Disney’s live action remakes. If you’re anything like me, the very words send a cold chill down your spine. Reactions range from mild excitement to widespread disgust. However, Disney doesn’t seem ready to stop remaking their old animated movies.
First, let’s take a look at how Disney has become what it is today.
Walt Disney, the man behind the magic, began his career in animation with the Kansas City Film Ad Company in Missouri in 1920. After completing the film ‘Alice in Cartoonland’ the following year, Disney filed for bankruptcy and left for hollywood. When the film turned out to be a surprise hit, Disney reopened in Hollywood with the help of his brother Roy. The Kansas City team soon joined the Disneys in California, and soon the public began to see the characters who are staples in popular culture today - Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto and Goofy.
It was in 1934 that Disney took his riskiest step, going into the unknown to create “Snow White and the seven dwarves” (1937). Through this film, Disney revolutionized the industry and proved animation’s effectiveness as a vehicle for feature-length stories. The style mimicked that of a live action film, standing out in stark contrast to the others in this era. The company went on with its highs and lows, creating movies that are still watched today. Disney took its first jump into live action movies with “Mary Poppins” in 1964, and remains one of the studio’s greatest achievements.
After Walt and his older brother Roy died in 1971, Disney began to decline. Michael Eisner took over the company in 1984.
Although Eisner now owned the company, his disinterest in the creative aspect of production is, surprisingly, one of the reasons the company has become what it is today. It allowed one of the saving graces of the company, Howard Ashman, to have creative freedom in what it did, making him primarily responsible for the Disney we know and love. The Disney Renaissance kicked off with ‘The Little Mermaid’ in 1989. Ashman was one of the biggest influences in the company who gave the film what it needed for its monumental success. Ashman was afforded far more creative input than your standard lyricist, and became something of a shadow director on the Disney projects he undertook. He unfortunately suffered from AIDS, which cut short his career.
It was one of the biggest shareholders of the company, the Bass family, who brought in Eisner from Paramount Pictures as CEO of the company in 1984. I want to draw attention to this point, as this is where I think everything started to go wrong.
Here is a statement Walt Disney made regarding his work:
“I don’t make movies to make money, I make money so I can make more movies.”
In contrast, here is something Eisner, the man now running the company Walt Disney spent his whole life building, is known for saying:
“We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement.”
Walt Disney was never a rich man by Hollywood standards, largely because he valued perfection more than profits. His ethos is fundamentally different to that of Eisner, whose main goal was to make profits.
It is here that I would like to introduce you to a commonly accepted capitalist ideology - companies should be run in the interest of its shareholders. According to this theory, since they essentially own the company, their incomes vary based on how well the company is doing. When the company goes bankrupt, they lose out the most.
However, this is where we look at the concept of limited liability. This means that a shareholder can only lose the amount of money that they have put into a company. This significantly shifts the way we should be viewing the role of the shareholder. Adam Smith himself, patron of free market capitalism, was against limited liability, saying that it “cannot well be expected that [shareholders] would watch over [money] with the same vigilance with which the partners in a private company frequently watch over their own”, as partners face unlimited liability. It shows that their primary interest would be to boost the company’s profits, regardless of whether or not it would benefit the company, or the economy, in the long run. It could potentially negatively affect the company as there would be less profit for reinvestment in the company.
This is reflected in the increased focus on live-action remakes by the Disney company recently. As one of my friends succinctly put it, “I honestly don't see the point of remakes, do we really need them?” The era of the live action remakes, which really began in what I fondly refer to as the Creatively Dry Era, is where the company decided having metatextual commentary on films decades old was better than producing new stories, new characters and new plots.
All disney is doing is selling their remakes to young adults, now probably with their own kids, showing them movies that would have played central parts in their childhood. They depend on the idea that their target audience of kids who grew up in the Disney Renaissance would want to share the experience with their own families. However, no one really walks into a live-action remake thinking that it would be better than its animated counterpart. At best, the expectation is “maybe it’ll be okay” or a simple plea for the lead actor/actress to be attractive enough to keep their interests peaked through the movie.
When we look at the profits made by the company in these live actions, it's clear that many did do well, with ‘Beauty and the Beast’ starring Emma Watson and ‘Aladdin’ with Will Smith and Mena Massoud, both of which were box office hits. However, the remake that strayed the furthest from its animated predecessor is objectively the one that has done the worst. The original animated Mulan of 1999 had a budget of $90 million, and was an overwhelming box office hit, making $304.3 million. Adjusted for inflation, the movie made $491.01 million in 2021 dollars. Conversely, 2020’s Mulan had a budget of $200 million, but only made $70 million in the box office.
Mulan’s 2020 remake took many many “creative liberties”. One of the things the film highlighted was that Mulan was a member of the proto-Mongolic Xianbei people. This is ironic as China is attacking Mongolian cultural identity, alongside the imprisonment and “re-education” of Uighurs in Xinjiang. The remake stripped the movie of most of the well beloved moments of the 1998 animated movie. The wisecracking dragon Mushu, our bisexual icon Li Shang, the music (one of the main reasons the disney renaissance succeeded the way it did), the struggle Mulan had to go through to finally achieve success, and how she defeated the enemy using her intelligence were elements of the original movie that boosted it into widespread success.
As far as I can see, one of the main points of the remakes is to provide metatextual comments on past disney classics. However, the company seems to have forgotten that these films’ target audience was young children. The movies were made to inspire them to be kind, to be compassionate, to be brave, to fight for what they believe in and to not give up. It is this fundamental message that the Disney company has forgotten about. In their search to present more “feminist” characters, they have long forgotten the core meaning of being feminist, which is wanting political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.
In Disney’s flailing grasps at cashing in on nostalgia, they have degraded the company’s name. Making movies with clearly exorbitant budgets, hiring some of the most well known actors and actresses, but losing the core essences of the stories they aim to remake.
Bibliography
“Disney Company - Live-Action Films and Later Decline | Britannica.” In Encyclopædia Britannica, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Disney-Company/Live-action-films-and-later-decline.
“Do We Have to Create Art? - JoePulizzi.com.” JoePulizzi.com, January 16, 2020. https://www.joepulizzi.com/news/do-we-have-to-create-art/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWe%20have%20no%20obligation%20to,to%20make%20some%20significant%20statement..
“Walt Disney - IMDb.” IMDb, 2021. https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000370/quotes.
Robinson, Joanna. “Inside the Tragedy and Triumph of Disney Genius Howard Ashman.” Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair, April 20, 2018. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/04/howard-ashman-documentary-disney-beauty-and-the-beast-little-mermaid-aladdin-alan-menken.
Chang, Ha-Joon. 2011. 23 things they don't tell you about capitalism. pp. 10-13
“$304.30 in 1998 → 2021 | Inflation Calculator.” In2013dollars.com, 2021. https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1998?amount=304.30.
Suyin Haynes. “The Controversial Origins of the Story behind Mulan.” Time. Time, September 4, 2020. https://time.com/5881064/mulan-real-history/.
Young, Jingan. “The Problem with Mulan: Why the Live-Action Remake Is a Lightning Rod for Controversy.” the Guardian. The Guardian, September 7, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/07/mulan-disney-live-action-remake-hong-kong-china.
“Merriam-Webster Dictionary.” Merriam-webster.com, 2021. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/feminism.
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