Why We're Stuck In An Endless Hell of Live Action Remakes

Tansy Gardam breaks down the phenomenon of live action remakes.

He just look so tired. Image credit: Universal.

Today I’m pleased to share this brief history of live action remakes by Tansy Gardam. If you enjoy the piece, check out Tansy’s excellent podcast, Going Rogue. -David Chen

When it was released in 2010, How To Train Your Dragon was a kinda risky proposition for Dreamworks: it was based on a beloved but not Harry Potter-level book series, and the film had been majorly overhauled less than 17 months before release, with a page one rewrite and complete redesign of the titular dragon. With a $165 million budget, it aimed for sincerity and wonder where other Dreamworks films packed their scripts with jokes, and it paid off, making nearly $500 million at the box office and launching a franchise that had earned more than $1.5 billion in box office receipts alone.

And like all good animated films, it could not be left alone. Not when there’s money on the table.

“Barry Jenkins’ Mufasa is going to make a billion dollars” is a sentence that would have prompted a welfare check in 2016, but here we are. After more than a decade of live action remakes, the cinematic landscape had been unalterably changed by sludgy, creatively low effort “live action” remakes of animated classics that are both shockingly expensive and shockingly profitable. The strategy has now spread beyond the Disney castle and into other studios, and as animation back catalogs are steadily depleted we’re approaching a world where animated films are devoured by the live action remake machine the moment they’re released, like Saturn devouring his children. 

And as this trend shows no sign of stopping, it’s worth looking back at how it started, and the musical chairs at the top of Disney that kept it going.

Burton in a CG Wonderland

1994’s The Jungle Book was Disney’s first attempt at a live action remake of their animated back catalog, followed two years later by the far more successful 101 Dalmatians in 1996. Both of these films had to significantly rewrite their stories to get around the limitations of live action filmmaking. Their human stars had to carry the story since their animals couldn’t speak, and while Jungle Book did fine, the cuteness of more than 300 puppies was rewarded with more than $300 million at the box office for Dalmatians. But while a sequel was made (the underrated 102 Dalmatians), it didn’t kick off a trend.

Image credit: Disney.

The real Live Action Remake craze started more than a decade later, when the former Disney Studios Chief who had overseen Dalmatians, Joe Roth, came back to his old company with a pitch: a radical new take on Alice in Wonderland, written by Beauty and the Beast screenwriter Linda Woolverton. The project was greenlit, the script was written and director Tim Burton came on after the first draft. Alice in Wonderland became the seventh film ever to earn more than a billion dollars at the box office, but it was also starkly different to the spate of live action remakes it would spawn — Alice was based much more on Lewis Carroll’s work than the 1951 Disney film, and it is far more of a Tim Burton film than a Disney one.

Alice also came during a Disney Studios shake-up, as the phenomenally named chairman Dick Cook was replaced by the less fun named Rich Ross. Ross did not last long — he was fired after two and a half years — but during his tenure, he greenlit both Maleficent and Cinderella, really kicking off the Disney Live Action Remake slate. 

Both Maleficent and Cinderella started off much more in the vein of Alice in Wonderland — Maleficent was a spiritual successor to Alice, written by Woolverton and initially intended to be directed by Tim Burton, while Cinderella started out as a swashbuckling adventure written by The Devil Wears Prada writer Aline Brosh McKenna. Neither project ended up as intended — Burton dropped out of Maleficent, and Cinderella changed writer and director after yet another change in Disney Studios management, with Alan Horn replacing Ross as the head of the studio.

Horn was the one who stressed the Disney of “Disney’s Cinderella”, approving a larger budget for the sake of spectacle and sparkle. Horn also greenlit Jon Favreau’s 2016 remake of The Jungle Book, and pushed for Favreau to use the technology developed on Avatar and Life of Pi to create the titular jungle digitally rather than shooting on location or trying to fit the story around its live action limitations, like Stephen Sommers’ 1994 version had. Between The Jungle Book and Cinderella, a new Live Action Remake house style was established: rather than radically rewriting the story, like Alice and Maleficent, these films updated some of the film’s imagery and politics, but otherwise stuck close to the animated original and used CGI to recreate magical, impossible images that had once been only possible through animation.

Same Film, Different CG

This new strategy was best encapsulated in 2017’s Beauty and the Beast, a slavish remake of the 1991 film which strip-mined the animated film for material while taking none of the charm. The film had been in the works for years when Alan Horn arrived at Disney, and for a good portion of development, it had been a serious, dramatic project instead of a musical. It was Horn “who championed the idea of owning the Disney of it all”, and pushed to include the songs from the animated film, along with additional songs that had been cut from the animated film for time and a new, dire solo for the Beast that seems to have been added for the sole purpose of getting a Best Original Song nomination at the Academy Awards (it didn’t).

Beauty and the Beast was the first live action remake since Alice to make a billion dollars, and with that success, the new Disney remake house style was set in stone. It was followed by Aladdin, The Lion King, Mulan and The Little Mermaid, as well as less seen, direct to Disney Plus projects like Lady and the Tramp, Pinocchio and Peter Pan and Wendy. There are the odd outliers like Cruella and Dumbo that sing more to the Alice in Wonderland hymn sheet of trying to reinvent the stories rather than just update them, but they have mostly fallen out of fashion. With half a dozen more remakes in production and development, Disney are at genuine risk of running out of animated films to remake – next year’s Lilo and Stitch is the first remake to be based on a film from this century, but it will be knocked out of the park a few months later by Moana, coming out less than eight months after the animated Moana 2 with The Rock once again playing demi-god Maui, in person this time.

The reason why Disney continues to make these movies is simple: they make money. Loads of it. They’re a safe bet for families at the cinema and the spate of Disney Renaissance remakes also brought in millennials with a disposable income and no kids. They carry less risk than original films, much like the animated films which used familiar fairytales as their scaffold and selling point. Disney exec Sean Bailey has also attributed some of the success to an underserved female audience, saying in 2017 that, “We were seeing Marvel and its superheroes with a very male focus and the same with Star Wars…There was opportunity with the female audience, and we had a lot of big characters here that we consider to be ours. Marvel has Iron Man, Captain America and Thor; we have Cinderella, Snow White and Belle. Pairing those characters with great live-action talent and technology, something that Walt always aspired to, with technology that has moved so far forward, just seemed a smart way to go.”

But that pairing of technology and live action talent is the very root of the problem with these live action remakes. Animation was once a way to achieve visuals that simply could not be executed in live action — cartoonish action, magical transformations, singing lions, bold sweeps of color that captured emotions rather than just physical reality. Animation was, in many ways, the visual equivalent of a musical, where when you can’t express yourself through speech, you do so through song and dance, except animation captured things we could not express through color, scale, exaggeration and impressionism. Modern computer generated animation has the ability to be photorealistic, and actively chooses not to: in the past few years we’ve seen an explosion of hand-drawn textures returning to animation with films like Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and The Wild Robot.

But Live Action Remakes take the opposite approach — they take images that were originally exaggerated and evocative, and flatten them down into a “realistic” look that cannot, by definition, capture the magic of the original. In order to match a human actor in a scene, the aesthetic must be limited to realism by that human: Dan Stevens’ CGI Beast had a far more limited range of movement and expression than his animated predecessor because he was acting opposite Emma Watson. When Aladdin’s Genie is a real Will Smith instead of a manic animated Robin Williams jumping from form to form, he loses his magic. When you make a realistic CGI warthog, meerkat and lion cub sing together, you’re stuck with the inconsistent scale and tiny mouths of the creatures you’re slavishly recreating, and you can’t put them on the bright backgrounds of the animated film, let alone shine a spotlight on Simba when he finally joins the song. Possibly the funniest example of this is the song Under the Sea from last year’s The Little Mermaid, which cut the underwater brass band for realism but still listed each musical creature in the lyrics. There is an extra irony to films like The Lion King and Mufasa being branded “live action” remakes, when they are in fact another form of animation that strives for the photorealistic look that most CG animation actively cast off more than a decade ago.

There are a myriad of other reasons for Disney to continue with its live action remake machine — the ongoing merchandising, the increased brand value of characters, and the lack of residuals that need to be paid to the writers and directors of the animated films are just a few. In a world where the once lucrative home media landscape has been decimated by streaming, merchandise is one of the few reliable ways to make money out of existing films. The VFX industry is also far less unionised than the rest of Hollywood, and the ability to digitally light a digital set full of digital props rather than pay IATSE members to do those jobs in the real world has its own appeal to the bean counters of Hollywood. And while these films are creatively low effort (if not creatively bankrupt), they are increasingly expensive exercises, regularly costing more than $150 million. Last year’s Little Mermaid was the tenth highest grossing film of the year, bringing in almost $600 million worldwide, but it may not have even been profitable (the film’s budget is disputed).

But what makes money at Disney will soon be noticed by other companies. I will die screaming that Spiderman: No Way Home is a low effort, poorly paced remake of the animated Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse. Dreamworks, once the cool kids to Disney’s staid old institution, are now dipping their toes in the live action remake pool with How To Train Your Dragon, and the teaser trailer shows all the hallmarks of a disappointing live action remake: shot for shot recreations of the animated film with blander lighting, CGI creatures with a restricted range of motion to match their more limited human counterparts, celebrity voice actors reprising their role in live action (Gerard Butler this time). They’ve even managed to speedrun the “controversies” of Disney’s The Little Mermaid by casting Nico Parker (daughter of Thandiwe Newton and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again director Ol Parker) as female lead Astrid — the usual uproar from the internet’s worst sewer dweller has conveniently ignored the fact that, despite being blonde in the animated film, the character was previously played by America Ferrera.

Like most Hollywood trends, the only thing that will kill Live Action Remakes is diminishing returns. The superhero bubble has well and truly burst, but we still have a years-long backlog of films that were greenlit before the collapse. Live Action Remakes are only just now hitting their Marvel Phase 3 era, as other companies hustle to make their own money-printing machines, even though the quality of the films that inspired the trend has already slipped.

We’ve got a long way to go, and a lot worse to get. -Tansy Gardam

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Other Stuff David Chen Has Made

• In case you missed it, I reviewed Gladiator II for my personal YouTube channel. Check out my thoughts below.

• Over on Decoding TV, we discussed the premiere of Dune: Prophecy, which has so much stuff going on that it’s hard to say if the show will be great.

• [PAID ONLY] On my personal Patreon, we discussed the new film version of Wicked, which I was a huge fan of, plus what else you should put on your Thanksgiving watchlist. Listen here.