Every Disney Live Action Remake (2010-Present) Review
3/10
Alice in Wonderland took a billion dollars in 2010 and established the arrangement. Take a title with forty years of affection attached, remake it with photographic imagery, and release it to an audience that already knows the songs.
The 3 is a rating of the program and not of any single entry. Several of these are competently made, one or two are good, and the collective effect is a studio strip-mining its own back catalogue because the back catalogue is the only asset that doesn’t require a new idea.
The whole program makes me grumpy. I like a lot of the animated films these remakes are copying, and watching a studio turn them into photographs of themselves feels like watching someone trace over a painting and sell the tracing at a markup. I think Disney knew exactly what it was doing, and the money told it to keep going.
What makes it worth treating as a single subject is that the failures are identical across eighteen films by different directors. That means the cause is upstream of any of them. That’s the reason a single entry isn’t the right unit of analysis. Condon, Ritchie, Favreau, Burton and Marshall aren’t similar filmmakers and their remakes have the same problems. That locates the fault in the brief instead of the execution.
Photorealism Removes the Point
Animation is a medium where every element is a deliberate choice, and caricature is its central tool.
The 2019 Lion King is the clearest demonstration. The animals are rendered with photographic accuracy. That means they can’t make expressions, because real lions don’t. A film about a grieving child can’t show the child’s face. The 1994 version solved that with drawing.
The Lion King remake is the worst offender. A grieving cub should flatten you, and the 2019 version offers a realistic cub with a realistic blank face. It leaves me cold. Disney spent a fortune removing the one tool that could have made me care.
The same problem recurs everywhere. A cartoon teapot can be warm because a drawing can suggest warmth, and a photorealistic teapot with a face is an object nobody wants in a room. Beauty and the Beast is full of these, and each one is less appealing than its drawn equivalent.
The songs suffer the same way. A drawn character can move impossibly during a number, and a photographed one is a person standing in a room singing. That requires either a real musical performer or a great deal of forgiveness from the audience.
What the remakes keep failing to understand is that stylization was doing the emotional work. Removing it doesn’t make the story more real, it removes the mechanism the story was using.
Every medium has a tool that carries its emotional weight, and translating between media means finding the equivalent instead of removing the original. Prose does this with interiority. Film does it with performance. Animation does it with exaggeration, and a photographic remake has simply deleted the tool.
Ask what your source was doing that your form can’t do, then find your own answer. An adaptation that reproduces the plot and drops the method has adapted nothing. Fidelity isn’t a virtue. The most faithful adaptations are usually the least successful, because faithfulness at the level of events is the easiest kind to achieve and the least useful.
Explanation Is the Other Disease
The remakes consistently supply backstory for things the originals left alone, and the backstory is always smaller than the mystery it replaces. Maleficent explains why a fairy curses a child. The Lion King explains the logistics of the elephant graveyard. Beauty and the Beast explains what happened to Belle’s mother and why the villagers forgot a castle existed. Each answer is less interesting than the question.
That instinct comes from a misreading: gaps in a story are errors. They’re not. A villain with no explained motive is frightening because there’s nothing to negotiate with.
Cruella is the endpoint. A woman who wanted to make a coat out of puppies is given a childhood, a grievance, a fashion career and a sympathetic reading, and what’s left isn’t a villain at all.
Emma Stone is good in it. That makes the point sharper. A capable performer and a considerable production were assembled to explain away the only thing anybody remembered about the character.
Cruella is the entry I find hardest to forgive. A woman who wanted a coat made of puppies was all that character ever needed to be, and handing her a sad childhood and a fashion career is the studio sanding the teeth off its best villain so she can be sold as a heroine.
The Two That Work
Pete’s Dragon in 2016 is the best of them by a distance and almost nobody saw it. David Lowery remade a forgotten 1977 musical as a quiet film about a feral child and a forest, kept almost nothing, and made something with its own tone. It helped that the source wasn’t beloved. Nobody had a childhood attachment to defend, which gave Lowery permission to discard everything and left the film free to be slow, green and sad without anybody objecting that this wasn’t how they remembered it. Pete’s Dragon is the one I’d rescue first from this whole pile. It’s slow and green and sad, and it feels like somebody made it because they wanted to. The Jungle Book in the same year is the other one. Favreau used the photorealism deliberately, cast voices that could carry personality against it, and kept the film short and physically driven. It’s also the only remake where the technology is the reason the film exists instead of a substitute for a reason.
What both have in common is that they’re not reproductions. Lowery discarded the source almost entirely and Favreau changed the ending, the tone and the structure. Every remake that tried to be the original with photographs is worse than the original with drawings.
That pattern holds across the whole program without exception. That’s unusual enough to be worth stating as a rule. Depart considerably or don’t bother.
Dumbo is the counterexample that proves it from the other direction. Burton departed considerably, changed the ending, added a plot about a theme park owner, and produced something worse than the original anyway. That’s the risk the rule carries.
An adaptation should be a different work with the same origin. The two successes here both discarded most of the source and kept one idea. The reproductions all failed creatively regardless of what they earned.
If you can’t name what your version does that the original couldn’t, you haven’t found your reason yet, and you shouldn’t start writing. The safest adaptation is the most dangerous one. Reproducing a beloved work invites direct comparison on the terms the original already won.
The Money Made It Inevitable
Alice took a billion, Beauty and the Beast took over a billion, The Lion King took over one and a half billion, and Aladdin took over a billion.
Against that record, no argument about craft was going to change anything, and the program continued for fifteen years on the strength of it.
The turn arrived slowly. The Little Mermaid underperformed expectations, Snow White in 2025 was a serious commercial failure attended by a great deal of noise, and several announced projects were moved or shelved.
What ended it was the audience for these gradually discovering that they already owned the version they liked. That’s the only argument the market responds to.
Streaming accelerated it. When the 1994 film is two clicks away on the same service as the 2019 one, the comparison is immediate and continuous, and no amount of marketing survives a household watching both in a week.
What It Cost
The main damage is what didn’t get made instead.
Encanto, Moana and Zootopia all came out of the same studio during the same period. That shows the capacity never went away entirely. What changed is where the money went first and which projects had to justify themselves.
Fifteen years of a studio’s animation and production capacity was directed at reproducing work it had already done, at budgets that would have funded a great deal of original filmmaking. The same studio produced the originals in the first place, under conditions where a new idea was the only option available.
The studio that made those originals out of nothing spent fifteen years and enormous budgets photocopying them, and I’d give back the entire program for two or three new animated films nobody had heard of yet.
That’s the observation worth taking away. An organization with a valuable back catalogue will always be tempted to mine it, because mining is lower risk than creating, and the risk profile determines what it makes instead of any judgment about quality.
The lesson for anybody producing work is exact and uncomfortable. The safest thing you can make is a version of something that already worked, and doing it repeatedly will eventually consume the capacity to make anything else.
Reworking your own successful material is the lowest-risk option available and it’s a cost that doesn’t appear for years. Every hour spent producing a variation is an hour not spent finding the next thing, and the capacity to find new things atrophies with disuse. The catalogue isn’t the asset. Whatever produced the catalogue is the asset, and it’s a set of habits instead of a set of titles. Watch for the point where your new work is mostly responding to your old work. That’s the signal to write something with no relationship to any of it.
Should you watch Disney Live Action Remakes?
Watch Pete’s Dragon, which nobody saw, and The Jungle Book, which used the technology as a reason for existing. Skip the rest and put on the animated originals. I rate the program a 3 because two good films can’t redeem a pile of expensive tracings that strip out the drawing and fill in every gap, and both of those changes make the stories worse. The originals are sitting right there, and they win every comparison.
