movies

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.

Good

Nowanna.

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.

People might want to take their kids to see a movie that they liked when they were a kid. Or just go see it themselves for nostalgia. Live action remakes aren't going to be as good as the original animated movie but they are a little twist on something familiar.

The original animated version of Moana came out 10 years ago. The kids who may have loved this movie ten years ago don't have their own children yet, and haven't reached the age where they're all that nostalgic for something from when they were a kid. People in their early 20s want to experience new things, they aren't at an age where they want to revisit something from their youth.

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.

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.

So far all their live remakes have flopped, why do they continue this shit

We. Don’t. Need. To. Live. Action. Every. FUCKING. Thing.

We need a live action Jetsons on ice.

• Makes an live-action version
• It's 90-95% CGI

What's the point?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

Good

Pray this is the end of this live action shit

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.

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.

Disney: Every one of our animated films requires a half-hearted live-action remake.

Everyone else: No.

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?!?!

The hierarchy of power in the live-action remake universe is about to change.