Andrew Gunn, the Disney producer behind family films including Freaky Friday, Sky High, and the recent Freakier Friday, has died at 56. His death was confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter, though specific details about the cause have not been made public.
Gunn spent over two decades at Disney, shepherding mid-budget family comedies during an era when that type of film could still thrive theatrically. His 2003 Freaky Friday remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan grossed $160 million worldwide—the kind of number that feels quaint now but represented a genuine hit at the time. Sky High, the superhero high school comedy, became a cult favorite despite modest box office returns.
What's striking looking back at Gunn's filmography is how completely that theatrical landscape has disappeared. Mid-budget family comedies simply don't get theatrical releases anymore. They're either huge IP-driven animated tentpoles or they go straight to Disney+. The Freaky Friday sequel Gunn produced, Freakier Friday, went to streaming—a fitting, if melancholy, bookend to his career.
Gunn represented a particular type of Hollywood producer: the studio veteran who understood how to deliver crowd-pleasing entertainment on a reasonable budget without sacrificing quality. Not every movie needed to be a universe-building franchise. Sometimes families just wanted a fun comedy they could all watch together on a Saturday afternoon. Gunn delivered that product consistently.
The Freaky Friday remake remains a gold standard for how to update a property. Rather than just rehashing the 1976 original, and his collaborators understood that the core concept—mother and daughter swap bodies and gain empathy for each other—was timeless, but the execution needed to feel contemporary. and both committed fully to the physical comedy, and the result was a film that worked for multiple generations.
