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…
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
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?
-
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.
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.
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?
Don’t forget the bagpipes, laddy!
I’m here to join the Bedknobs is better than Poppins-club. Not that I hate Mary Poppins. I just think Bedknobs is way more fun.
Thats just because of how awesome Angela Lansbury is in everything she ever did.
Honey I Shrunk the Kids would make a great animated movie, and Rick Morranis could reprise his role!
That one in particular is what got me started on this thought. I’ve been playing the game Grounded and it’s really brought me back to that movie and realizing what was so evocative about the premise.
Rick Moranis is also freaking great in it. He somehow manages to come across in the movie as a cartoon character.
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.
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.
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.
Remake any Disney owned movie with The Muppets. Slam dunk.
Newsies, please!
I feel like Sony Animation would knock this one outta the park.
- Makes an live-action version
- It’s 90-95% CGI
What’s the point?
From that studio that gave you “Live Action” Lion King.
Good
Pray this is the end of this live action shit
They probably needed a tax writeoff or whatever, so don’t keep your hopes up
People need to stop mentioning tax write offs as if it is a strategic goal when it is a reaction.
It’s a write off!
Yes. They will definitely get the message, this time.
I mean if they start losing money yeah maybe
Pretty sure a bunch of them have lost money and Disney just doesn’t care.
They were losing money, then Lilo and Stitch made tonnes of it which convinced them to keep going. It’ll take a few more flops for them to give up.
This might be the end, or at least the muting, of The Rock’s movie career. The Rock had to push Disney to make this and I don’t think The Rock has had a hit in years.
Really proves how simple-minded these people were. They were creating cashgrab nostalgia remakes in a manner that snubs royalties to original crews who worked on the original films, but they couldn’t even tell remaking a modern film with no nostalgia value was a bad idea.
Is Moana even old enough to HAVE Nostalgia? Isn’t Moana like, 5 years old or something?
It’s not quite 10 years old. The animated version (and I hate I now need to qualify that) came out November 23, 2016. Still way too soon for a remake, especially when you don’t even recast the second name on the call sheet.
If they had animated on top of Dwayne Johnson’s bicep tattoos I might consider watching it.
I think they do animate his tattoos. I partially watched a review and saw them moving around as they talked about how jarring some of the CGI to real life transitions were.
Oh they did get Johnson? It looks like Moana was the one who stepped away from the role, props to her.
Johnson was pushing for the movie to be made.
Ten years. Still not old enough. To maximize nostalgia, they would have to wait until those who enjoyed the original movie have their own children of the right age, so at least 20-25 years. Which, to nobody’s surprise, neatly matches the time span between original and remake for The Lion King (25 years) and The Beauty and the Beast (26 years). For The Little Mermaid, they waited even longer (34 years).
Alice in Wonderland did 59 years
I wouldn’t really count that as a remake though, just a new (and very different) movie based on the same source material.
The newer “live action” / CGI remakes on the other hand are overall closer to the animated versions than to their source material with the same original characters, same songs and so on.
10 actually!
Do you think it’s time for a remake of the Moana remake? We could concurrently start working on the remake of that.
Michael Bay would be proud!
They aren’t really human. They don’t think and feel like the rest of us
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.
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.
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
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
Yes, but at least the intellectual property claim lasts ten years longer.
Except it doesn’t. The original version will still take the same amount of time to enter public domain as it did before
But the IP of the characters are extended. You’ll have to convince a court you’re using the original characters in public domain and not the updated characters still under copyright. And this is in a fight against Disney.
But the IP of the characters are extended.
Except no. There wasn’t any fight like this when Mickey Mouse/Steamboat Willy went into public domain.
You have different depictions of the same characters characters going into public domain in the order that they were created. Not that difficult to get your head around.
I sure hope you’re right, but I’m cynical about Disney.
I wonder if anyone made a large-ish creative work and sold it with Wiily in it yet, or is it just random people posting on the web?
Let’s dump all the charm and character of the famously last major hand-drawn animation and cover it in slop.
Wait, why aren’t people fighting to give us their money?!?!
Moana was hand drawn??
I’m an idiot. And/or didn’t have my coffee yet.
I was thinking of Lilo And Stitch.
Hand-drawn moana is an excellent idea actually
THAT is a way to get me to watch Disney remakes.
That’s still not the last handrawn movie, that would be the Princess and the Frog (although technically one of the Winnie the Pooh movies)
Lilo and Stitch’s live action remake made the older sister abandon her family to go to a prestigious art school on the mainland, despite Hawaii having a really great program and Ohana meaning family.
It’s pretty obvious:
- too soon for nostalgia
- half the movie and characters is animated anyways
Plus Moana was all about the vibrant colors and visuals.
How the live action looks so lifeless and this was considered acceptable baffles me. Even when the teaser was first shown many had complaints that it looked nothing like the source material in terms of vibrancy and color choices.
Good, hopefully this will serve as a message to stop making pointless live action remakes. The fact they didnt cast the original voice actress for the lead role is bewildering, but maybe she read between the lines and didn’t want it.
