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.
Nowanna.
Good
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.
We need a live action Jetsons on ice.
It’s worth repeating a gazillion times over: it’s unaffordable to go to the cinema nowadays, so we wait for the stream or pirate. If it’s worth it. Few movies released recently are even worth our ears and eyeballs.
Over all, box office sales are declining, so it’s easy to chalk up this to that trend over all and argue that people will watch the movie some other way, and Disney will still make their money back on streaming and parks.
But those parks and streaming make their money based on over all cultural relavence.
Arguably declining box office sales are largely driven by a declining relevance of the major producers who have consolidated so much of the industry. If 90% of the major films in a year are made by 2~3 companies who are all doing fairly similar things, and people aren’t interested in what they do, then it drives people away from theaters as a whole.
So even if this poor box office performance isn’t an outright failure due to other revenue stream, it is part of a larger trend of the entire industry being destroyed by corporate consolidation and an uncompetitive environment.
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.
No one does… any why should they? The classic disney films are great, they don’t need remakes…
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.
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:
-
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
-
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?
-
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.
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.
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?
Thats just because of how awesome Angela Lansbury is in everything she ever did.
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.
The Rocketeer (1991)
As much as I love good animation, nothing can possibly replace 1991 Jennifer Connely.
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.
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.
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.
Newsies, please!
I feel like Sony Animation would knock this one outta the park.
Disney: Every one of our animated films requires a half-hearted live-action remake.
Everyone else: No.
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?
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
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.
Nobody asked for this movie.
The Rock did
I remember seeing a headline of “how The Rock co-opted Hollywood” some time ago, guess he really has a lot of influence there?
The recommended videos on the side will be a hell of a watch later, when I’m off work 😁
Hope you enjoy!
Moana is probably my favourite animated movie. I see absolute zero reason to watch the remake.
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
