Why do directors feel the need to remake movies that have no reason to be remade?

Unfortunately this seems to be the the problem with the Walt Disney Classics collection, the first of the classics to be remade was 101 Dalmatians in 1996, the movie was met with massive success at the box office and it has since become one of the most beloved Disney films among fans, the main reasons that the 101 Dalmatians remake is so beloved is because not only did it correctly follow the source material but it also added new twists to the story, one of biggest differences is that the animals don’t talk, not only that but the casting was fantastic Cruella De vil was played by Glen Close and they could not have picked a better actress for the job, she manages to be threatening but still hilarious and over the top just like the original, the rest of the cast are great too but none are more memorable than Hugh Laurie and Mark Williams who played Jasper and Horace they are hilarious and by far the best part of the movie.

With the massive success of 101 Dalmatians we couldn’t wait for the future Disney remakes and so when Tim Burton announced that he was remaking Alice in Wonderland it created a lot of hype, and with an all star cast including Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter how could it possibly go wrong?

Well we didn’t exactly get the dark Alice in Wonderland remake we expected and instead we got this horrible excuse for a movie, it wasn’t sure if it was remake, a sequel or a retelling of the original story, it wasn’t weird enough and it kept trying to bring logic into what is supposed to be a world filled with nonsense and it was just awful, critics panned this movie for its bad casting, terrible CGI and lackluster story telling, unfortunately the movie was still successful which was probably due to it having Disney’s name to it and because of this not only is there going to be a sequel but other directors saw the movies success and started to remake all of the other Disney movies.

The next three movies to be released were Maleficent, Cinderella and most recently The Jungle Book, out of all three of the movies the only one I was really excited about was Maleficent because it was advertised as the story about how Maleficent became evil and I thought that would be the main focus of the movie but instead it was just a really bad retelling of Sleeping Beauty, it added some good aspects to the story by giving Maleficent a more understandable reason as to why she is bad as well as giving her a backstory, but apart from this most of the acting wasn’t very good, the film was pretty boring and the only part of the movie I really enjoyed was Angelina Jolies performance as Maleficent, Cinderella which is by far the weakest of the remakes was pretty much the exact same film but remade with less likable characters with the exception of the prince who gets more screen time than he does in the original and as much as I don’t like the new evil step mother compared to the original I have to give the remake credit for giving her a reason to dislike Cinderella, for the most part I  enjoyed the Jungle Book remake, I thought it was clever with the way it expanded the story of the original film while also sharing more similarities to the book, I hated the little boy who played Mowgli as I found him to be extremely annoying and honestly it didn’t feel like he was the right casting choice to play Mowgli in my opinion, the CGI was great and the animation flowed smoothly and worked well with the characters and the movies environments, the only thing I really disliked was the casting not only did I hate the little boy who played Mowgli but I also hated almost every voice actor in the film as I just didn’t feel that they were the correct choices to voice those characters but most of this hate goes towards Bill Murray as Baloo and Christopher Walken as King Louie, I think they shouldn’t have made the animals talk at all, it worked in 101 Dalmatians favor so I don’t see why it couldn’t have worked for The Jungle Book as well, with all that said and done I do feel that people should go and see The Jungle Book as it honestly is a pretty good movie despite some of my more negative opinions of it.

So as you’ve probably already guessed, I’m not a big fan of the Disney remakes, I have nothing against some of these movies getting remade or retold if the more modern versions follow the source material and at least try to capture what the originals did, some Disney movies in my opinion don’t need to be remade at all due to their not being much wrong with the original a great example would be Beauty and the Beast which is soon to be remade, if Disney want’s to remake some of their old movies then I think they should try to focus on the older classics that could use updating such as Snow White, Pinocchio or Bambi otherwise I just think that beloved movies should be left alone to be loved and not remade for modern audiences and as a quick cash grab.

Thank you for reading this article about my personal opinion on Disney remaking their movies, please remember that this is purely my opinion and if you disagree that’s fine.

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