I just want to have a discussion about this. All of the remakes and reboots hollywood has done throughout its history have always been a way of just making money by putting all the money on “sure” bets, things that producers already know people like because they were successful before, but there’s something exceptionally soulless about the Disney reboots.
There seems to be no true desire to introduce a new generation to stories they weren’t familiar with, but instead a desire to just rewrite disneys entire catalog to be presented in a new aesthetic. It’s a homogenization of film to a single set of techniques and looks. Capitalism is directly strangling creativity and it’s being successful enough that it’s seemingly never going to stop. I mean. They’re rebooting movies that aren’t even 20 years old yet at this point. There are people in college seeing promos for reboots of movies their parents took them to as kids.
It’s creating this environment where we’re all stuck in this moment that already passed. The media we consume now was written in response to events that happened already, have passed us by, and can no longer be addressed. Any attempts to make new media that meet our current moment are stifled by studios who just… Don’t care.
I feel you.
It isn’t that I’m against the idea of remakes and reboots. Especially for technology improvements that can make a given story work better. But when a company is just rehashing their old material as a cash grab, and that’s what Disney does, why bother? They never give a new take on things in any useful way. They don’t really reimagine the old stories into a new version, they just retread their previous version of a fairy tale. Even when it was a new fairy tale, like the Lion King.
Which, it isn’t like the Lion King was exactly all-new, but it was at least an original Disney version of those ideas.
Tangent aside, Disney has the money, the people, and the draw to create film history the way they gained their reputation as a film studio. But they don’t. And it’s just sad.
Totally! I’m not trying to be an old man talking on how things used to be better back in my day. I think there is genuine value in looking at a good story that people liked because it fit a moment, recognizing that the moment has changed, and remaking that story with some adjustments to fit the new moment better. For example, look at how Godzilla, a film about Japanese Nuclear anxiety following WWII has never fully exited the zeitgeist. It’s been rebooted at least 4 times now, but each reboot offers something prior versions didn’t to the current moment, while still maintaining that core ethos of what resonated in the original film.
Meanwhile, what does the new Sleeping Beauty offer us that the old Sleeping Beauty didn’t? What was it about that movie that resonated with viewers back then that would resonate with viewers now? If you have answers to that question, you’re less cynical than I. I just see Disney going through a checklist and rebooting everything because that’s just what they’re doing. Further, how far are we out from a reboot of a recent reboot? When do we see a remake of the live action Alice in Wonderland remake that kicked off this whole horrible nightmare? It all leaves me with this sense of dread.
And further, yeah! Disney is filled with talented and creative people with ideas and stories. Why aren’t they telling them? It feels like Disney’s less interested in hiring creative people to make wonderful and creative things in the hopes that those wonderful and creative things will be their next big success story, and more like they just want to keep those creatives from making something else for people to consume. They don’t want any distractions from the Disney machine.
Maybe I’m wrong. I’d like to be. But Disney, the megacorp, terrifies me with its scope, scale, and power, and I worry what their propaganda power could be used for, or worse, what it is being used for.