Coming out later this week on Friday is the new live action remake of Lilo and Stitch, yet another example of a major movie studio taking a beloved animated film and recreating it in live action. This trend in the entertainment industry has been especially notable this year, with the recent release of Snow White, the already mentioned Lilo and Stitch, and even a recreation of How To Train Your Dragon coming later this year.
This phenomenon notably started with Disney, who released their first live action remake in 1994 with a version of The Jungle Book. In the thirty one years since this release, Disney has put out 22 live action remakes. This phenomenon has even pushed beyond Disney, with the How To Train Your Dragon being one of the first similar projects to be produced out of Universal Pictures and Netflix having released many of their own live action remakes of animated shows such as Avatar the Last Airbender, Death Note, and One Piece. In this way, it appears that this formula has now been brought to other mainstream studios and will no longer be relegated to only Disney’s classic animated films.
This wave of live action remakes is often received relatively poorly by film critics, with only 3 of the 23 released Disney remakes reaching a Rotten Tomatoes score of 80% or higher, and online discourse around this trend in cinema has been largely negative. Complaints of a lack of originality have been at the center of discourse surrounding live action remakes online, that Disney has been producing these films out of a lack of creativity to create new stories and ideas. That being said, oftentimes audience scores for these films are significantly higher than that of the critical scores, with 2023’s Little Mermaid, for example, only having a 67% critical score but an incredibly high 93% audience rating. This begs the question of whether these films are genuinely unpopular with the public, or if there is a silent majority of people who will continue to see these films?
This idea has been supported by the monetary success of these live action remakes, with even a few of them such as Beauty and the Beast making over one billion dollars on a budget of just one hundred and sixty million. But, with the recent flop of Snow White, which cost Disney two hundred seventy million dollars to make while only receiving two hundred and two million dollars at the box office, the question of the validity of these remakes is being raised once again. The only way to answer such a question is to ask the average film enjoyer what they think about live action remakes, and these were two of their answers.
[Nic] Yeah, I mean, I think that they are not infrequently, just cash grabs made to play on the nostalgia of the original original IP, right? So they’re a way of putting in not much budget and getting a lot of money out of people who are desperate to go see some more media from their favorite series. And I think they have potential if they were actually made to be good products, but in my opinion, a lot of them just end up being cash grabs, especially those by Disney, in my experience.
Maybe, maybe someday people will, like some group will actually like try to make effort and like do justice to the original with one of these adaptations and then I’d be happy to go watch it, but I think ideally now people start voting with their wallets, right?
[Tyson] The only problem I have with live actions is the creativity aspect of it. And I literally just think of it as of like a future generation problem in that obviously we grew up being, we meaning Gen Z, We grew up on these old Pixar movies like The Incredibles, Monsters Inc, and if they start trying to recreate those, I feel like it’s not adding anything. We need like new ideas and like the movie industries has become, find something that worked in the past and remake it, but I feel like we just need to like move forward. Like, obviously, I mean it’s good to take inspiration from different movies from the past but I think we just need new ideas.
Whatever the verdict is among the common movie goer, it seems that this trend is not slowing down with a live action remake of Moana coming out next year and several other remakes in the works with unannounced release dates such as the Aristocats, Hercules, and Bambi. Perhaps the release of Lilo and Stitch later this week will provide more of an answer for if this trend will continue into the future, but for now it seems like a fair guess to say that, despite their often negative depictions, live action remakes are here to stay.
