Surprise! Disney is making a live-action and CGI hybrid movie that isn’t a remake of one of their established properties — it’s like Christmas in August, or maybe someone at the studio realized they have enough live-action remakes in development to get them through the next 30 years and into nuclear winter. In any case, Disney has hired End of the Tour and The Spectacular Now director James Ponsoldt to take on their latest live-action / CGI project, Wild City.

THR reports that Ponsoldt will write and direct Wild City based on his original story idea about the adventures of animals in Los Angeles. The report doesn’t clarify if the animals will talk, but it wouldn’t be surprising give that 99 percent of this year’s animated films are about talking animals. Perhaps a more novel idea would be a movie about animals that don’t talk — but whatever the case, Ponsoldt is a consistently interesting director who has shown great dramatic versatility from Smashed to The Spectacular Now and more recently, The End of the Tour.

Further details on Wild City are scarce, but with some of the advances in CGI we saw with Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book, it looks like Disney is really committing to expanding their upcoming slate of live-action and CGI hybrid films.

Ponsoldt’s next film is The Circle, a new thriller based on the Dave Eggers novel which stars Emma Watson, Tom Hanks and John Boyega. That film is set to hit theaters later this year.

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