At the stroke of midnight, a new Cinderella appeared.
The newest take on the classic tale is now streaming on Amazon, starring Camila Cabello as the put-upon heroine who's full of dreams but lacking the time, freedom and fashionable threads to put them into motion. If that sounds like a job for Fabulous Fairy Godmother, played by Billy Porter, you would be right.
And so the centuries-old gift that is the rags-to-riches story of Cinderella keeps on giving.
Though the hit animated Disney feature from 1950 (adjusted for inflation, it has a lifetime box office gross of $532.4 million) was generations of fans' first exposure to the fairy tale about the beautiful and kind young maiden whose wicked stepmother and stepsisters have made her a servant in her own home, the crux of the story is many millennia old, dating back as far as between 7 BC and 23 AD, when the Greek tale of Rhodopis—a slave who ended up marrying the king of Egypt—was supposedly first shared.
And while the foot-maiming version envisioned by the Brothers Grimm remains a mainstay for those who prefer their sweet tales served with a bit of spice, most of the more contemporary retellings hew closely to French author Charles Perrault's "Cendrillon," first published in Paris as part of a story collection in 1697—hence the chateau that has fallen into disrepair and Cinderella being referred to as mademoiselle in the Disney version, though you'd be hard-pressed to find a French accent.
For a tale close to as old as time, the meat of the Cinderella story has had remarkable longevity, playing out for centuries onstage in plays, operas, ballets and, of course, in movies and on television.
The first Cinderella film based on Perrault's fairy tale was made in 1899, a six-minute production by French director Georges Méliès (the auteur played by Ben Kingsley in Martin Scorsese's Hugo) that was screened at music halls and fairgrounds. And that was only the beginning.
Take a look at the many iterations of the ever-optimistic heroine that have been lighting up screens big and small ever since:
Cinderella is streaming on Amazon.