gaston’s youth, revealing the experiences that shaped his manipulative personality. There’s also plenty of room for comedy in finding out how he met LeFou, developed his antler decorating style, and formed his quirky breakfast habit of eating dozens of eggs. 

A spinoff with a more revisionist take, meanwhile, might deliver a tragic backstory or even a sympathetic retelling of Beauty and the Beast from Gaston’s point of view. Recent successes in this subgenre, like Cruella and Wicked, have been rooted in recasting female villains as misunderstood feminist heroes—but Gaston is already established as a false hero in the narrative, and his misogynistic traits may be harder to defend in the context of a family film. 

And if it’s not a prequel or a retelling? Well, a sequel to Beauty and the Beast could explore what happened next if Gaston somehow survived that fall from the castle tower.