Mary-Kate Olsen and Vanessa Hudgens Star in Beastly, Based on Book by Miami Author

Some of the nation's greatest tween thespians have come together to bring Beastly, Miami author Alex Flinn's modern retelling of the fairy tale The Beauty and the Beast, to the big screen.Hot on the heels of the Twilight craze, the movie is set for release this July. High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens stars...

By Kyle Munzenrieder

January 22, 2010

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Some of the nation's greatest tween thespians have come together to bring Beastly, Miami author Alex Flinn's modern retelling of the fairy tale The Beauty and the Beast, to the big screen.

Hot on the heels of the Twilight craze, the movie is set for release this July. High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens stars as Linda Taylor, the Belle of Beastly; newcomer Alex Pettyfer plays the Beast equivalent; and in what we think is amazing casting, Mary-Kate Olsen plays a weird goth girl who places a curse on the Beast. Neil Patrick Harris is also in there somehow -- sadly, though, not as a talking candlestick.

The movie and the book it was based on are set in New York, but Flinn's followup, A Kiss in Time, brought another classic fairy tale to Miami. In a tweeny twist on Sleeping Beauty, some Miami kid takes a trip to Europe, where he awakens the sleeping princess of Eurphrasia. Understandably, everyone in the kingdom is kind of pissed she made them all take a 300-year dirt nap, so the boy sweeps her away to SoBe, where they do Jell-O shots together. Honestly.

Flinn is also working on another Miami-based book called Cloaked. It's a mixup of various fairy tales, in which a boy who works at a South Beach shoe repair store is set on a chase through the Florida Keys to find some princess's brother who has turned himself into a frog. No plans to make this one a movie yet, but we'd really like to see Zak Efron as the frog.

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