Disney spent four years and up to $30 million on a serious Inca musical with Owen Wilson before throwing it out in 1998 and rebuilding it as a llama comedy. Sting wrote the songs. His wife’s documentary about the wreck is the one Disney never released.
The Emperor’s New Groove opened on Dec. 15, 2000, ran about 78 minutes, and is one of the funniest movies Disney Animation has ever made. It was also, for most of its life, a completely different movie.
That movie was called Kingdom of the Sun. It had Owen Wilson in it.
It had a love story, a villain who wanted to snuff out the sun and a set of Sting ballads. In 1998 Disney shut it down with a quarter of it animated and started over.
And a camera crew was there for all of it.
What was Kingdom of the Sun?
Disney’s next big epic. Work began in 1994, with Roger Allers, fresh off directing The Lion King, in charge. The story was a Prince and the Pauper riff set in the Inca empire: a selfish emperor named Manco, voiced by David Spade, swaps places with a llama herder named Pacha, voiced by Owen Wilson, who was written as a carefree 18-year-old.
Eartha Kitt’s Yzma was already the villain, but her plan was bigger. She wanted eternal youth and, per Cartoon Research’s account of the production, tried “to snuff out all light on earth.” There was a romance between Pacha and a girl named Nina. Andreas Deja, who drew Scar and Jafar, was animating Yzma.
It was going to be a musical. That’s where Sting came in.
Why did Sting write songs for The Emperor’s New Groove?
Disney asked him in 1997. He said yes on one condition: his wife, Trudie Styler, and her company Xingu Films could document the whole production with, per Cartoon Brew, “unlimited access.”
Disney agreed. Nobody at the studio seems to have thought about what that footage would look like if the movie went sideways.
It went sideways. By summer 1998, an executive told producer Randy Fullmer the film was “this close” to being shut down.
On Sept. 23, 1998, it went dormant, with about 25 percent animated and somewhere between $25 million and $30 million spent. Allers left rather than direct the smaller version Disney wanted.
Sting found out by phone that most of the songs he’d written, roughly six of them, were gone. Cut songs included “Walk the Llama Llama,” “One Day She’ll Love Me” and “Snuff Out the Light.”
Who saved The Emperor’s New Groove?
Mark Dindal, who’d directed Cats Don’t Dance, took over with writer Chris Williams. They kept Kuzco, Yzma and a version of Pacha, threw out the epic, and made Pacha older so John Goodman could play him. Wilson was out by summer 1999. Patrick Warburton’s Kronk, the character everyone remembers, was a creation of the rebuild.
Dindal finished the whole thing in about a year and a half. That’s why it feels loose in a way Disney movies usually don’t. There wasn’t time to overthink it.
Did Sting really change the ending?
He did, and it’s the best footnote in the whole saga. The original ending had Kuzco building Kuzcotopia, his theme park, by bulldozing the rainforest next to Pacha’s village. Sting, a longtime rainforest activist, wrote Disney a letter saying he wouldn’t be part of that.
The ending changed. Kuzco builds a small hut next to Pacha’s instead. The song Sting kept, “My Funny Friend and Me,” was nominated for Best Original Song at the 2001 Oscars and lost to Bob Dylan’s “Things Have Changed.”
What is The Sweatbox?
Styler’s documentary. It runs 86 minutes, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 13, 2002, played a quiet one-week Oscar-qualifying run in Los Angeles, and then disappeared. Disney owns it and has never released it.
Cartoon Brew called it “an invaluable historical document about Disney’s animation operations in the late-1990s,” and described the film as “the tortured morphing of the Kingdom of the Sun into The Emperor’s New Groove.”
An 18-year-old cartoonist in the U.K. leaked a copy online in March 2012. It appears to be an earlier cut than the one Toronto saw. Disney has never commented, and the film has never been on Disney+.
You’ll read that Disney “banned” it. Not quite.
It screened at a major festival and got its Oscar week. Disney just declined to ever let anyone see it again.
How did The Emperor’s New Groove do at the box office?
Not well. It cost about $100 million and made $169.7 million worldwide, per Box Office Mojo, with less than $90 million of that domestic. For a Disney animated feature in 2000, that was a disappointment.
Then it found its audience on DVD, on cable and on the internet, where Kronk’s shoulder angel and “Pull the lever, Kronk!” became permanent. It got a direct-to-video sequel, Kronk’s New Groove, in 2005 and a Disney Channel series, The Emperor’s New School, from 2006 to 2008. It’s a cult favorite in Italy, for reasons nobody has fully explained.
For the 25th anniversary in December 2025, Disney gave it a 4K release, a three-day run at the El Capitan and a limited Yzma doll. Not bad for the replacement movie.
The one Disney meant to make is still sitting in a vault, next to the documentary about why it isn’t there.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
Pirates and Princesses is your destination for Disney news, theme park updates, and the pop culture you love. From Disney cruises and travel tips to Disney fashion, food, collectibles, and movie news, PNP covers it all. Visit us at piratesandprincesses.net for daily coverage. Follow PNP on Facebook and Instagram, and listen to the Pirates & Princesses podcast on Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
Hat Tips:
D23 (The Emperor’s New Groove A-to-Z entry), release date, director, cast, the 1994 start and the 1998 revamp
Cartoon Brew (The Sweatbox feature), the Sting and Styler deal, the TIFF premiere, the shelving, the 2012 leak and quotes
Cartoon Research (The Sweatbox documentary feature), the Kingdom of the Sun plot, character names, cut song titles and the Sting phone call
Animation World Network, Owen Wilson’s casting, Andreas Deja on Yzma and the Fullmer shutdown account
Collider, the Kuzcotopia ending and Sting’s letter
Box Office Mojo, budget and grosses
FlickDirect and WDWNT (Nov. and Dec. 2025), the 25th anniversary 4K release, El Capitan run and Yzma doll
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