Watching teen stars leave Disney with a bang after a brief career as child actors or presenters is a decades-old tradition. Tommy Kirk, of Faithful friend (1957) or The Robinsons of the South Seas (1960), was removed from the studio as news of his homosexuality emerged. Jodie Foster abruptly moved from Disney children’s productions to playing a minor prostitute in Taxi Driver (1976). Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez and Ashley Tisdale reappeared as pop stars with an openly sexualized image, a rebellion against the childish look that the factory had forced them to maintain. For this reason, at the last D23 –the biannual convention in which Disney presents new projects and pays homage to itself–, held between August 9 and 11, it was striking to see two of these figures embarking on the road back: Miley Cyrus, who became the youngest person to obtain the distinction of Disney Legend, and Lindsay Lohan (New York, 38 years old), brand new co-star of Freakier Friday, one of the major commercial bets of 2025.
This is the late sequel to Put yourself in my place (2003), in English Freaky Friday, which arrives more than two decades later with the same cast: in the film, which has already been shot, Lohan is once again accompanied by Jamie Lee Curtis, her mother in the fiction, as well as Chad Michael Murray, Mark Harmon, Lucille Soong and Rosalind Chao. This second installment will be released 20 years after Lindsay Lohan’s last collaboration with the studio, Herbie: Full throttle (2005). Between that film, for which it was rumored that Disney had digitally reduced Lohan has struggled with various addictions, has been arrested at least seven times, sentenced to prison six times and has been in rehab five times. The actress has been living in Dubai (United Arab Emirates) for a decade, has threatened to convert to Islam and, since last year, has had a son with Kuwaiti businessman Bader Shammas.
The career of the actress, who rose to fame at the age of 12 playing the two twins of You to London and I to California (1998), has been going through a period that has practically been left fallow. In the last five years, it has made timid comebacks with two romantic comedies for Netflix and a superficial cameo in Bad girls (2024), the remake musical of her eponymous success, which already invited the actress to intuit that her return to the front line would come by way of nostalgia. Before, her scandals had made a destructive dent in her public image, first to banish her to increasingly poor films and then to turn her into a high-risk signing. The chronicle for The New York Times that journalist Stephen Rodrick made of the filming of The Canyons (2013), titled This is what happens when you put Lindsay Lohan in your movie, That was the final straw: constant delays, disappearances, erratic behavior and tensions with her colleagues made up, in principle, a profile that was too explosive for anyone in Hollywood to consider rehiring her.
But these are different times. The perception of the so-called broken toys has changed: the proliferation of testimonies from young actors – whether through social media or documentaries – talking about the labor or even sexual abuse suffered at a very early age, the unbearable pressure and scrutiny experienced before maturity, have helped develop greater empathy towards these stars, whose controversies are now seen as more understandable consequences. And Disney, as much as the image of Lohan (or Cyrus) seemed to distance itself irremediably from its values, could have understood it as well. Nothing like a film about putting yourself in the skin of the other to represent it. Can their reconciliation be a form of amendment on the part of the studio?
“I’m not so sure that this [la secuela de Ponte en mi lugar y el reconocimiento a la protagonista de Hannah Montana (2006) como Leyenda Disney] “It may be an attempt to repair their relationship with former child stars as much as to capitalize on the nostalgia and affection they inspire,” Professor Peter C. Kunze of the Department of Communication at Tulane University in New Orleans, USA, tells ICON. Kunze is the author of Staging A Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, And The Disney Renaissance (2023, unpublished in Spain), an essay published last year on the occasion of the factory’s centenary and dedicated to Disney’s rebirth since the late 1980s. “And who doesn’t like a story of downfall and comeback?” the academic asks, in relation to the morbid curiosity about Lohan’s return.
“Selfless love will put you in your place”
The continuation of Put yourself in my place It comes, strangely, shortly after Disney released a fourth version of the same story in 2018, in musical format, called the same in Spain and produced for Disney Channel. Based on a novel by Mary Rodgers, which in our country Alfaguara translated as A haunted Friday (1972), the mouse company first adapted the material into the successful Crazy Friday (1976), with Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris in the role of daughter and mother, respectively. A television version followed in 1995, What a mess of a daughter. In a context in which Disney’s live-action division is focusing its efforts on making remakes of its animated classics, with Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot’s Snow White announced for March, the fact that the studio is interested in developing such a specific and timely sequel (its soundtrack features Simple Plan or Andrew WK, inseparable from the style of the film and its time) may be striking. In an article in The Hollywood Reporter in 2023, for the twentieth anniversary of Put yourself in my place, Producer Andrew Gunn admitted that such a film “would not be released in theaters today.”
“A lesson that [el estudio] “What Disney+ learned with Disney+ is that many subscribers were less attracted to the animated classics than to Disney Channel content,” analyzes Peter C. Kunze. “Part of that is because the generation that grew up with the shows of the 2000s and 2010s are now parents, so they rewatch these shows with their kids. A new Disney+ movie Put yourself in my place “It takes advantage of this.” For the professor, Disney’s fetish with Rodgers’ novel, to which he returns again and again, is easy to understand: “The core of the story is the disconnect between many parents and children, who do not fully understand each other’s point of view. The body-swapping narrative is an opportunity for empathy and to explore generational differences. As time passes and cultural conceptions of what it means to be an adult and a child change, A haunted Friday allows you to delve into different experiences. What is more Disney than reaffirming those mother-daughter bonds that can be strained but also renewed?
There are more reasons why A haunted Friday could be so functional to the Disney discourse. In a retrospective interview in 2002 with Jodie Foster, Journalist Terry Gross was surprised that the studio had chosen her to star Crazy Friday despite having already done it with Scorsese Alice doesn’t live here anymore (1974) and released that same year Taxi Driver. And he pointed out a detail: his appearance. tomboy (women with a masculine appearance, what in Spanish is called “tomboy”). While in Mary Rodgers’ book the teenage protagonist discovered that she was pretty after her mother, in control of her body, fixed her hair, clothes and teeth, the film Crazy Friday He played at domesticating and feminizing the image of his still teenage star in the traditional way.
Foster, however, also pointed out in that interview how second-wave feminism had positively permeated the film’s message: one of the surprises the daughter got in the mother’s body was discovering all the invisible work she was doing, exploited by her lazy and useless husband. The version directed in 2003 by Mark Waters eliminated that aspect of the plot, as did the remake of the nineties, to turn the mother into a widow and create another conflict with her descendant, who does not accept that she tries to rebuild her life with another man. However, Put yourself in my place The film rectified the body-switching theme so that it went both ways, with Jamie Lee Curtis’ daughter embracing the punk aesthetic. While the original had a more cautionary tale (in the book, the mother herself magically performs the body-switching as punishment for the teenager), in the film, Lohan and Curtis learn from each other.
The sequel also suffered from a tacky and outdated orientalism, with a mystical woman driving the fantasy part through fortune cookies in a Chinese restaurant. No details are known about the plot of the sequel, although the return of the establishment’s Asian actresses announces that Freakier Friday isn’t going to ignore the problem of representation, either to fix it or to make it worse. The new film will have a different director, Canadian Nisha Ganatra, and a different screenwriter, Jordan Weiss, and this time it won’t be based on any of Rodgers’ books, who did write several sequels, but none with the mother and daughter as protagonists again. A Billion For Boris (1974), the neighbor and the girl’s little brother find a television that shows the future and try to get rich by gambling. Summer Switch (1982), were father and son who switched bodies. Both had television adaptations.
Mary Rodgers died in 2014 at the age of 83. In addition to being a successful children’s and young adult writer, she was also a notable composer who premiered a couple of plays, worked with Leonard Bernstein and also created songs for television. Her father was Richard Rodgers, author of the music for Smiles and tears (1959 Broadway play and 1965 film). The musical Carousel (1945), from which the anthem came You’ll Never Walk Alone, was the writer’s favorite. “For me it speaks of the relationship between a father and a daughter. I’m not one to cry easily, but there’s something about redemption between parents and children and forgiveness that always moves me,” said the author of A haunted Friday in an interview in The New York Times in 2001. In a notable echo of her popular book about shifting identities and mutual discovery, Rodgers, who had bittersweet memories of her father because of his alcoholism, depression and workaholism, said on another occasion that she doubted anyone had ever had the chance to really know him well.
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