Good.
Disney’s live action remakes are wank, and I’m really not sure why they started doing it or are continuing with it.
This is pure CEO “no, it’s the children who are wrong” mentality.
Good
Nowanna.
People might want to take their kids to see a movie that they liked when they were a kid. Or just go see it themselves for nostalgia. Live action remakes aren’t going to be as good as the original animated movie but they are a little twist on something familiar.
The original animated version of Moana came out 10 years ago. The kids who may have loved this movie ten years ago don’t have their own children yet, and haven’t reached the age where they’re all that nostalgic for something from when they were a kid. People in their early 20s want to experience new things, they aren’t at an age where they want to revisit something from their youth.
Not to mention that the animated Moana is still active with Moana 2 released around Thanksgiving 2024.
I don’t understand why these articles treat this kind of film as having a single income stream (i.e. box office ticket sales). In fact, one could argue that these articles themselves serve to market the film. We know, for example, that movie theater viewership is declining rapidly. Given that Disney will have multiple income streams planned for any given movie, the box office will only be some portion of the total, and you can bet that The Mouse has done the math. The linked article even alludes to this:
(the two Moana animated movies have sold $22M in toys, generated $26M in music streams and have clocked 1.5B hours watched on the streaming service)
But crucially, that 1.5B hours watched on the streaming service is hard to quantify in dollars – for the public, but not for Disney. They have a number of subscribers and a dollar amount that time corresponds to. They are folding those numbers into their calculations.
Disney knows that people aren’t going to the movies, but their stranglehold over them is such that the film is shown widely anyway. Terms for showing movies in the theaters are famously pro-studio. It’s almost certain that the box office isn’t even the key factor for the studio heads here. It’s likely that they didn’t greenlight yet another flop; rather, they have more data than we do.
Then people read these articles, and they say “damn, it sounds so bad! We’ll have to see how bad when it comes out on streaming.” And the cycle continues. Movie theaters should not be the yardstick by which anything is measured. There is a reason why seemingly every studio is losing money at the box office: it’s because they actually aren’t losing money overall, or at least not as much as these kinds of articles would have you believe. Even if they did have numbers available, streaming income, like toys / music / etc, do not come in until well after a film’s release.
Toy Story 5 had the second-highest grossing opening weekend for an animated film with $160 million domestically. It looks like Toy Story 5 will make at least $420 million domestically and has already made $879 worldwide. The estimated cost of the film is $200 million.
People go to the movies to see things they want to see. If they are only marginally excited to see a movie, they’ll just watch at home. Great movies have just been in short supply recently between covid and the way studios were treating cast members.
That said, I’m sure Disney has accounted for flops, especially given how poorly many of their live actions have performed. I’m sure they see a bump in ticket sales for their parks after a big movie is released and theres a ton of merchandise between popcorn buckets, pins, and recycling some of the older merch from around the original release.
- Makes an live-action version
- It’s 90-95% CGI
What’s the point?
From that studio that gave you “Live Action” Lion King.
There is a beautiful version of Moana already. I can’t imagine needing to see this. I don’t hate these remakes for existing, but I just don’t see the point.
Studios don’t like risks nowadays. So they’d rather remake successful past movies.
Apparently it’s not as risk-free as they thought.
Against the billions they have made churning these out? Yeah, it is.
I mean yes on average but potentially no on the trend. The whole point is to de-risk their bullshit, if they view this as a trend instead of an isolated incident other projects might be more likely to get greenlit instead of recycled stories. Pretty much any soulless cash grab bombing incentivizes making actual art.
If they were looking at things collectively this way, they wouldn’t be making so many remakes and would be making more original movies.
This movie is the result of the risk analysis of each project, not the risk over a time period with multiple projects.
Ah yes, losing $100,000,000 seems very low-risk.
If they thought they had a good chance of losing that much money, they wouldn’t have made the movie. The news here is more about how their risk calculations were off.
And now they realise it isn’t risk free after all.
To them? Yes it is
No, no it’s not.
They can absorb the loss, but it’s by no means small
Low risk is still risk
The movie’s made nearly 100 mill worldwide. With brand new IP there’s no guarantee to even get that much. Plus you’d need more marketing, etc.
They lost, but the risk was smaller than it could’ve been.
Think about two different scenarios:
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Brand new IP, movie costs 250 mill to make, it could be the next Avatar and make well over a billion, or it could make 10 mill because nobody cares
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Existing IP, almost certainly going to make under a billion, but there’s essentially no way it’ll make significantly under 100 million against the same budget of 250 mill.
Which one is low risk and which one is high risk?
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So far all their live remakes have flopped, why do they continue this shit
So far all their live remakes have flopped
Aladdin, Lion King, and Lilo & Stitch have all been financial successes.
Yeah, I was thinking kind of the opposite, “at least one of these is finally a flop.” I don’t know why audiences keep going to these things.
I can kind of see doing a remake with Aladdin, because there’s reference humor in the original (like doing a quick gag around imitating a late-night TV format) that might not mean anything to a modern audience. The remake still suffered from regression to the mean, though. Still, I can imagine some young audiences finding the original hard to relate to at times, so some kind of update might have felt worthwhile. And giving another actor a chance to try putting his spin on the genie I’m sure felt generous. That at least guaranteed it would offer some kind of difference that would distinguish it.
But The Lion King and Lilo and Stitch and Moana don’t really have any of that going on. The originals are fairly charming, not particularly tied to any specific time period, and don’t offer any big roles that provide room for a new interpretation. (Well, maybe Maui, but they gave that role to the same guy again.)
And the animation was such a big part of the appeal of the originals! Replacing that with bland, lifeless CGI is such a let-down. I haven’t actually watched any of these new releases, but I’ve seen trailers, and the CGI just feels awful in them. It’s hard to even describe, but it’s like there’s a greasiness to it. It’s profoundly offputting.
And people keep turning out. I don’t get it. Is it just that people want their kids to experience theaters and popcorn and it doesn’t really matter what’s on the screen as long as it’s Disney?
So yeah. I’m glad to see one finally underperform. Maybe people are finally getting tired of slop. I hope it’s not just that people can’t afford the cinema anymore.
We. Don’t. Need. To. Live. Action. Every. FUCKING. Thing.
My daughter loves the Moana movies. I’ve told her about this one - and the anti-excitement of “the same movie but with actual persons” is quite obvious. I can only conclude that no actual parents were involved in its inception.
No actual parents were involved in the inception of any of the live action remakes
…I’m trying to think. What animated -> live action remakes have we gotten, through history, that were really good?
Not just “alright” or fun, but like a landmark movie, unto their own?
I’m coming up blank. But I’m sleepy.
Friend, I am positively obsessed with mermaid movies. I have watched some of the worst movies in existence, just to watch mermaids flop around in water and look pretty. I didn’t even bother with the live action remake of the little mermaid. It looked so fucking shit, I couldn’t even pretend to care. And I also didn’t understand them casting Halle, because she’s such a soft an gentle soul and not at all like Ariel. Her sister, Chloe would have been a better Ariel because she has that similar spark of defiance in her that Ariel needs (I used to watch their youtube channel back in the day because I liked their singing). But eh, I guess. I’m just glad that Halle had an overall good experience with the film and that her career appears to be going well.
It may be worth giving the new Little Mermaid a shot. Visually it was very beautiful, and I appreciated the small storyline differences between them. It was enough of a difference for me to find it entertaining, since it wasn’t just a live shot-for-shot remake.
I mean…I already watched this movie like 10 years ago. I know what happens already.
OK, Maui is now The Rock in a muscle suit and a wig. But most of the new movie is CGI. The original movie was also animated. Why do I need to watch the new one?
At least with the lion king there was a 25 year gap between the two movies so the target audience would’ve been entirely different generations.
But Moana 2 came out 2 years ago. Anyone who watched it, probably watched the first one beforehand, even if we’re talking about a 5 year old in 2024 who wasn’t around in 2016 - the kid’s parents would’ve probably pirated or streamed it to watch before going to the movies to see Moana 2.
Also, The Rock’s acting in the trailers looked… stiff as a rock
But seriously, he doesn’t have the charisma of the original Maui
Which is funny because he voiced the original Maui too. I guess the animators did a lot of work to sell his voice acting.
Honestly I didn’t even realize it had been that long till you said it.
10 years is still to early for a “live action” (even though it’s basically just animation) remake.
They would have made more money doing frozen
They would have made more money doing frozen
The CinemaSins video on the trailers suggested making a live action remake of Atlantis. That would sell like gangbusters, but Disney has spent the last 20 years pretending it didn’t exist
Here’s my pitch: Let’s animate the live action Disney movies. They have these properties to draw from, and instead of making a live-action remake of them like Freaky Friday or Herbie, or a sequel like Hocus Pocus or Mary Poppins Returns, reinvent it as an animated feature.
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
- The Shaggy Dog (1959)
- Pollyanna (1960)
- The Absent-Minded Professor (1961)
- The Three Lives of Thomasina (1964)
- Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)
- Escape to Witch Mountain (1975)
- The Cat from Outer Space (1978)
- Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989)
- White Fang (1991)
- The Rocketeer (1991)
- Newsies (1992)
- The Mighty Ducks (1992)
- The Adventures of Huck Finn (1993)
- Cool Runnings (1993)
- Blank Check (1994)
- Heavyweights (1995)
- A Kid in King Arthur’s Court (1995)
- George of the Jungle (1997)
- Air Bud (1997)
- RocketMan (1997)
- Inspector Gadget (1999)
Bedknobs and Broomsticks but the animated parts are live action…
Incidentally Bedknobs and Broomsticks is the better Mary Poppins, I know I know it’s an unpopular opinion but I stand by it.
I agree! As a kid I was obsessed by the final battle between the Nazis and the animated armors!
ah, but would Di$ney risk possibly alienating a few movie goers by depicting Nazis as bad and incompetent today?
Don’t forget the bagpipes, laddy!
Thats just because of how awesome Angela Lansbury is in everything she ever did.
I’m here to join the Bedknobs is better than Poppins-club. Not that I hate Mary Poppins. I just think Bedknobs is way more fun.
Honey I Shrunk the Kids would make a great animated movie, and Rick Morranis could reprise his role!
That one in particular is what got me started on this thought. I’ve been playing the game Grounded and it’s really brought me back to that movie and realizing what was so evocative about the premise.
Rick Moranis is also freaking great in it. He somehow manages to come across in the movie as a cartoon character.
The Rocketeer (1991)
As much as I love good animation, nothing can possibly replace 1991 Jennifer Connely.
Flubber (1997)?
That’s remake of The Absent-Minded Professor which is on the list.
Oh I didn’t realize they were one and the same!
That’s an easy one to miss. Unlike The Shaggy Dog or Escape to Witch Mountain, for instance, Flubber isn’t named the same as the movie being remade.
Blank Check
Disney really wants everyone to forget this movie, wherein a thirty-something adult falls in love and makes out with a child, exists.
But Disney loves groomers. They produce all their live-action teen content.
Animation is now about as expensive as live-action, and Disney, like most studios, is still on “animation is for kids”. They’re trying to position these live-action remakes as somehow “more adult” because they’re not animated.
Newsies, please!
I feel like Sony Animation would knock this one outta the park.
I came back to see if The Black Hole was on your list. That would be an interesting one too, The Black Hole was actually one of the last movies to use the hybrid hand drawn animation/live action approach. It’s hard to tell though because it’s only used for the special effects like the black hole itself.
I’m not familiar with it, but it looks really interesting. I might have to go seek this one out.
It’s one of my favorites but definitely not like other Disney movies at the time or anything that came before or since really. I freely admit that I have nostalgia goggles for it and that it’s definitely one of those love it or hate it kind of movies.
One of the more interesting things for me in addition to the animation is it was planned to be their Star Wars. There was a huge merchandising push behind it that had board games, and action figures, and a novelization, etc. and there were planned sequels. Of course it went nowhere because the movie was very much a love it or hate it kind of movie.
AFAIK, they’ve actually tried to remake it two or three times in the last 30 years or so and every time it’s run into development hell because people have wildly different interpretations of what the main theme or point of the movie is just for starters.
There were quite a few movies that used this technique after that, including some produced by Disney (most notably Who Framed Rodger Rabbit). It was pretty common, at least for effects shots, will into the 90s and early 2000s.
Yes and no, I was specifically talking about the practical effect of combining animation with live action. Every movie that came after had some form of computer assistance whether in camera control or in using CG for the actual combination even if the animation was still hand drawn or in some other way. The Black Hole used some computer help but at that time there were only a couple entities, like the newly formed ILM, that could do things the new way and they were all tied up with other projects like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Alien. So a bunch of the shots in The Black Hole were done using the same double exposure techniques used in Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks among others.
It sounds like you are trying to describe the sodium vapor process, which would be a more accurate way of saying this. Hand drawn animation was used a lot, this specific process was not, and the differentiation is not “using computers” or “CG”. It was a Disney developed process that was not used by anyone else, so obviously it would only appear in Disney films or collaborations.
Its a pretty elegent way of doing this and it looks better than even a lot of modern computer equivalents because it essentially places the animated sequences on the same plane as the live action. It also required a lot of bespoke equipment and knowledge that no one was able to effectively copy.
Its why the animated sequences in the films that used it look better than a lot of the stuff that came after.
Honestly, I would watch animated adaptations of most of these.
Remake any Disney owned movie with The Muppets. Slam dunk.
The real question is if these still hold copyright value for Disney.
That is why they are remaking the movies. To keep their rights on the more successful versions.
I didn’t even know it was coming out and even after seeing this post I still don’t care enough to click the article
Feels fucking good leaving this nasty-ass comment though haha
Good
Pray this is the end of this live action shit
They probably needed a tax writeoff or whatever, so don’t keep your hopes up
People need to stop mentioning tax write offs as if it is a strategic goal when it is a reaction.
It’s a write off!
Yes. They will definitely get the message, this time.
I mean if they start losing money yeah maybe
Pretty sure a bunch of them have lost money and Disney just doesn’t care.
They were losing money, then Lilo and Stitch made tonnes of it which convinced them to keep going. It’ll take a few more flops for them to give up.
This might be the end, or at least the muting, of The Rock’s movie career. The Rock had to push Disney to make this and I don’t think The Rock has had a hit in years.
Really proves how simple-minded these people were. They were creating cashgrab nostalgia remakes in a manner that snubs royalties to original crews who worked on the original films, but they couldn’t even tell remaking a modern film with no nostalgia value was a bad idea.
Is Moana even old enough to HAVE Nostalgia? Isn’t Moana like, 5 years old or something?
It’s not quite 10 years old. The animated version (and I hate I now need to qualify that) came out November 23, 2016. Still way too soon for a remake, especially when you don’t even recast the second name on the call sheet.
If they had animated on top of Dwayne Johnson’s bicep tattoos I might consider watching it.
I think they do animate his tattoos. I partially watched a review and saw them moving around as they talked about how jarring some of the CGI to real life transitions were.
Oh they did get Johnson? It looks like Moana was the one who stepped away from the role, props to her.
Johnson was pushing for the movie to be made.
Ten years. Still not old enough. To maximize nostalgia, they would have to wait until those who enjoyed the original movie have their own children of the right age, so at least 20-25 years. Which, to nobody’s surprise, neatly matches the time span between original and remake for The Lion King (25 years) and The Beauty and the Beast (26 years). For The Little Mermaid, they waited even longer (34 years).
Alice in Wonderland did 59 years
I wouldn’t really count that as a remake though, just a new (and very different) movie based on the same source material.
The newer “live action” / CGI remakes on the other hand are overall closer to the animated versions than to their source material with the same original characters, same songs and so on.
10 actually!
Do you think it’s time for a remake of the Moana remake? We could concurrently start working on the remake of that.
Michael Bay would be proud!
They aren’t really human. They don’t think and feel like the rest of us
