Disney Needs To Stop Remaking Movies – Or Else
Rather than creating new and original films or adapting new stories from novels and fairy tales, Disney has recently chosen to recreate its own classic stories in a different medium.
Reception has been mixed. Quite a number of fans are downright vitriolic towards the live-action remakes.
Some of the remakes are blasted for just being so glaringly inferior to the animated versions, such as The Lion King. The more general accusations are numerous. One of them is creative bankruptcy, with the remakes, even at their best, not adding anything new or interesting to the story, and being point-by-point, and almost line-by-line retellings of the original content.
Except for The Jungle Book, whatever small changes appear in them have next to no impact, and whatever impact the changes do have is negative more often than not, making the overall plot less sensible.
Watching them is like watching the originals, except with less charm.
Speaking about charm, it is agreed that many characters in the remakes have much less personality and charisma than their animated version, most notably all the animal characters in The Lion King and The Jungle Book, but also the Beast in Beauty and the Beast and Genie in Aladdin – facial reaction and body movements which work well in animation, do not necessarily translate well to live action, and this is particularly obvious for non-human characters.
And songs, one of the main selling points of the Disney renaissance animated movies, did not translate that well to the live action too. Fans generally agree that their new versions are considerably inferior.
In short, the prevalent opinion on the Internet is that Disney's live-action remakes are the very definitions of a soulless cashgrab, with very few people liking, never mind actively defending them, while most of viewers actively encourage Disney to stop remaking movies - "or else."
But if so, Disney has certainly succeeded in grabbing cash – as noted in the thread above, every remake that was released in theaters so far made big profits. What may explain such a difference between the opinion of the fans and the box office?
Well, most probably the target audience, whose nostalgia Disney has successfully monetized, simply does not use social media that much. So, however people on Reddit and elsewhere may condemn the live-action remakes, they hardly can do anything to prevent Disney from making them until the end of time (or at least until running out of animated movies to remake).