It’s been three years since Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson announced that he and Disney were developing a live-action remake of “Moana,” as well as the fact that he would be returning to play the character Maui in the film.
Ever since Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” accidentally made $1 billion in 2010, we’ve been getting a new live-action remake of a Disney animated film almost every single year. I foolishly believed that after “Snow White” bombed embarrassingly hard, Disney would rethink their strategy when it comes to live-action remakes and maybe finally give up on them, and there were even rumors to corroborate that.
But that hope was very short-lived because a few months later, “Lilo and Stitch” made over $1 billion, and now we have a sequel to that remake in the works and more remakes of other films on the way. One of those remakes, of course, is “Moana.”
I’ll remind you, the original “Moana” is a film that just got a sequel a year and a half ago, and, by the time the remake releases, it won’t even be 10 years old. And it may surprise you that I actually fully believe the film will be good. But I only believe that because I love the original, and I do not have a doubt in my mind that this will be a full-on shot-for-shot remake of the original.
Does that mean I am excited for this film? Absolutely not. The idea of remaking a film that just got a sequel and whose life span does not even reach double digits yet is so remarkably lazy and greedy, I would laugh at it if I didn’t already expect this to happen.
Not to mention the only justification beyond money for making these was that people liked the idea of introducing their kids to the films they grew up with by taking them to see these new versions. But now they don’t even have that going for them. They have run out of classics of reasonable age to remake, so now they have moved on to films from 2010 or younger.
And I know for a fact that this film will make over $1 billion, because of course it will. Disney could release a movie of a painting of Mickey drying for 10 hours, and there will be die-hard Disney fanatics who will deposit their hard-earned cash into Disney’s pockets to see it.
And I worry that Disney will look at the billion dollars this film will undoubtedly make and then turn to their other films still in their infancy age-wise, with dollar signs in their eyes, and then, in a few years, will have an “Encanto” remake.
Bottom line, Disney is a greedy and soulless husk of its former self, and they know full well that no matter what they do, there will be people paying for their content. The gaps between original and remake have been getting drastically shorter over the years, and now they are basically going to start rereleasing the same exact films over and over and over again like clockwork.
As much as we say we hate live-action remakes, Disney just doesn’t care, because it will make oodles of money anyway. And, although I’d like to be mad that they keep coming and the films they’re remaking are getting younger and younger, I’m more disappointed than anything. But, again, at the end of the day, I can’t say I’m surprised.
