Do I Actually Hate the Disney Remakes: A User's Guide

 

Despite the internet's passion for griping over the state of the union, including and especially Hollywood's passion for remakes and reboots, the process of retelling and readaptation within art has been around for a while. Some of the earliest, most beloved films were themselves adaptations of famous texts of their day (The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, etc.) Sometimes if the beloved text is beloved enough, we can see multiple film versions of the same stories throughout time. Adaptation is nothing new to film.

   Yet the process hits a nerve in the context of the 21st-century pop culture scape, what with the constant refrain of "when did Hollywood run out of ideas??????" This most contentious of all dialogues is clearer nowhere than with the warzone of Disney live-action remakes.

         It’s likely because of the sheer wealth of remakes on board that we use apocalyptic rhetoric to condemn them—they are plagues, they are soulless, they are morally bankrupt—habitually and without much curiosity. I can’t think of another property or series (hm ... maybe the Jurassic World movies) so reviled for the unpardonable offense of existing. The internet has been “so over” these films for a good five years now. And yet they reliably rank among the highest-grossing movies of each year.

        The Disney remakes strike a unique chord with me. The worst of them expose everything about Disney's pop culture dominance that's so upsetting, yet I’ve unironically enjoyed a good two or three remakes, a better ratio than the equally cash-grabby Pixar sequels which never endure the same degree of audience pushback. I’m very much a proponent of supporting new content, but I just look at various online voices tearing down The Lady and the Tramp remake and feel more worn down than I do watching any of the remakes themselves.

    I have seen a few dozen video responses to this phenomenon, and I still hundreds more lie in wait in the YouTube algorithm. If I had to distill the message of all these videos into one argument, it would sound something like, "Disney is a capitalist monster that just wants to prey on the nostalgic achings of the millennial audience by pushing out the most commercially safe product, forsaking all creative or moral merit in the name of pounding that bottom line." And this is not some niche insight that has yet to reach the mainstream consumer base. People "know" these things, and in my experience, nobody knows them better than the people who continue to reliably see these films opening weekend so they can gripe about them online, and that's the phenomenon I really want to talk about here today.

    

  I'm not really here to defend Disney squandering its creative potential on nothing but the safest of bets, but the dialogue around these remakes is vulnerable to some very specific fallacies, ones that would have the movie-going public throwaway its own voice within the ecosystem in which these remakes arise in the first place. Nothing is so messy that unchecked rhetoric won't make it worse. 

           There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the Disney remakes, but if we really want to understand where these remakes are coming from, and what to do about them, we’re better served looking less at the CEOs high on Olympus and more at ourselves. Because at the end of the day, it isn’t that Disney is running out of ideas, it isn’t that Disney is out to mess with “the classics,” it isn’t that Disney is forcing these remakes down our throat. We scorn the Disney remakes so ruthlessly because they are precisely what we as a media consuming society have been asking for.

 

         Talking Point 1: “I Just Want to See Disney Try O R I G I N A L Stories”

         The ground of originality and creativity is usually the first base hit when bagging on the Disney remakes: they are bad because Disney should be delivering creative new stories, not just retelling old ones.

    There's a lot about this that I agree with. Plow through the 90s for their biggest hits and you find films like Jurassic Park and Titanic. Plow the 2010s for their most important contributions to cinema, and you find films from the 90s. There's something embarrassing and even unnerving about how dependent we are on pre-existing content within entertainment, something I cover thoroughly in my rant on Toy Story 4.

    Just so, the internet sometimes forgets that “originality” and “creativity” are funny things and aren’t necessarily confined to one end of the IP spectrum. I have long wondered how many Spiderman franchises one century can take, yet I loved "Into the Spiderverse" as much as the next guy. Remixing is its own kind of artform, and there are all kinds of ways to do it right.

    The common line surrounding these remakes is "we've already seen this story before." This is partially true and very dependent on which remake we're talking about. For every "Lion King," which hits the notes of its animated predecessor beat-for-beat, there is a "Jungle Book," which borrows some of the story points of the original movie but builds its own narrative from it, even diverging wildly from its preordained ending.

    Even small changes can make for entirely unique experiences. I’ve seen Beauty and the Beast on stage a good half-dozen times and counting. Some might consider that superfluous or repetitive, “It’s just the same story over and over again,” but I don’t. Yes, it’s always the same song of a tortured beast falling for a bright young woman (not that one) and becoming a better person for it, but each production sings that song in a slightly different way, emphasizing different notes. Some Beasts really lean into the Phantom of the Opera-like tragedy of the character, other times they play him like an overgrown puppy. The unique inflections in acting, design, and directing all add up, and through each imagining I discover some new angle of the story.

    I think these nuanced story flecks are an essential part of the equation in part because there is a large swath of film critics who would reduce the success of the Disney library to a set list of factors--to feeding into a very specific algorithm that Sir Walt himself hacked decades ago. Considering these stories for the fine texture of their narrative reveals the fine mechanics of the stories, and exploring how this story balances out in the minutiae reinforces something Disney fans have always known: the magic of these films isn't accidental--the storytelling works, down to the detail.

When the foundational story is good, and the production is committed to excellence, the experience is rewarding such that it doesn’t matter that I’ve seen the show over and over. Really, it doesn’t matter that I’ve seen the animated film over and over. The question posed by the remakes is whether the same can be said for restaging the story on film.

    Let's use the Cinderella remake as an example. In and out of the Disney canon, Cinderella is a symbol for transcending trials and holding on to your goodness even as others try to snuff it out of you. The live-action film supplements this by letting us see firsthand Cinderella’s deterioration from an innocent child unspotted from grief or distress into a young woman who suddenly finds herself in the thick of hardship.

    In the animated film, this is all mostly conveyed through storybook exposition. In the remake, we actually see Ella's support systems being stripped from her over and over onscreen all while she tries to hold onto her light. You sit with her as you watch her learn that her father is dead, and you watch her stepmother strip away her dignity bit by bit, which makes her evergreen compassion and faith all the more bright. It's the kind of thing that really reminds us why we even remake Cinderella to begin with.

    There’s also something to letting new talent drive the old engine. The narrative around Will Smith’s take on the Genie (at least before that one trailer) centered mostly on how Smith could ever hope to step into the shoes of the legendary Robin Williams. Smith’s answer seemed to be that he just wasn’t going to. He was going to do his own thing. Where Genie ‘92 is like everyone’s favorite drama teacher, Genie ‘19 is basically Hitch with all the powers of the cosmos. And turns out this was the best approach he could have taken.

    Whether or not this new take resonates with each viewer is its own conversation. Just because something’s different, that doesn’t mean that it’s de facto good--I haven’t liked every stage show I’ve seen of Beauty and the Beast--but it does mean it deserves a fair chance.

    The concept of "original stories" also sits weirdly with me when I consider the studios' unique relationship to pre-existing material. Most films within the Disney animated canon, especially those receiving the remake treatment today, are not truly "original stories" themselves. The Disney tradition, and I mean the animated classics, gets a lot of blowback from certain pools of scholars and intellectuals for its practice of grafting pre-existing stories (Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book stories, Grimm's Sleeping Beauty, etc) into its own bank of merchandisable material, inevitably supplanting the original story's place in pop culture. (When you buy your nephew a Winnie the Pooh book, are you buying the Disney version or one of the A.A. Milne books?)

There's a lot of legitimate concern to be had here, but since I've already dedicated my Beauty and the Beast essay to this very topic, let it suffice to say here that complaining about Disney killing original stories with their remakes--while not acknowledging that the "original movies" are themselves stamping on the graves of older stories--is kind of turning a blind eye. (There's a cheat, though: every time you read Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, the universe permits you three angry YouTube comments about Belle's prom dress in the remake.)

         Talking Point 2: “Leave the Classics Alone”

Waking Life (2001)

         Perhaps you’re familiar with the stigma connected to animated films. Even in a landscape with such a rich offering of animated films, a sizable segment of the movie-going public takes it as a given that animated movies are just for kids. This is doubly true for the sentimental smorgasbord of Disney animated pics.

    So when the Walt Disney company pays top dollar to translate their entire line-up into the more acceptable adult medium of live-action, it’s not entirely unreasonable that tried and true Disney fans would be upset. It doesn’t help that these remakes are billed as apologies for the animated films that birthed them.

    The Jungle Book remake is Disney’s apology for "dumbing down" Rudyard Kipling’s precious writings. Maleficent is Disney’s apology for every Disney Princess trope. Beauty and the Beast is Disney’s apology to that guy commenting on Buzzfeed about “how come there’s just a giant castle in the middle of the woods that nobody knows about?”

    These talking points reliably become the backbone of promotion for any given remake. The Beauty and the Beast campaign was basically Emma Watson spouting gratitude over getting to play "the only good Disney Princess." Eventually it starts to feel like these remakes are designed especially for people who don’t like Disney animation, which inevitably creates a lot of resentment toward these remakes. But it is possible for the reactions to these PR runs to become distortions of their own.

    As a case study, let’s view the narrative around Jasmine in the 2019 remake of Aladdin.

Princess Jasmine of the 1992 animated film is a somewhat polarizing figure within feminist discourse. Just as many people champion her as a girl power icon as write her off as a trophy for the male protagonist. Some praise her subversive and rebellious actions within the film while others see her as just another damsel in distress.

   Jasmine in the 2019 remake is just as divisive within the Disney fandom. The remake went to great effort to appease critics of Jasmine in the animated film, most notably by adding a new song for her, a power ballad ironically titled "Speechless." Most within the Disney community fall into one of two camps: those who love that their favorite princess has an awesome new jam, and those who see her as yet another reminder of Disney's addiction to pandering. Pushback against something like newandimproved Jasmine rises in tandem with the usual round of ill-informed narratives about the original film. That was certainly the case with Aladdin 2019.

    Leading the charge was none other than producer of the remake Dan Lin, who in multiple interviews gave the most aggravating summation of Jasmine’s character in the animated film. Said Lin to the LA Times, “Jasmine’s main goal in the original movie is really to find a spouse, and in this movie there’s much more than that.” He made similar remarks in his interview with Empire Online where he kindly let us know “In the original movie, it felt like [Jasmine] didn’t have as compelling a goal. Her main aim was to find the love of her life."

     This is, of course, in direct contradiction with the animated film. Jasmine of Aladdin '92, where she actively rejects and sabotages her father's attempts to match her with the first rich guy to walk through the door. Don’t get me wrong, there are grey areas within Jasmine’s character, but claiming that Jasmine “just wants to get married” is inventing controversy. And when invented controversy started making headlines, a lot of Disney fans were rightfully upset.

         This is what outsiders misunderstand about us Disney loyalists getting riled up over hot takes about Disney’s damsels in distress or whatnot. It’s not that we don’t like seeing strong, multi-dimensional females in our films. It's not that we can't accept criticism. It’s that we’re tired of being patronized by people like Dan Lin who insist that they know better than us when they haven’t seen the darn movie since our solar system lost a planet. 

         But even Lin’s ignorant comments, ignorant as they are, can’t bear all the weight of this rewriting. If they do, then what do we make of people like Benj Pasek, the lyricist for the new music in the film including “Speechless." In “The Art of Aladdin” book, Pasek says Jasmine’s new power anthem was “a natural extension” of the character.

“I think people gravitate to Jasmine because she is such a strong female character, and we were inspired by that and aimed to give her a song, and a moment, that matched her power."

    Meanwhile, the actress portraying Jasmine in the remake, Naomi Scott, describes the process of blending '92 Jasmine with '19 Jasmine as a simple process of accessing her humanity.

“Jasmine was my favorite, so I can’t really reconcile those two things. You have to have a healthy respect for what came before, but I still see those things as separate. It’s more a case of being able to create this human version of her. That’s the way I saw it.”

       There are a lot of cooks in this kitchen. A lot of ideologies go into something like remaking a Disney princess for a new decade. Disney princesses have always occupied a rather precarious place in pop culture discourse (and yes I promise I will write that essay one day) so there's just no pleasing everybody. But when I see pushback from Disney fans over the remakes disrespecting the animated films, I frequently see them citing comments like Lin's. I seldom see them bring up Pasek's, and that represents a blindspot.

    Inherently baked into the process of remaking the Disney films is the notion that the animated films are not perfect. Confronting this reality can be frustrating, especially when the loudest voices in this discussion don't have any curiosity for the films they are critiquing. But I don't think efforts to update the Disney canon always come from a place of disdain for the animated films. (On that note, I also don't think that appreciating progressive action in the remakes automatically means turning your back on the original films.) It's just as likely that the filmmakers are trying to figure out how to better tell the story to reflect today's understanding of multiculturalism. Yes, it's disappointing when the figureheads of these conversations choose not to be graceful in their phrasing, but Disney fans can choose to look past the theatrics of this arena and create dialogue that celebrates the opportunities these remakes have helping to champion marginalized communities. 

    Critical engagement of any sort opens the gates for a lot of lazy jabs at the classics, and yeah some people really need to do their research, but it also opens the gates for a lot of good. For one thing, minorities are being allowed to see themselves in historically white icons like Ariel and Tinker Bell, both being portrayed by black actresses in their upcoming remakes. Much like how it's frustrating when X-celebrity fundamentally misrepresents X-Disney film, it isn't exactly fair to be equally reductive when talking about the remakes.

     We've talked thus far how there are a lot of legitimate reactions to the remakes, and I stand by that. Provided their logic is sound, it's perfectly reasonable for a large slice of Disney fandom to dislike the remakes and what they stand for, but there's a caveat. The breadth of reasons we list for why the remakes are terrible (they're just the same story again, they're disrespectful to the classics, etc.) all betray an uncomfortable truth: the Disney remakes didn't just come from nowhere. This is our mess too.

         Talking Point 3: “Literally No One is Asking for These”

         This is probably the most frequent response I see to these films, but when I notice that four of these remakes grossed over a billion dollars worldwide, I can’t help but think somebody is asking for these.

Let's take a look at where Disney was back when the remakes business all started.

    Flashback to the early 2010s. Back when Disney's little experiment with Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland was making so much money that even Disney was like "Holy crap, that actually worked?" and wondering what they were going to do next. I was on IMDb during this time, and one of the most popular themes in users lists was this idea of recasting characters from Disney animation contemporary actors. (Any list that didn't have Emma Watson as Belle had Anne Hathaway.) This was all back when the notion of these remakes was purely hypothetical. You also saw things like the Disney Dream photograph series by Anne Leibovitz, a promotional campaign for the Disney Parks, featured real-life celebrities posing in costume as Disney characters. Jennifer Hudson as Tiana and the like. Maybe the idea of dressing up favorite celebrities for live-action restagings of the animated films didn't come from the executives.

         I also want to key in on an underdiscussed branch of the Disney company in this conversation, the theme parks. During this time, the theme park division was busy cleaning up after the mismanagement of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, notably public embarrassments like Disneyland Paris and the Disney California Adventure Park. The latter especially was a dartboard for online jokes about how far from grace the Disney theme parks had fallen. The question became how to get the public to see the park as being worthy of the Disney brand.

    The answer? Throw Disney properties onto the park.

         By 2012, Disney California Adventure introduced new rides for Toy Story and The Little Mermaid and an entire segment of the park themed to Cars. This campaign was indisputably successful, and the park is regarded much more favorably than it was in its opening days. Those of us who follow the parks closely might say that the shift had as much to do with the parks simply spending more effort on their projects as much as it did with featuring more movies, but the result is hard to dispute. A lesson was learned, or at least ratified, from this experiment: if you build a ferris wheel with Mickey Mouse’s face plastered on it, they will come.

    Seeing how this was applied to Disney California Adventure, this approach doesn’t seem so insidious. Fans got a lot of good stuff from this campaign. Playing with the Disney catalog can be really fun when it’s done with an eye for craftsmanship. But Disney would soon find out that the brand could also function as a lifejacket even when the product isn’t good.

    Immediately preceding this wave of remakes was the hit series on ABC “Once Upon a Time.” First airing in 2011, this show featured fairy-tale characters from a fairy-tale world who are magically transported into the real world. (Think Disney’s own Enchanted but as a soap opera.) I mention this show because, being an extension of Disney, ABC had access to the full Disney library of characters. But interestingly the early run of the show didn’t lean into flashing Disney’s IP catalog.

Initially the show’s cast drew from the full library of fairy-tale characters—Snow White and Pinocchio, yes, but also Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, etc.—and when Disney characters did feature, even prominently, the show wouldn’t necessarily rub the Disney connection in too hard. We’d maybe hear Snow White humming one of the songs from the animated film, but these were easter eggs, not the backbone of the show. But the show’s business model shifted partway through.

For reference, this is back when the show made sense ...

        It’s widely agreed that the first season featured the show’s most cohesive writing, and things fell apart very shortly after. Show-writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz (of Lost fame) are somewhat infamous for chasing a fantastical situation long after it stops making any logical sense, and that was certainly the case in Once Upon a Time which leaned on plot twists like making Peter Pan not only an evil mastermind bent on world domination but also Rumpelstilksen's long-lost father.

    But despite this critical drop-off, the show ran for seven seasons. Why? Because the show figured out the audience wasn’t here for the writing—they were here for the Desperate Disney Housewives. And so when the writers realized the storyline was so convoluted even they couldn’t keep up with it, they just filled in the blanks with more cameos from Disney characters.

         This strategy really took over in the third and fourth season. That’s when we started seeing seasonal arcs based on Frozen or Aladdin with the characters basically wearing their theme park costumes. Even characters with no roots in traditional fairy-tales like Lumiere or Merida started popping up.

         I’m sure the show has its genuine fans, but most people I know who watched the show all the way through admit that they were bored or irritated with the show’s incoherent storytelling, but they stuck around because next season had Snow White’s daughter and Captain Hook teaming up with Robin Hood to take on the trifecta of Ursula, Maleficent, and Cruella DeVill. (I watched this show a lot longer than I should have, so, yeah, this is my sin too.) I’ll repeat: much of the audience thought the show was crap, but they gave it their time and attention because it had Disney. Fast forward five years and suddenly the internet is overflowing with hot takes about “why are they even making these remakes?”

    This trend is consistent across all branches of the Disney tree. In 2015, Disney Channel premiered the movie Descendants featuring the children of Disney Villains going to boarding school with children of Disney heroes. In terms of quality, the show is indistinguishable from your standard Disney Channel show, but the brand signaling was a lightning-rod. The movie was an overwhelming success, scoring the goalpost of 5th most-watched original movie in cable history. What’s interesting is that only 3 M of the show’s 6.6 M viewers opening weekend were a part of the channel’s 11 and under demographic. And I'm not here to shame you if you were part of that crowd, but I am here to tell everyone to view consumer behaviors in context.

        This also ties back to the audience's attitudes toward Disney and "original stories." A remake of The Jungle Book will earn 100 M opening weekend where a film like The Finest Hours, released only two months before The Jungle Book, will earn only half of that during its full term at the box office.

    We say we want Disney to try new things, we broadcast we’re all “over Disney and their remakes,” and we lampoon Disney for “running out of ideas,” but that tiptoes around a deeper truth. By casting ourselves as passive victims of this phenomenon, we give ourselves permission to indulge in the splurge without feeling guilty about perpetuating it. But unfortunately, when someone drops $30 to watch Mulan 3 months early, Disney doesn't take into account who bought it because they genuinely wanted to see the film and who bought it "just to laugh at how bad it is."

A fourth talking point I could bring up might be the argument that "no one is going to remember these movies anyways." I most often see this peddled out as an assurance that because these films are so rapidly produced and then forgotten, their impact on Disney and pop culture at large will be microscopic, so who cares that they're making bank? I have some hesitation over this line of thinking as well. The pop culture conversation leaves plenty of room for films that are sobadthey'regood. I cite the weird renaissance the Star Wars prequels have enjoyed over the last five years or so.

    And whether this all blows over five years from now or even sooner, that doesn't mean there won't be casualties. Think of how Disney's own direct to video sequels not only soured the reputation of Disney animation as a whole, but also helped kill hand-drawn animation in the U.S. These remakes are considerably more expensive than the direct to video sequels and land with much more of a splash. Who knows what their collateral might be?

As this process continues to draw viewership, the remakes march forth unfettered. Cruella DeVil’s origin story comes to theaters and Disney+ next month. Currently filming or slated to begin filming soon are remakes for The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan, and Pinocchio, with others like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Lilo and Stitch, and Hercules in various stages of pre-production.

    But surely there are only so many movies they can remake, right? We’ll stop after they get around to The Great Mouse Detective and Brother Bear, right? Not if the sequels to Aladdin, The Jungle Book, and The Lion King have a say in the matter. This pattern will continue for as long as audiences continue to fund it. And given that audiences don’t need to even like the product to endorse it, we’ll be hearing rants about how Disney needs to stop these remakes for a long, long time.

 

So What Will it Take to Stop the Remakes?

    Dismantling this age of IP Wars is difficult to imagine because the Disney remakes are just one tentacle on the Kraken of brand dominance. Both Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones are receiving spin-off television shows coming to a streaming service near you. Nickelodeon recently announced the development of Avatar Studios to continue mapping out the universe of the 2005 animated series, separate from the live-action series also coming to Netflix. Meanwhile it’s only a matter of time before the rumors of the "Harry Potter" series for HBO Max come to fruition, even as the Fantastic Beasts films continue plowing headfirst into controversy after controversy. Even The Rugrats are making a comeback.

It’s no longer a novelty to report that projects like these are taking the place of new stories, new classics born and made in the 21st century, but that’s as far as the discussion ever goes. A lot of us, myself included, have followed this train a lot longer than we should have, and we've seen what that mentality sows.

Stella Meghie's The Photograph, the exact kind of movie that stands to lose in today's climate

    I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who a few years into college took stock of all the movies he'd seen in theaters the previous five years, felt somewhat embarrassed at just how few "original movies" sat in between all the remakes and sequels, and vowed to be more curious in my film viewing. To think twice about watching a movie I know I'm going to hate just because everyone else is going to. To drive to the next town over where they're screening that new indie film that, who knows?, might end up being really great.

    I'm not saying that I'll never watch another Disney remake in theaters again, I'll just only watch the ones that catch my attention. By now I've figured what interests I do and don't have in this system. Besides, more useful than groaning over remakes, boycotting remakes, or even ignoring remakes is actively supporting films unbuoyed by a pre-existing brand.

This is admittedly becoming an increasingly more difficult task in a landscape where there are just fewer and fewer non-franchise properties being produced, especially for theatrical release. Check Disney's upcoming release calendar, and you'll notice a very clear pattern as to which movies are being reserved for theatrical distribution and which are being shipped directly to streaming.

Just so, it's very unlikely that it will become easier to scout out viable candidates. So if original content is the thing we want, we'd best get to work.

--The Professor