I'm not sure what I think of this trend. Somehow I remain skeptical, despite Disney having done a great job so far with this concept.
I was trying to figure out where it started -- there was 1996's live action 101 Dalmations, but it didn't start any kind of trend. No, the recent phenomenon is new, and I think it goes back only eight years, to Amy Adam's generic 2007 princess movie, "Enchanted," which, while not a remake of a specific movie, was basically "What if we took a generic princess fairy tale and brought it into real life?" The movie was decent, a dry run perhaps. But somewhere at Disney it caught on.
2010 gave us Alice in Wonderland, a rather inspired little sequel to the 1951 classic, which put it more in line with Spielberg's non-disney Peter Pan sequel "Hook", perhaps not the true remake as we're starting to see now. Still, they did a pretty good job bringing the absurdity that is Lewis Carroll's Wonderland off the drawing board and onto real film.
A few months later, still in 2010, someone decided that The Sorcerer's Apprentice classic short from 1940's Fantasia deserved a live action tribute, but it wasn't a remake, and Nicholas Cage and Jay Baruchel couldn't help it any.
I will give Oz the Great and Powerful brief mention here - the Sam Raimi movie was charming, but not good, and wasn't remaking or even a sequel of a cartoon, but somehow it seems to fit in this line. While these few movies are not in themselves remakes of cartoons, they somehow seem to pave the way for what is happening
now:
Maleficent (2014) - Despite the critics, this was a financially successful little retelling of Sleeping Beauty 'as it really happened, rather than the story you were originally told.'
Cinderella (2015) - A very well done direct remake of the original classic that managed to get the critics onboard, too.
Already in the pipeline:
The Jungle Book (2016),
Beauty & the Beast (2017),
Dumbo (?! - Burton is directing, so maybe the absurdity of the idea can be matched by the absurdity of the director and make something ok), and announced yesterday,
Mulan.
If you look into the details of any of these remakes, they're not taking them lightly - these aren't low-cost cash-ins. My gut-check thinks, "The originals were great. They don't need remaking." But so far the remakes don't seem to replace the originals, but rather complement them. They seem to be made for me, as an adult, to get to rewatch a childhood classic in a new light, close enough to the original to bring back all the nostalgia, but remade with just enough added depth to keep my more refined adult tastes interested.
Can they work? I'm sure there will be some flops there, but somehow, I think they just might pull most of them off.
To forestall the inevitable invalid criticism:
- No, nobody's running out of ideas. You see that stated every time someone makes a sequel or remakes a classic. Disney releases far more original properties now than they ever did when Walt was alive. It's not that they have to remake things because they have nothing else to do - they are remaking things
in addition to making lots of things that are new.
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