Lin-Manuel Miranda already has enough on his schedule to keep seven people busy, but he's long since proven he can handle spinning a few creative plates at once. And this latest project is actually an old plan coming back to life. He'll work on an animated movie called Vivo for Sony Pictures Animation.
And this one could be a little easier in terms of workload, because a lot of his creative chores have been done. Vivo, which focuses – or did, in its previous incarnation – on a capuchin monkey with adventure in his heart who travels from Havana to Miami to fulfill his destiny, was set up at DreamWorks Animation about six years ago. That was during Miranda's acclaim for his pre-Hamilton musical In The Heights, but as so often seems to happen, it couldn't quite get moving.
So now the movie, which already has 11 songs from Miranda in place, will get a new script from his Heights collaborator Quiara Alegría Hudes and Kirk De Micco is on board to direct. And it won't hit screens until December 2020, so Vivo has time to develop.
Which means that Miranda's schedule now has something else on it, in addition to acting in Mary Poppins Returns, helping to produce the live-action Little Mermaid working with Patrick Rothfuss on the movie and TV adaptations of the latter's Kingkiller Chronicle books, try to get a new movie of In The Heights on its feet and developing a potential original Disney animated movie. Oh, and checking in with touring productions of Hamilton while also quietly working on a second volume of the Mixtape of covers and tunes inspired by the show. That sound you hear is the worried gurgle of kidneys from people playing a drinking game about whether Helen will mention a Miranda project on the Empire Podcast in a future episode...
Lin-Manuel Miranda and Alan Menken board Disney's new Little Mermaid