Seitz: As is often the case with the recent Disney remakes, this one seems to adhere to the same misconception that affects the rest of the film industry, particularly where science fiction adventures, superhero narratives, and fairy tales are concerned: that if it’s animated, i.e. a “cartoon,” it’s somehow not a “real movie,” and thus not worthy of the automatic respect bestowed upon the most expensive and heavily promoted motion pictures, and not as validating to the people who’ve paid to see it. All of which is also strange, considering how CGI-dependent these sorts of movies are, even when they’re trying to make the mountains and buildings and tigers and parakeets made of ones and zeroes look as “real” as possible.
Bile Fascination: A few moviegoers have admitted that the only reason they paid full price for the live-action remakes was just to see how bad they were. Aladdin (2019) became perhaps the most notable example of this, when Genie's Unintentional Uncanny Valley redesign underwent Memetic Mutation that made it a huge target for mockery.
Broken Base: While many people love the live-action Disney remakes for the depth they consider they bring to the older Disney films (oftentimes disliking them for what they see as being corny, outdated and having slightly sexist/racist elements), there are many who absolutely hate the live-action Disney remakes for what they consider to be soulless imitations of the movies that they loved for years, and feel like Disney is running out of ideas and are just producing them to rake in money via nostalgia pandering. They also feel that it's another attempt to minimize 2D's influence in current Disney, considering how most of the remakes are of handdrawn animated films, with the upcoming Moana remake being the only one of a CGI-animated film.
Critic-Proof: A mild example. While the remakes in general have been given a mostly positive reception by critics despite an emerging consensus online that the films have overstayed their welcome* Only Dumbo, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Pinocchio (as well as the twoAlice in Wonderland and Maleficentmovies, if one counts Live-Action Adaptations that aren't straight-up remakes) have gotten critic scores on Rotten Tomatoes designating them as "Rotten" and also hold below average Metacritic scores, but Cinderella, The Jungle Book (2016), Pete's Dragon, Christopher Robin, Beauty and the Beast, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Cruella, Peter Pan & Wendy, and The Little Mermaid have been more well-received, although Metacritic's professional reviewer scores for Lady and the Tramp, Cruella, and The Little Mermaid are a bit more mixed, even the ones that are much more widely considered to be polarizing still end up being pretty successful at the box office, primarily because of the nostalgic value attached to them. Of note, Alice in Wonderlandnote Tomatometer: 51%. Metascore: 53, Aladdinnote Tomatometer: 57%. Metascore: 53, and The Lion Kingnote Tomatometer: 52%. Metascore: 55 were able to pull in more than $1 billion worldwide. The Lion King in particular scored, at the time, the biggest opening weekend for an animated movie with a domestic total of $191 million (also breaking this record in its first weekend internationally at $246 million), and then went on to become the highest-grossing animated movie ever made. That being said, not all of the remakes have been smash hits. Alice Through the Looking Glass and Mulan bombed, while Dumbo, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and The Little Mermaid barely broke even. Pete's Dragon and Christopher Robin were modest hits, but not to the extent of other remakes.
Epileptic Trees: A lot of theories about the "Disney Universe" come to fruition with these remakes, considering even though most of the time periods don't match, the movies still can be considered to all exist in the same universe due to similar aesthetics, writing, etc.
TRON fans are not pleased on how Disney has approved of over 20 live-action remakes while they're left in the dark because of Tomorrowland bombing at the box office. The failure of Sanzaru Games produced RUN/r, which also caused Sly Cooper fans to resent the remakes* Sanzaru developed Thieves in Time, which most fans disowned for its ending, did not help.
Star Wars fans also have some resentment after more live-action remakes were approved in the wake of Solo failing as well, and several Star Wars projects were also canceled or indefinitely postponed.
A small fandom rivalry has emerged between Disney fans who adore the remakes for the nostalgic value and the fans who adore Disney but really dislike the remakes, thinking they're just a continuation of a "creatively bankrupt" era that began with Bob Iger where Disney's preoccupied less with producing original, groundbreaking animated movies and more with selling and focusing attention on franchises, sequels, Star Wars and Marvel-related content although even they're likely to be Screwed by the Network in favor of live-action remakes, as shown with Solo. There's also the fact that traditional animation at Disney is mostly dead, which sours the opinion of many fans — though Jennifer Lee, the head at Walt Disney Animation Studios after John Lasseter left, has said they're open to doing 2D animated films again in the future, so there is hope.
Fleeting Demographic Rule: Being a series of remakes produced by the same company as the originals, this could be said to apply to all the films, but the one that got real backlash for Disney supposedly running out of ideas was the announcement of a remake of Moana, which came out less than a decade before said announcement.
The films have gotten criticism for their occasional instances of Stunt Casting from the very beginning, but it didn't lead to major backlash until a few years down the road. In The Jungle Book (2016), many critics felt that Bill Murray's performance as Baloo was the weak link in an otherwise strong film — partly because Murray had minimal experience in singing and voice-acting, and partly because Baloo's personality (as a laid-back wiseass) was mostly just a riff on Murray's actual public persona. Most of them were willing to forgive it, though, since newcomer Neel Sethi's acclaimed performance as Mowgli largely made up for it. Beauty and the Beast (2017) similarly got some flack for casting Emma Watson as Belle, since Watson had minimal experience in singing, making her a questionable choice for a character with so many musical numbers. While her acting was widely praised, critics generally felt that her singing was one of the weakest parts of the film, which was all the more glaring since she was the protagonist. But when Aladdin (2019) cast Will Smith in the role of the Genie, the choice proved so unpopular that it was already generating bad publicity long before the film actually came out. Not only was Smith such an instantly recognizable public figure that his presence came off as distracting, many critics and viewers felt that his distinctively contemporary style of comedy was horribly ill-suited to an epic period fantasy. It didn't help that the Genie was a far more iconic character than either Baloo or Belle — and unlike them, he was already permanently associated with an iconic performance by a completely different actor. Taken alongside the films' previous casting choices, Smith's performance has led to the accusation that the filmmakers care more about snagging big-name actors for publicity's sake than appropriately casting characters.
Beauty and the Beast (2017) and The Lion King (2019) proved to be highly divisive films, in part for making changes to the movies they were adapted from that many fans saw as unnecessary. While those changes wouldn't necessarily be bad by themselves, some saw them as gratuitous pandering to "bad-faith critics" who had trivial complaints about the originals. note Just to name a few: Beauty and the Beast goes out of its way to justify the Beast's servants being transfigured alongside him, it explains why the local villagers don't remember who the Prince is, and it gives Gaston and the Beast Freudian Excuses to "explain" their personalities; The Lion King inserts a scene of Nala sneaking away from the Pridelands to find Simba, explaining how she ended up in the jungle with him. To a degree, this was also true of Cinderella (2015) and The Jungle Book (2016), which were much more widely acclaimed. Among other things, Cinderella gave Lady Tremaine additional backstory to explain her hatred of Ella (which not everyone liked), and The Jungle Book changed King Louie into a Gigantopithecus to placate people who complained about an orangutan being in India (never mind the fact that Gigantopithecus are extinct). But even if those small changes weren't exactly necessary, they were easier to tolerate because they were mostly overshadowed by larger changes that actually made for stronger stories: Cinderella gave the Prince, previously a Flat Character, considerable Character Development to make his relationship with Ella more meaningful, while The Jungle Book added a great deal of actual drama to a story that was originally pretty light on emotion. Furthermore, both Cinderella and Jungle Book were released nearly 50 years after the original animated movies debuted, so the numerous changes made sense to keep up with modern tastes and societal changes. Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King's changes, on the other hand, mostly just added additional weight to the movies rather than actually making them better, since the originals already had well-paced stories with rich themes and strong characters, and there wasn't a lot of room for improvement. Not to mention that they were based on films that were less than thirty years old when they were remade (both having been released in the 1990s), and generally agreed to have aged pretty well—making the changes seem even less necessary.
The Lion King (2019) was criticized for its over-realism sucking out the movie's emotions and soul. The use of hyper-realistic CGI can be traced back to The Jungle Book (2016) (both films being directed by Jon Favreau). However, this wasn't viewed as a problem in The Jungle Book because the animators gave the characters facial expressions that conveyed emotions, which, alongside the amount of changes to the story compared to the original, gave it some degree of its own magic. The Lion King, on the other hand, felt too much like a Shot-for-Shot Remake to many critics, where the characters had very little emotions in their facial expressions, sending the animals down the Unintentional Uncanny Valley in the process of them seeming empty.
It's Not Supposed to Win Oscars: The criticism the remakes get for basically repeating the plot points that moviegoing audiences who grew up with the animated originals are very likely to know by heart has, in some cases, been met with defenses invoking the "it's just for kids" excuse — arguing either that the remakes are geared toward nostalgic adults who want a faithful recreation of the emotional experiences they had when they were children watching the animated originals, or that the remakes are simply meant to be for the new generation of children. Of course, the movies that these remakes directly borrow from have won Oscars (one of which was even nominated for Best Picture, which is no small feat) and are widely regarded as having memorable characters and thematically resonant stories, so it's only natural that more critical fans would go into their remakes expecting this same level of quality.
It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: While still a mostly beloved approach by general moviegoing audiences due to its nostalgic appeal, the fact that the live-action remakes created from Cinderella (2015) on bear many similarities to the original animated movies is also the most common complaint reviewers and some fans have brought up with them. Some, most notably the aforementioned Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast (2017), and especiallyThe Lion King (2019), are even point-by-point rehashes of the originals, with the few things that they do add tending to not actually contribute anything to the plot.
Facebook comments around the 2010's had people replying on how Disney will remake all of its animated films in live-action, even unpopular ones such as Chicken Little, impossible to adapt films such as Wreck-It Ralph, and unreleased ones, given there are 55+ movies, and over 20 confirmed remakes as of 2019.
"I love the part where [X] says [X]. Gave me chills." Explanation For trailers of The Little Mermaid (2023) and Peter Pan & Wendy, comments quickly began claiming the remakes had their characters saying a famous line from another movie before following up with saying how it gave them chills to hear it.
Maleficent may officially be treated like it's the first Disney live-action remake, but 18 years before that, another animated Disney film came to real-life: 101 Dalmatians (1996), with Glenn Close as Cruella De Vil. It's a well-known film that became one of the highest grossing movies of 1996 and even got a sequel, but it tends to get forgotten when talking about remakes. This is probably because 101 Dalmatians was a one off remake, rather than a trend starter.
The Jungle Book also got a remake in 1994, two years before Dalmatians
of Aladdin (2019):Seitz: As is often the case with the recent Disney remakes, this one seems to adhere to the same misconception that affects the rest of the film industry, particularly where science fiction adventures, superhero narratives, and fairy tales are concerned: that if it’s animated, i.e. a “cartoon,” it’s somehow not a “real movie,” and thus not worthy of the automatic respect bestowed upon the most expensive and heavily promoted motion pictures, and not as validating to the people who’ve paid to see it. All of which is also strange, considering how CGI-dependent these sorts of movies are, even when they’re trying to make the mountains and buildings and tigers and parakeets made of ones and zeroes look as “real” as possible.