Disney’s Live-Action Medusa Movie Is Real, Dwayne Johnson Is Producing and a Tangled Writer Is Drafting It: What’s Confirmed, What the Myth Actually Says and Why I Think It Only Works If the Gorgon Stays Dangerous

There is a marble head in a Munich museum that has been quietly arguing with storytellers for about two thousand years. It is the Rondanini Medusa, and it is on our cover for a reason: she does not look like a monster. She looks like someone who has been through something. Goethe saw it in Rome in 1786, and Wikipedia’s account of his reaction says he was struck by its “unspeakable anguished stare of death.”

On Friday, Nov. 6, Deadline reported that Disney is developing a live-action movie about that same woman. Michael Montemayor, a writer on the live-action Tangled, is drafting the script, and Dwayne Johnson’s Seven Bucks is producing. That is nearly everything anyone has said so far, and it is why I wanted to write this now. A thin announcement is the best moment to say what you hope a movie will be, before the trailers start telling you what to think.

What’s confirmed, and what isn’t

Laughing Place says plainly that details are scarce, and I agree. Everything past this list that I flag as “my read” is me thinking out loud, not me leaking anything.

Who Medusa was, and why “villain” was always shaky

Here is the thing most people skip: there is more than one Medusa, and Disney gets to pick. The oldest account that survives is Hesiod’s Theogony, written around the eighth century BCE. In it, Medusa is one of three Gorgon sisters, and the only mortal one. Perseus beheads her, and Pegasus and Chrysaor spring from her neck. Hesiod says Poseidon lay with her in a meadow. There is no temple and no curse.

The version most of us know comes from the Roman poet Ovid, centuries later. In his telling she was a beautiful woman, Poseidon violated her in Athena’s temple, and Athena answered by turning her hair into snakes. According to GreekMythology.com, Ovid is the only ancient source for the temple scene. Another ancient writer, Apollodorus, offers a third reason: that she was killed because she wanted to rival Athena in beauty.

This matters because the “misunderstood Medusa” pitch is not a modern fan theory bolted onto a villain. It is Ovid’s version, and it is two thousand years old. Nerdist guesses Disney may go the Maleficent, Cruella and Wicked route, and I think that is the likeliest reading too.

My read, though, is that the Ovid backstory is built on an assault, and a studio that makes family films has to decide how to hold that. If it is handled lightly, or turned into a makeover story, it will feel false. If it is handled plainly and with restraint, it can be the engine of the whole film.

The face on our cover

The Rondanini Medusa is a Roman marble copy kept in the Glyptothek in Munich. According to Wikipedia, it shows the Gorgon more humanized and beautiful than the grotesque, protective face that usually decorated Athena’s aegis. If the original it copies dates to the fifth century BCE, it would be the first “beautiful” Gorgon face in Greek art by more than a century, though scholars have also argued for a later Hellenistic model.

It mattered to artists for centuries. Wikipedia notes that Antonio Canova used it as the model for the severed head in his marble Perseus with the Head of Medusa, made between 1798 and 1801. I find that oddly comforting. Even in antiquity, sculptors were asking whether she was a monster or a person, and Disney is not the first to face the question.

Why Disney wants a Gorgon right now

Nerdist’s guess is that Disney saw two signals: the ratings success of its Percy Jackson series on Disney+ and the huge box office of The Odyssey. Both are checkable. Wikipedia’s running 2026 tally has The Odyssey at roughly $1.8 billion worldwide, and we covered how it became Universal’s biggest film ever. Greek myth is clearly selling tickets again.

The Percy Jackson link is even closer to home. When that series premiered in December 2023, Medusa was played by Jessica Parker Kennedy, and at casting she was described as a character wronged by the gods who lives in bitter seclusion. In other words, Disney has already tested a sympathetic Medusa, in a single episode of its own Disney+ series. If you want the wider picture, here is my look at where that series stands.

My read is that the appeal is simple. The myths are free to use, the characters are instantly recognizable in every country, and nobody has to build a cinematic universe to explain them. The catch is that every other studio can open the same book. Disney’s best-known visit to Olympus is still the 1997 animated Hercules, a musical comedy that sanded the stories down. A live-action Medusa is a very different bet. Its nearest cousin on the calendar is the studio’s witch movie Hexed, opening Nov. 25, which I wrote about last month.

The writer and the producer are the real clues

When a project has no cast and no director, the people attached are the only fingerprints you get. Two of them are worth reading closely.

Michael Montemayor

Besides the live-action Tangled, which Laughing Place lists for March 31, 2028, Montemayor is writing Stepsisters, an original live-action Cinderella spin-off that Akiva Schaffer is directing. Put Stepsisters and Medusa side by side and you get a pattern: famous stories told from the margins. My read is that Disney is turning to him as its “story behind the story” writer, which points toward an empathy-first Medusa.

Dwayne Johnson and Seven Bucks

Laughing Place notes that Seven Bucks’ last Disney film was Jungle Cruise in 2021. Johnson has a mythic résumé of his own: he played Hercules in 2014 and voiced the demigod Maui in Moana. Nerdist expects him to stay behind the camera on this one, and I agree. My read: a producer credit on a Gorgon movie looks like a man who wants the myth shelf in his catalog, not a man who needs to be Perseus.

A Medusa who cannot hurt anyone is not a reclamation. She is a costume.

Three Medusas Disney could make

These are my guesses, not forecasts. The bars show how likely I think each version is, and the words are my confidence.

What I want from it

I have not seen a frame of this film, so this is a wish list, not a review. Three things would make me a believer.

1. Make the gaze cost something. Her power is the best idea in the myth, because it turns every shot into a question about who is allowed to look at whom. Dread Central remembers Perseus crouched behind a pillar in the 1981 Clash of the Titans, watching her through his shield. That scene works because the audience cannot see her either. Keep that fear.
2. Do not use the assault as a footnote or a joke. If Disney takes Ovid’s backstory, it has to take its weight too. If it prefers Hesiod’s meadow or Apollodorus’s rivalry, it should choose that on purpose and let the story say why.
3. Let her stay frightening. Giving a monster a voice should not mean giving her a redemption tour. The most moving version of Medusa is one who is still a little scary after we understand her.

What earlier Medusas teach

Questions people are asking

I keep coming back to the marble head in Munich. It still stops people because it looks like pain and menace at the same time. If Disney can get a face like that on screen, one that frightens you and breaks your heart in the same second, it won’t need a twist to make this work.