For the past decade, Walt Disney Studios has been cranking out live action remakes of its animated classics. Even films as recent as Moana are getting remade, but one era of Disney’s history has evaded reevaluation.
In the early 2000s, Disney turned briefly away from musical showcases like Aladdin and The Little Mermaid and aimed at fans of action and adventure with two films that were inventive but underperformed at the box office. Treasure Planet was one of them, a retelling of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic Treasure Island, set in space. The other movie went in another direction—literally—down to the depths of the ocean.
That film, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, is about a Smithsonian linguist and cartographer named Milo Thatch (voiced by Michael J. Fox) who, in the early days of the 20th century, finds an ancient document that may lead to the fabled lost city of the title.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire received mixed reviews and underperformed at the box office, but found a loyal cult audience on home video.
San Antonio native Jonathan Munoz was one of those kids that became obsessed with the movie.
“I remember that [movie] sort of like sending a strike of lightning through my little eight-year-old body,” he said. “I would watch this movie on VHS time and time again, almost breaking [the tape]. I think that it’s a movie that really stands apart from a lot of the other Disney movies.”
Years later, as a student at Sandra Day O’Connor High School, Munoz’s own filmmaking would land him a place in multiple years at Austin’s famed South By Southwest Festival, screening short films. From there, Munoz’s path took him to Northwest Vista College, then to the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, and Columbia College.
Now an editor at Cosm Entertainment in Los Angeles, Munoz has gone back to that early inspiration to create something Disney hasn’t (yet) done: a trailer for what would be a live-action version of Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
Munoz said it was something he had to do, or he’d bust.
“If I see somebody else do it, I’m gonna freak,” he said he thought to himself.
That was in 2023. Now, with the help of a crew that includes many of his colleagues from San Antonio, his project has come to fruition in a big way.
The two-minute trailer opens with a young Milo wandering along a flowing stream, with towering mountains in the background, then flashes forward to the adult hero gathering his crew to search for Atlantis. There’s a shot of the famous Gamble House in Pasadena, California, and impressive underwater FX shots of a belle epoque-styled submarine on its way to a hidden world. Every element in the short film works beautifully, including the music, by composer Christian Heschl, who had a good piece of advice for Munoz, who wanted to call back to the original film’s theme by James Newton Howard. Heschl felt otherwise.
“You want to fool everybody into making them think that Disney did this,” Munoz recalled him saying, “but your filmmaking voice can’t help but come out in this project.”
Everything, from the dialogue, to the FX, to the music, Munoz says, does feel like Disney, but “has its own sort of personality.”
And through a stroke of luck, Munoz found his work in front of the eyes of his filmmaking heroes, Don Hahn (producer of the original Atlantis), Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise (co-directors of Atlantis). Their response?
“You guys are crazy in the best way,” is what Munoz said Hahn wrote to him.
Soon thereafter, Munoz’s director of photography, Brendan Boyle, received a Facebook friend request from the original movie’s screenwriter, Tab Murphy.
“The two of us ended up meeting him at his house in L.A. We cracked open some beers, ate tacos, and just chew[ed] over what it’s like making movies in Los Angeles.”
Two weeks later, their trailer was screened at the famed Chinese Theater in Hollywood, with Kirk Wise and Tab Murphy in attendance.
The response online has “surpassed expectations,” Munoz said. And since that public screening, Munoz said he and Boyle have been talking with Murphy about developing a series.
Not bad for two years’ work on a $35,000 investment.
“It was totally worth it just to get my foot in the door. I’m hoping that it leads to maybe a feature that I can direct that’s in the same sort of genre. And if Disney ever finds their way to doing the live action treatment of Atlantis, I hope that they would call me up. But if there’s somebody better for it, then I’d be happy to settle for a [production assistant] position,” Munoz said with a laugh.
Spoken like a true Hollywood player.
WEB EXTRA: Listen to the full interview with Jonathan Munoz where he talks more about his early inspirations, working with a San Antonio crew, and life in California.
