Thirty-five years ago tomorrow, on November 13, 1991, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast opened at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood. Within months it became the first animated feature ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
The opening at the restored Hollywood Boulevard movie palace kicked off a short limited run before the film went wide across the US on November 22, the same day as The Addams Family and An American Tail: Fievel Goes West.
The version that almost happened
The film people love was not the first plan. After The Little Mermaid revived the studio in 1989, Disney hired Richard Purdum to adapt the French fairy tale as a non-musical period drama. Studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg disliked the results and ordered a full restart as a musical.
That decision brought in the Little Mermaid songwriting team of lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken, plus two first-time directors, Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton’s finished script made it Disney’s first animated feature written in full before storyboarding began.
Ashman never saw the finished film. He died of AIDS eight months before release, and the film is dedicated to him.
A risky festival debut
Before the El Capitan opening, Disney did something unusual: it showed an unfinished cut, with some scenes pulled back to earlier stages of completion, at the New York Film Festival on September 29, 1991. The audience gave it a standing ovation of about ten minutes.
The famous ballroom sequence relied on Disney’s Computer Animation Production System, known as CAPS, which let hand-drawn characters move through a computer-built set. Beauty and the Beast was only the second feature made entirely with the system.
What 35 years of numbers look like
The film cost $25 million. It opened third, with $9.6 million, behind The Addams Family and Cape Fear, but kept going to $145.9 million in North America and $331.9 million worldwide on its first run. That made it the first animated film to cross $100 million in the US.
IMAX and 3D re-releases in 2002 and 2012 pushed the lifetime total to about $451 million, roughly 18 times its budget. Its awards haul included:
- The first Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy, won by an animated film
- Six Oscar nominations, with wins for Best Original Score and Best Original Song for the title track
- A place in the US National Film Registry in 2002
Its influence spread well beyond cinemas. In 1994 it became the first Disney film turned into a Broadway musical, which won a Tony Award and ran for 13 years. A live-action remake followed in 2017.
Animation’s push for respect at the Oscars has not stopped: this year’s race includes Coyote vs. Acme, which Warner Bros. had shelved. Another big anniversary lands this week too, with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone turning 25 on November 16.
The El Capitan, which hosted that 1991 opening, is still showing Disney films on Hollywood Boulevard today.
Further reading
Image: Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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