Well I think a lot of us were doubting whether anyone could come close to what James Woods did as Hades, but then Greg Germann surprised a lot of people. With that in mind, I just don’t think you can leave out the genie if you bring in Aladdin. I would expect they would at least try and get someone to do the genie justice, and since they just did it with Hades (granted these are two very different characters), I think they have no reason to think they won’t have similar success with casting the genie.