Plot summary

1961. For twenty years through their respective representatives, Walter Elias Disney (Tom Hanks) has tried so far unsuccessfully to purchase the rights from British author P.L. Travers (Dame Emma Thompson) for her series of Mary Poppins books to make into a movie. Travers has felt protective of her material, especially against Disney, as she sees the Disney brand as not meshing with her stories. She fears that Disney will turn the stories into a saccharine animated mess as she doesn't want her Mary Poppins to become synonymous with Mickey Mouse. But Travers, who has not written voluntarily in years and is running out of money, agrees now at least to meet with Disney's representatives in Los Angeles, California to go through the script, as she has managed to gain script approval before she signs over the rights, something Disney has never agreed to with anyone else. Those representatives are most specifically the project's Screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and Songwriter brothers Richard M. Sherman (Jason Schwartzman) and Robert B. Sherman (B.J. Novak), the latter two who irk Travers, if only because she also does not see a Mary Poppins movie as being a musical. Disney and Travers find that they are the antithesis of each other in almost every respect, his casualness in dealing with people on a first name basis against her wishes to be more formal in calling and being called by one's surname preceded by the appropriate honorific only the most obvious example. Although not in the script meetings, Disney gets wind either directly or indirectly of the difficulties in the script negotiations, where he sees most of her demands as being overly unreasonable to kibosh the project purposefully. For the negotiations to be successful, Disney and his representatives will have to learn that Travers' protectiveness is due to the relationships she had with who were the inspirations for the characters of Mary Poppins, and most specifically, Mr. George W. Banks.—Huggo