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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We need a live action Jetsons on ice.
- Makes an live-action version
- It’s 90-95% CGI
What’s the point?
From that studio that gave you “Live Action” Lion King.
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
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:
-
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?
-
No one does… any why should they? The classic disney films are great, they don’t need remakes…
I wish someone re-mastered the Donald duck and Goofy driving instructional/documentary videos/movies
Goofy teaching how to play sports was great, too. Basketball game starts, players jump and start slapping one another
If you want a live action Moana, go watch Whale Rider instead. It’s a heavy inspiration and a much more authentic and better movie.
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.
…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.
No actual parents were involved in the inception of any of the live action remakes
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.
