Every new shot I see of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Disney’s upcoming live-action 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Little Mermaid remake replaces the one before it as the worst shot I’ve ever seen. And yesterday, Dwayne Johnson and Disney , a movie that's not yet seven years old. At this point, Disney is struggling to produce anything of artistic merit and, to make up for the lack of craft, is cannibalizing its backlog for recognizable names in hopes that brand recognition alone can get people to theaters.
The Little Mermaid movie looks really bad, replacing the vibrant colors of the original with a sludgy grayness that looks like it was exclusively shot using the natural light available on the seafloor. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Lion King seemed like an entirely unnecessary exercise when it came out, but at least then, the FX work was genuinely impressive. That film’s director, Jon Favreau, replicated the look of a Planet Earth documentary — which wasn’t a great fit for a musical, but was nice to look at in isolation. Little Mermaid director Rob Marshall seems to be getting the short end of the stick, and if the live-action remakes are dealing with the same problems as Disney-owned Marvel, likely with a rushed post-production pꦉipeline and overworked VFX workers. The results look awful.
Disney’s insistence on making remakes a pillar of its movie business alongside Marvel and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars has resulted in tons of talented filmmakers getting stuck making disposable dreck. Robert Zemeckis, who once made incredible popcorn movies like Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, directed the terrible Pinocchio remake for Disney+. Barry Jenkins, the brilliant Oscar-winning director behind Moonlight, is attachedไ to make a Lion King prequel. From Tim Burton to David Lowery, Craig Gillespie and Kenneth Branagh, Guy Ritchie and Marc Forster, real directors are devoting years of their lives to movies that only exist to generate nostalgia for earlier, better movies and then promptly get forgotten. Filmmakers at the early, middle, and late stages of their careers are working with Disney on movies that will only ever elicit a shrug. Jenkins’ Lion King prequel may be good, but the fact that a rising Academy Award-winning auteur’s best prospect for commercial work is a spin-off of a live-action Disney remake is a pretty damning indictment of the state of the industry.
Setting aside the effect Disney's remake factory is having on the creatives behind it, what is the House of Mouse giving to the next generation? Disney wasn't uncommercial in previous generations, obviously. One of my favorite series growing up, the Pirates of the Caribbean, was based on a theme park ride. But the craft was evident. Gore Verbinski brilliantly combined incredible practical sets and ships with best-in-class CGI that, in the case of Davy Jones, still looks unbelievably good today. Johnny Depp turned in the best performance of his career as Jack Sparrow, and earned an Oscar nomination for his work in Curse of the Black Pearl. Disney was doing the same thing — attempting to make a blockbuster franchise that synergized with its theme parks — but the creatives behind it had the budget and support to make a genuinely great summer movie.
We have nostalgia for whatever we loved as children, and there will be kids who love the live-action remakes of The Little Mermaid and Moana and Lilo & Stitch. But there are movies we love as children that have artistic merit and which, when we return to them as adults, reward the added attention and knowledge we bring. For me, that's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Lord of the Rings and Sam Raimi's first two 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man movies. They’re movies that captured my imagination completely in the early 2000s, but still impress me with their aesthetic beauty and craft today. There are plenty of movies, though, that I thought were good as a kid, but returned to as an adult only to see massive flaws. I recently threw on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3, which I hadn't seen since I was probably 11 or 12, and was shocked by how amateurish the script seemed.
With Top Gun: Maverick, Creed 3, John Wick: Chapter 4, and Avatar: The Way of Water (which is owned by Disney, but creatively controlled by James Cameron) we're seeing Hollywood return to giving audiences genuine spectacles, movies that look good and are worth seeing on the big screen. But with the live-action remakes, the recent MCU movies, and most of its Star Wars output, Disney is coasting on brand recognitio💛n. The lack of craftsmanship is going to catch up with it eventua💙lly.