Great new images and details arrive for Mary Poppins Returns

We’ve been following the Mary Poppins Returns movie for a while now but this is undoubtedly the best look we’ve had yet at the movie and it’s look… and it really feels like it’s gone right back to basics.

The new movie stars Emily Blunt as Poppins and, as we can see on the cover of the new issue of Entertainment Weekly above, she has nailed the appearance made famous by Julie Andrews in the 1964 original.

We know that the movie is set 25 years later and will return to the setting of the original movie, 17 Cherry Tree Lane, and is now owned by the son of the original Mr Banks, Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw), who is now grown up from the little boy we met in the first movie and is, like his father before him, a banker.

Michael is distraught over the daunting task of singlehandedly raising three children — twins John (Nathanael Saleh) and Annabel (Pixie Davies) and youngest son Georgie (Joel Dawson) — so much so that he makes a grave oversight about a very important adult responsibility that could mean losing the house on Cherry Tree Lane.

“The kids each bring their own beautiful, anarchic, sparkly personalities to their characters,” says Whishaw.

“Little Joel is a law unto himself, which is wonderful. And Nathanael and Pixie are very mature and have a wonderful, serious quality about them. They’re completely, alarmingly on top of everything and know everyone’s lines, which is very much the characters they’re playing. I suppose the film is about the way these children have become little adults and are really looking after Michael, although he doesn’t realize that.”

Obviously, at some stage during the sequel, the children will need Mary Poppins to return… and we’re guessing it will be interesting to see her meeting up with Michael and his sister Jane (Emily Mortimer) who are now grown up after Poppins saved their family in the first movie.

Whishaw says: “There’s something lovely about revisiting these two people that an audience has seen as children, and rediscovering them as adults with all the problems and stuff that life inevitably throws at you.” 

Mortimer adds: “Your backstory is the first movie, in a way. I suppose I was trying to think about who would be the [children] of those two parents, who were quite dysfunctional but really sweet and sort of slightly mad. We know who Jane and Michael’s parents were, because they were living and breathing on celluloid before we were even born, just how it is in real life. And on the one hand, that might be daunting because they’re all iconic characters, but on the other hand, you feel as if you’ve lived this life. I remember these people. I recognize them. I remember Jane and Michael’s childhood almost as if it was my own. Because in some ways, it was.”

It looks like, as expected, Mary Poppins Returns will pick up the story we know from the first movie and it will be interesting to see the children we met all those years ago all grown up and, sadly, bogged down with the troubles that very often come with being an adult.

This could be another Disney live-action movie that dances on the fault line between the fun and the darkness… but the original movie’s wartime setting did that too, so we’re expecting a sequel that very much feels true to the original.

And, given the images below, it looks like we’re really in for something special indeed.

Mary Poppins Returns arrives on Christmas Day 2018.