More and more, the cinema industry is gravitating toward live-action remakes of already-established animated films. This trend is nothing new, but as it gets more popular the creativity and spark of classic animated films start being lost.
A studio known for participating in this practice is Walt Disney Studios. However, they are most known for being a titan of the animation industry with classics such as The Lion King, Mulan, and The Little Mermaid.
These classic films, all at least a decade old, got butchered in their live-action remakes. All three of these films were received less favorably than their animated counterparts, with mediocre ratings at best.
Walt Disney Studios has made over twenty different live-action remakes of their animated films yet none of them has ever received better ratings than the originals. In fact, the ratings often show lower critical reception.
One might question why Disney and other studios decide to continue to make live actions even though they are so negatively received. The answer is simple, money, the thing that drives all decisions.
Making a live-action remake is much simpler than coming up with a new idea from scratch and then animating it. When creating a remake there is already a proven formula out there in the old animated movies of the 90s.
It makes it easy just to grab the original story, slap the Rock on it (or any other famous actor) then call it a day. Much easier than grabbing together a team, story-boarding a story, and then animating.
Walt Disney and other studios are banking on the fact that people will be blinded by their opinions of the original film and decide to watch in a new live action format.
A big portion of the viewers will be parents who choose to bring their kids to watch the new Disney movie not actually caring if its good or not. Kids are easy to please and will most likely not be able to discern if the movie is good or not as long it’s entertaining.
These live action remakes almost always make a lot of money for the studios as they still fill seats. Who cares what they think of the movie after watching as long as they paid to watch?
A sacrifice to all this money made is the creative integrity and ingenuity that defined these studios in the past. For example Disney is making less and less original animated films.
Instead they are opting out to make live action remakes because they know it will make money. They don’t want to take the risk by creating a new film.
The new live action films can never capture the one time feeling of the originals. It leads the new live action remakes to be sloppy, unoriginal CGI abominations.
This leads us to today where Disney is already in the works on live action remakes of Moana and Lilo and Stitch. It seriously begs the question, who asked for this?