Disney's Live-Action Thread

The Pete’s Dragon remake was directed by David Lowery. While the film did modestly at the box office, it seems to have worked out great for Lowery’s career, as he got to direct Robert Redford’s retirement and then The Green Knight.

It seems like some of these directors are doing this as sort of a One for the Money; One for the Art type of deal.

You know, I actually had the complete opposite feeling: it doesn't feel like a Ritchie movie at all.

The guy is known for his fast action and quick editing, which I felt Aladdin lacked. It's odd, I was genuinely looking forward to how he would make a big musical number, but the musical numbers look very stalled (in particular Prince Ali).

Lowery definitely is, after those he's coming back to do the Peter Pan one for next year.

Kenneth Branagh is a guy who plays well in a studio system in general (which is why Disney keeps hiring him) and is good at telling older stories with sincerity and weight. He made his name with Shakespeare adaptations and now does the Agatha Christie adaptations for what honestly seems like fun, so he's able to play Cinderella without just a bit too much cheese and was able to give Asgard that fantasy heft in Thor. Conversely, the less said about Artemis Fowl the better.

Guy Ritchie...yeah, his musical numbers were bummers.

Friend Like Me was pretty dope. It's basically exactly what I wanted out of a live action version of that number: camera and cut tricks, and creative use of screen space, with a lot of wild and frenetic action.

I think you can see the difference it makes when the director cares when you consider that Favreau directed both one of the better regarded remakes (Jungle Book) as well as one of the weaker ones (Lion King).

Probably too simplistic to say it's totally down to directorial enthusiasm but the latter felt a lot more cash-in-by-numbers than the former, for me at least.

I would also counter that a Jungle Book remake was probably only ever going to happen because someone genuinely cared about it in the first place. A Lion King one would more likely be shoved out just because "Oh money!"

x3

Yeah. The musical numbers were what turned me off to it a bit. I remember them showing off Prince Ali as a number and they slowed the tempo a lot. Which just kinda killed a lot of the energy. Prince Ali is meant to be manic and fun! High energy! Slowing that down is gonna feel weird.

Edited by InkDagger on Sep 23rd 2022 at 10:03:57 AM

I remember a joke when the "Prince Ali" number was uploaded to Youtube that you needed to play it at 1.5 speed to get it to sound like the original.

I find Friend Like Me to work nicely with that too imo. Though 1.25 is enough honestly.

Edited by alekos23 on Sep 23rd 2022 at 8:21:54 PM

"Prince Ali" does sound funner sped up, but I'd argue that its bigger problem is that it tries to do what the animated film did and focus on Genie. Decades of Bollywood films will show you it is totally possible to shoot enjoyable, high-energy crowd numbers with a lot of things going on at once. But the remake feels like it has to track Will Smith, which results in that spectacle being shafted in basically two camera angles: "Will Smith/some of the entourage" and "entire entourage from the front".

I remember watching the live-action music being posted over the animated sequence, and found it amusing how well the Overly Long Gag pause fit in with the animated equivalent.

Agree about "Price Ali" from the live action version. It felt like Will Smith reading lines.

Seconding Friend Like Me being dope and I liked Prince Ali.

I feel people are becoming too inherently biased against the remakes lately which I can understand why since with so many coming out around the same time the public must feel burned out from them but that doesn't mean that the idea of remaking an older story is bad by its very nature, if that was so then most Disney classic animated movies would be terrible since they're also reimaginings of pre-existing stories.

Lion King is more a Tech Demo for dinosaur documentaries, if you ask me. I think Jon wants to show the power of CGI advancement to convince people that yes, Prehistoric Planet is feasible.

Yeah, the big concern I have isn't that remakes are happening at all... it's that they're pretty much the only thing happening at Disney's live-action department right now. Sure we get a Jungle Cruise and Rescue Rangers sprinkled here and there but most of their live-action slate these days is just remakes. Though the remakes legitimately being of gradually lesser quality doesn't help.

It's not a recent trend. It's something deeply encoded in the framework of pop culture, an instinctive genetic (memetic?) defect so to speak. Sequels and remakes have long been met with animosity, especially when the 'original' one is seen as really good.

Other reasons it can be good are: using new storytelling techniques, including new technologies, to see how a story can be altered for narrative, aesthetic, or thematic ends; using it to spread the good word—we don't often get the Renaissance works in theaters, and this way classic stories can reach another generation; it's what audiences evidently want, and the loud internet denouncers are apparently wrong.

Disney's live division is still making plenty of other stuff. It just isn't very good, for the most part.

Like if we go back 5 years, we've got A Wrinkle In Time, Christopher Robin, Nutcracker and the 4 Realms, Noelle, Togo, Timmy Failure, Stargirl, Magic Camp, One and Only Ivan, Godmothered, Safety, Flora & Ulysses, Cheaper By The Dozen, Hollywood Stargirl and Rise.

That's not counting the various documentary movies like Polar Bear, Dolphin Reef, Elephant, or experimental stuff like Black Is King. That's well over three movies a year, every year, since 2018.

It's just most of them aren't really any good, so they were not marketed heavily, not well received, and then quickly forgotten about. Compared to the remakes, which generate vast amounts of discussion and speculation and generally end up making bank (Aladdin and Lion King came out in the same year and each made over a billion dollars).

That's enough money to make all those other movies and then some. So if you're a company that likes to make money, you'd be stupid not to keep churning out the remakes, no matter what complaints people make about them.

Edited by ArthurEld on Sep 24th 2022 at 8:30:53 AM

It reminds me of that Thanos quote. "You could not live with your own failure. And where did that bring you? Back to me."

For me it's all about the intention of the remake.

If the intention is to supplant the original and make it seem inferior, or if the director makes some kind of comment about how they need to change something/create a different message I'm usually a little turned off, but if there's a very clear love or research of the original and changes that are modernly sensible and makes sense to me I usually enjoy it a lot more.

I would prefer remakes like Aladdin over Mulan or Tarzsn. I want a remake that remind me of the Disney movie.

Small changes like Belle being an inventor are fine, or updating a few lines in Prince Ali are fine. A big change like Mulan being a Jedi are harder to accept.

Edited by FOFD on Sep 25th 2022 at 8:37:16 AM

Well Prehistoric planet was amazing. So a small price to pay for a dull lion king remake.

I feel like a few of the changes The Lion King makes are pretty good ones, like Shenji being a serious character in charge of the hyenas and… well, that is pretty much it.

For me, the best live-action remakes are the ones that are similar to the original movie, but at the same time use the original movie as more of a basis for a (either slightly or majorly) different story. It's the reason why I unironically like the The Jungle Book and (hot take, I know) Aladdin remakes.

If a live-action remake leaves me feeling like I didn't waste my time after watching it and/or not feeling like I would rather be watching the original animated movie instead, I feel like that's a plus. Pinocchio was kind of frustrating for me to watch because I feel like they did plant the seeds for a somewhat different story and yet they just largely stuck rigidly to the same plot of the original animated movie.

I think one of the main problems people use to have with those remakes from what I've seen is the pacing. You have a movie that follows the original from beat to beat to heavily capitalize your nostalgia, but since they want to make the run time longer, they put other scenes that often weren't neither in the original movie nor in the original source and end up making the pacing stranger. It's like they want to commit to make changed to justify the remake's existence, but also don't want to make too many changes to not alienate the public (except for Mulan though, which was completely different from both the movie and the ballad).

Edited by good-morning on Sep 25th 2022 at 8:16:32 AM

Hell, if any film needed some updating and serious changes, it was Pinocchio. Namely, what happens (or rather, lack thereof) when it comes to the Coachman and Honest John.