This Slate Spoiler Special is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio.

For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase, go to Squarespace.com and use the offer code, spoilers.

Hi, this is Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, here with a Slate's spoiler special podcast on Maleficent, the new Disney film that's a retelling of Sleeping Beauty from the witch's point of view.

Yeah, sure.

And joining me here in the Slate studio is Katie Rich from Vanity Fair.

You are the Hollywood editor at Vanity Fair now, your fancy new title.

And, yes, I thought of you upon seeing this movie because it just seemed like something

that we could take apart in a fun way.

So where do you want to start with Malefica?

I mean, everybody knows the Sleeping Beauty story, so I don't think we need to do a lot of

plot recapping.

But let's talk about how it's framed and how it begins.

And, oh, and most importantly, about Angelina Jolie's. Yeah, I feel like you kind of have to

start with Angelina because she's the reason this movie exists. I mean, the guy who Robert Schaumburg

directed it, he was the art director for Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which is probably

the actual reason it exists because it made a billion, like literally a billion dollars. And so they're

like, okay, what other things can we make a darkened? Is Alice in Wonderland one of the top grossing movies of the past decade?

It's crazy successful.

It's so bad.

I know. It's so terrible.

And so I went into this kind of bracing myself for like complete awful Alice in Wonderland chaos and was slightly pleasantly surprised, but also kind of found that Angelina Jolie being the driving force of, makes the rest of the movie around her a little bit weaker.

I don't know about Robert Stomberg as a guy, as an art director, stepping up as a director.

...