This could be nothing more than Disney capitalizing on the success of “Wicked.” It’s a formula: take a villain, make them sympathetic. Or it could be an extension of something much deeper in our culture that is just now reaching our classic villains of fiction.

A new live show debuts later this month at Disney’s Hollywood Studios park in Orlando. It stars three of Disney’s most famous villains: Cruella de Vil, Captain Hook and Maleficent.

And lest you forget, they really were baddies.

Cruella wanted to turn cute little Dalmatian puppies into fur coats, Captain Hook tried to explode Peter Pan with a bomb, and Maleficent placed a death curse on Aurora.

So what’s the theme of the new show? They were just misunderstood.

In “Disney Villains: Unfairly Ever After,” the three characters are given the chance to plead their case as to which one has been the most misunderstood villain of all.

This isn’t a first for Disney. The 2021 film, Cruella, gave a backstory that blamed her villainy on her birth mother never wanting to have her. And it isn’t just Disney. The most famous rethinking of a pop culture villain is none other than the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In “Wicked,” our entire thinking about the evil character portrayed in the books and in the 1939 film classic is turned on its head.

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