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.
Nowanna.
Good
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.
We. Don’t. Need. To. Live. Action. Every. FUCKING. Thing.
We need a live action Jetsons on ice.
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.
Well, it seems Supergirl was way more popular in it's reportings of failure. Supergirl wins this one. I wonder if The Odyssey or Ulysses or whatever it's called will bring people back to the theater? I stopped going decades ago but I'll be going to see this one.
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.
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.
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...
Studios don't like risks nowadays. So they'd rather remake successful past movies.
Ah yes, losing $100,000,000 seems very low-risk.
If they thought they had a good chance of losing that much money, they wouldn't have made the movie. The news here is more about how their risk calculations were off.
And now they realise it isn't risk free after all.
My daughter loves the Moana movies. I've told her about this one - and the anti-excitement of "the same movie but with actual persons" is quite obvious. I can only conclude that no actual parents were involved in its inception.
No actual parents were involved in the inception of any of the live action remakes
…I’m trying to think. What animated -> live action remakes have we gotten, through history, that were really good?
Not just “alright” or fun, but like a landmark movie, unto their own?
I’m coming up blank. But I’m sleepy.
Here's my pitch: Let's animate the live action Disney movies. They have these properties to draw from, and instead of making a live-action remake of them like Freaky Friday or Herbie, or a sequel like Hocus Pocus or Mary Poppins Returns, reinvent it as an animated feature.
Animation is now about as expensive as live-action, and Disney, like most studios, is still on "animation is for kids". They're trying to position these live-action remakes as somehow "more adult" because they're not animated.
Newsies, please!
I feel like Sony Animation would knock this one outta the park.
Bedknobs and Broomsticks but the animated parts are live action…
Incidentally Bedknobs and Broomsticks is the better Mary Poppins, I know I know it’s an unpopular opinion but I stand by it.
I agree! As a kid I was obsessed by the final battle between the Nazis and the animated armors!
ah, but would Di$ney risk possibly alienating a few movie goers by depicting Nazis as bad and incompetent today?
Flubber (1997)?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Feels pretty disrespectful to the audience of the original, like “you watched an animation but it’s a real movie now!”, except the real movie is just as much an animation.
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