{"id":683350,"date":"2026-07-10T00:58:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T00:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/683350\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T00:58:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T00:58:09","slug":"free-willy-set-for-a-comeback-with-russo-brothers-reboot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/683350\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Willy Set For A Comeback With Russo Brothers Reboot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Long before the MCU came along and set the template for the modern cinematic universe, there was another interconnected, multimedia franchise driving the kids wild: The FWCU. Yes, folks, the Free Willy<\/a> Cinematic Universe. Spanning three movies (who can forget \u2014 or indeed remember \u2014 Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home<\/a> or Free Willy 3: The Rescue<\/a>) , an animated TV series, two CD-ROM games, and a DTV reboot, the continuing adventures of orphaned boy Jesse and his orca pal won the hearts \u2014 and wet the eyes \u2014 of families the world over. Now, per THR<\/a>‘s reporting, Free Willy is about to be unleashed upon a whole new generation.<\/p>\n

Warner Bros. and The Russo Brothers’ AGBO production company are teaming up to reimagine Free Willy for a modern audience, with Miller’s Girl producer-writer duo Mary-Margaret Kunze and Jade Halley Bartlett aboard to write the screenplay. Whether the new Free Willy will exist in the same world as Simon Wincer’s cult classic \u2014 or follow the same foundational orphaned-kid-befriends-captive-orca narrative \u2014 very much remains to be seen at this point, as does the approach Kunze and Bartlett will take here to their whale-y big star. In the original movies, actual orca Keiko stole our hearts as the eponymous Willy, helping undo generations of misinformation and myth-making surrounding the killer whale as a species. One would suspect a modern-day Willy will be some sort of at least partially CG-constructed beast \u2014 but who knows?<\/p>\n

With Brian Duffield’s sperm whale epic Whalefall<\/a> mere months away, and now the return of Free Willy to *checks notes* look forward to, perhaps we’ve misdirected our energy into the Welsh New Wave<\/a>. Clearly, the Whale New Wave is upon us. All hail the new blubber!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Long before the MCU came along and set the template for the modern cinematic universe, there was another…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":683351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-683350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/683351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}