Most of the films that Disney has been releasing recently are live actions. Almost all-important characters of the studio have received – or are going to receive for the next years – an adaptation.
The company started investing in this kind of production in 2014 after seeing live action takes on classic pictures like 101 Dalmatians (1996) and Alice in Wonderland (2010) make success in the box office. Maleficent starring Angelina Jolie was the first official production of the live action era, and due to its immense hype, bringing a new perspective to a famous animation villain, it did not take long for other characters to be portrayed in this style.
However, what should have been an original idea is starting to look like a repeated way of making cinema maintained only by the fact these productions still bring a lot of money to the studio. And the question people keep asking is how long will the live action era last?
From a glorious begging to a flop
At the beginning of the 2010’s decade, people could not stop talking about Disney’s project of bringing a new modern version to their famous stories. The idea consisted of creating a new perspective of side characters, especially villains, like Maleficent and Cruella (2021), transforming them into an anti-hero. The studio invested as well in making new stories inspired by the originals without missing the animation essence, for example Alice in Wonderland directed by Tim Burton.
Moved by the hype, the first Disney princess to receive an official live action was Cinderella (2015) followed by Beauty and the Beast (2017). Both had a super cast – respectively Lily James and Emma Watson playing the main characters -, a massive box office of more than US$ 1 billion dollars for the second one and indications at the Oscar’s for costume design.
The scenario looked good, as fans were asking for more and the cinema specialists were recognizing an excellent job in the new studio’s productions. But everything started to change in 2020 when the hype went down. Mulan came out directly to Disney+, and they could not replicate the animation essence. Script, songs, nostalgic scenes, and even important characters, like Mushu, were cut from the movie’s final version to adequate the new format. The fans weren’t really happy, but it wouldn’t be the only and last time a live action became a flop among the main audience.
Peter Pan and Wendy and Pinocchio received lots of critics for their lack of personality and imagination, as these films changed the main script to turn the story into a more realistic version than the animation. Disney is well known for their imaginative stories about magical and fantastic events, changing that, is killing the studio’s reputation and history.
By investing massively and exclusively inline-action remakes instead of creating new stories, Disney is losing quality and audience, bringing attention to releases through real polemics and not fantastical expositions.
So, what comes next?
Snow White, which is expected to be in theaters in 2024, is already attracting hate from the public. It seems the first Disney princess to ever have her own animation is not receiving a live action that respects the original story. Press leaks and interviews with the cast and the producers confirmed many changes in the script, including the seven dwarfs’ substitution for magical creatures, the casting of a Latin actress to play the main character and the focus that Snow White will not need a prince to save her or even to live her happily ever after.
Despite justifying the changes, as the world has changed a lot since the animation’s release in 1950 and story had to be adequate to nowadays perspective, Disney couldn’t explain why they are still producing live actions if their intention is to change the whole tale and use the famous characters we are already familiar with to create new stories, which are not capable of repeating the emblematic studio’s essence.
The main explanation that comes up is the need for a representative in studio films. Instead of creating new characters to represent different people around the world, their intention is to change the original nationality of existing characters, provoking more hate than acceptance. Disney has more than ten princesses, none of them is Latin. In Encanto, they honored Colombian culture, making references to the magical universe written by Gabriel García Marquez, the studio made this production a real example of representative’ s importance. It is not about giving voice to a particular society because it is mandatory, there is a Disney way of turning a kid’s experience into something above them special representing them.
A bunch of new films are in production for the next few years, and it is expected most of them will continue to follow this pattern consolidated recently by the studio. Like generic mass production has affected cinema in general, now it’s affecting Disney and the live actions era. As long as these movies still make a decent profit, they will keep making live actions, yet fans do not need them anymore.
The article above was edited by Fernanda Miki Tsukase.
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