Lin-Manuel Miranda may be a household name thanks to his skyrocketing success in 2016, but the talented composer/writer/performer has been hard at work for more than a few years already. Sure, the record-setting success of Hamilton and the more recent acclaim for his work on Disney's Moana keep him in the day-to-day zeitgeist, but this is not Miranda's first brush with success. The last time his name started appearing in headlines was in 2009 when his musical In the Heights won four Tony Awards, one Grammy Award, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Around that time, Miranda took his movie idea for an animated tale about an adventurous capuchin monkey to DreamWorks Animation, where it had languished for the last six years. (The film treatment of In the Heights underwent the same shelf treatment at Universal Pictures.) Now, as Deadline reports, Miranda's Vivo project has found new life, so to speak. Set up at Sony Pictures Animation, the tale about "a capuchin monkey with a thirst for adventure – and a passion for music – that makes a treacherous passage from Havana to Miami to fulfill his destiny" is due out on December 18, 2020.
Miranda himself confirmed as much on Twitter soon after the news broke:
Miranda's 11 original songs will anchor the animated adventure epic; his In the Heights collaborator Quiara Alegria Hudes is writing the script. The Croods director Kirk De Micco will helm the picture, which will be produced by Lisa Stewart with Laurence Mark as executive producer. Few other details are available on the project at the moment, but since Vivo's tunes are a few years old, perhaps Miranda will freshen them up a bit in the meantime.
Then again, his schedule appears to be pretty full-up these days. He was recently reported as the point man for the adaptation of The Kingkiller Chronicle, has a secret project in the works with Disney and Zootopia's co-director, Byron Howard, and is involved with Disney's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. Oh, and remember that In the Heights picture? It's now set up with The Weinstein Company with Jon M. Chu set to direct. If any studio out there has some old Miranda projects gathering dust, now's the time to bring them back out.
