The CG remake of Yellow Submarine gets hit by a torpedo

After this weekend’s 3D CG-animated movie MARS NEEDS MOMS returned less than $7 million on a $150 million budget, Disney has decided to send Robert Zemeckis’ planned remake of The Beatles’ YELLOW SUBMARINE to the crush depths of the development ocean.

Zemeckis was planning to use his “performance capture” process to bring the Fab Four back to unholy blank-eyed life in a 3D update of the psychedelic 1968 original, in which the band used songs and trippy visuals to save Pepperland from the villainous Blue Meanies.

But the project had reportedly been slow in coming together and faced budget and development problems (Zemeckis’ dedicated performance-capture studio ImageMovers already shuttered last May), and now the “disastrous” opening of the Zemeckis-produced MARS NEEDS MOMS has prompted Disney to put the whole thing in dry-dock.

Deadline claims that Disney had already elected to sink SUBMARINE before MARS NEEDS MOMS bomb-de-bombed — if that’s the case, this would sure support the decision. Either way, Zemeckis is still free to shop the project to other studios, so it’s conceivable we will still get waxen rendered versions of the quartet down the road.