Free Willy: The 1993 family favourite is being rebooted, but how do you even remake this movie now?

Here’s one for the eyebrow raisers: a reboot of Free Willy is in development.

The project is being housed with Warner Bros and AGBO, the latter of which is the production company run by Joe and Anthony Russo, best known for their movies with Marvel, including the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday.

The production has tapped screenwriters Mary-Margaret Kunze and Jade Halley Bartlett.

The 1993 film is forever seared into the minds of generations for its iconic closing scene, where Willy the orca is freed by leaping over a seawall. The film was a worldwide hit and spawned direct-to-video sequels and an animated TV series.

The big question of a rebooted Free Willy is how will they actually film this?

Will Willy have to be an animatronic puppet or CGI? It seems unlikely the film could use a real orca as the 1993 production did. Marine conservation efforts and the acceptance of sea life in captivity have dramatically changed in the past three decades.

Keiko, the real-life orca who played Willy in the original film, was a big part of that story.

After the film’s release, it came to light that Keiko, who had been captured in 1979 near Iceland at the age of two, was being kept by a theme park in Mexico City in a tank which had a surface space smaller than an Olympic pool.

After pleas from audiences, especially children, Warner Bros teamed up with conservation foundations to rescue Keiko from the terrible conditions he was confined to. The orca had also been in poor health, having developed skin lesions and was underweight.

The Free Willy-Keiko Foundation was established in 1995 and the following year, Keiko was transferred from Mexico City to an aquarium in Oregon, in the pacific northwest of the US. There, the orca lived in a much larger facility and swam in cold seawater rather than the chlorinated artificially salted water in Mexico. He was also no longer required to perform daily.

It was the first step in an ambitious plan to re-introduce him into the wild, which had never before been done with a captive orca.

Two years later, Keiko was flown from Oregon to Iceland on an American military plane, the only one large enough to carry him after he gained weight since leaving Mexico.

Onboard, Keiko was held in an open-topped container with water up to his fins, and was constantly replenished with ice to regulate the orca’s temperature. Apparently, he was calm throughout the journey.

Once he arrived in Iceland, Keiko was homed in a specially constructed pen by the seaside, and had to gradually be re-introduced in the wild, first by learning to catch wild fish (he kept returning the fish to trainers because he thought it was a game) and also to build up stamina for long swims.

He was freed in 2002 and a month later, Keiko showed up in Norway 1500km away, apparently craving human contact after having spent almost his whole life with them.

He spent his remaining year and a half based out of a fjord in Norway, coming and going at will, but still being taken care of by human handlers. He died from pneumonia in December 2003. He was 27 years old, which was old for a captive male orca, but young for a wild one.

Keiko failed to ever really integrate with an orca pod. He was observed swimming with them but not becoming part of one.

There are 54 orcas still in captivity as of April this year.