Beauty And The Beast: 7 Reasons It Will Make Disney A Billion

5. The Jungle Book Precedent

Although Cinderella's live action remake wasn't exactly a financial bust (it made almost $550m from a $95m budget), it wasn't until Jon Favreau's excellent take on The Jungle Book hit cinemas that Disney's live action "experiment" really started to look clever.

It might have been expensive (at $165m), but pulling in $865m outside of the summer blockbuster season and between Batman v Superman and Civil War is a hell of an achievement. That performance effectively means that Live Action Disney starts to sound like Pixar Release in terms of adding brand power to a sub-genre.

That precedent means that just as any sequel to a high-performing movie has a foundation audience no matter how poor it is, Beauty And The Beast can count on a boost (worth maybe a couple of hundred million dollars) before anyone has even seen it.