Disney’s terrible-looking ‘live-action’ remakes are the stuff of nightmares

Deadpool & Wolverine and Inside Out 2 have put the beleaguered studio back on top. But could Snow White and Mufasa end the winning streak?

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, The Who once memorably sang. And in Disney’s case, the gloomy epigram is literally true. After the inglorious two-year reign of Bob Chapek – during which a rash pivot to streaming degraded some of the entertainment giant’s most valuable brands – its former CEO Bob Iger is back at the helm, promising a return to the good old days of ruthless cultural supremacy that defined popular cinema in the 2010s.
At the weekend’s D23 fan convention in Anaheim, Iger spoke of the “unmatched strength” of the company’s portfolio of studios, all “bound by a common mission: to tell great stories… and to bring you those stories in the most modern, relevant, and compelling ways.”
And on Disney’s recent form, “unmatched strength” is far from sabre-rattling. In less than three weeks, Deadpool & Wolverine has grossed $1bn globally, while Inside Out 2, closing in on $1.6bn after two months, is now the most commercially successful purebred animation ever made. (Just half a billion to go before it overtakes 2019’s photorealistic The Lion King.) Note too that these are the latest productions by Marvel and Pixar respectively: arguably the two Disney subdivisions that lost most credibility under Chapek.
But “modern”, “relevant”, “compelling”? Those are harder claims to shore up. With three notable exceptions – two new Pixar features and a monster truck comedy starring Dwayne Johnson – every forthcoming title touted at D23 was a sequel or remake. Vast tracts of the list resembled Scottish lower league football results: Moana 2, Zootopia 2. Frozen 3, Incredibles 3. Avatar 3, Toy Story 5. (An intriguing maybe-exception was Matt Shakman’s Fantastic 4 reboot, whose swishy atomic-age styling suggests it could be one of the rare post-Endgame Marvel movies that has found itself a fresh angle to work.)
Cause for more concern, though, were the latest additions to Disney’s ever-expanding suite of “live-action remakes” of their classic hand-drawn animations. Note that one of these – Mufasa: The Lion King – is technically neither a remake nor live-action, but a $250 million CG-animated prequel to the also-CG 2019 reimagining of the beloved 1994 original. But while you can quibble over the particulars, the broad approach seems to mirror the one taken by most of these things since 2015’s Cinderella: a lavish photoreal replica that variously sidesteps and airbrushes its forebear’s perceived shortcomings, be they political (now the sisters have to be vain rather than ugly) or proprietary (Cinders’ dress is no longer silver but blue, in line with the dolls and toys).
The unease around these fell into two camps. One was that gifted, distinctive filmmakers were being swallowed up by this multi-million-mulching replication machine – such as Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-winning Moonlight auteur, and Mufasa’s arguably unlikely director. (The 2019 Lion King was headed by Jon Favreau, a talented journeyman filmmaker, and no one objected to that.) 
While Mufasa got a warm launch at D23 itself, its trailer was far more frostily received on the social media platform X when it launched back in April. Jenkins soon found himself mounting a defence of the project, manfully if fruitlessly – since every swipe at the charges of soullessness prompted further accusations of having sold out. “You can do a Disney movie for the cheque, in order to work on your passion projects at a later time, but you don’t have to shill like this,” ran a typical comment.
For all Jenkins’s enthusiasm, the poetry and tenderness he brought to Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk and The Underground Railroad are nowhere to be seen in the trailer itself, with its clumsy dialogue clunkily delivered in a strained mix of accents (English Scar: perfect as an adult, just odd as a cub). And unverified reports from an early test screening on the industry website World of Reel described an awkwardly muted reception. “Jenkins’ assistant nervously asked me what I thought of the movie when I stepped out into the bathroom halfway through – I told her it sucked and she quietly nodded,” related one. “It’s clear they know it’s a dud.”
There is nothing soulless about The Lion King. For decades children have sat in theaters all over the world experiencing collective grief for the first time, engaging Shakespeare for the first time, across aisles in myriad languages. A most potent vessel for communal empathy.
Part of the problem is timing. The entertainment landscape has shifted dramatically since these films were commissioned, back when early entries like Beauty and the Beast and The Jungle Book (and of course The Lion King 2019) all drew teeming crowds. The quality of the films has dipped – for every slyly reimagined Cruella or Peter Pan & Wendy there was a disastrous Dumbo, a mediocre Mulan, a pitiful Pinocchio – and viewer interest dipped with it. Even 2023’s The Little Mermaid, the only entry to be given a blockbuster rollout since Covid, barely clawed back its production and marketing costs.
But at D23, a still more fundamental objection bubbled back up too: that rather than honouring their predecessors, the remakes are simply wringing them dry for revenue, and let artistry and history be damned. And next year’s reprise of Snow White – Disney’s first animated feature, and therefore an especially sensitive case – is proving a magnet for such grumbles. 
This began a year ago, with the widespread dismay that met its star Rachel Zegler’s dismissal of the 1937 original as “extremely dated”: its “ideas of women being in roles of power” and “weird” love story involving “a guy who literally stalks [the heroine]” were out of step with the modern world. (First, you tell Disney fans the films they loved as children look a bit crap these days at your peril. And second, because of the general way in which time works, films made before the Second World War don’t tend to be that big on early 21st century girlboss feminism.)
But the newly released teaser trailer opened up another front: the portrayal of the seven dwarfs themselves. It’s believed that the film first featured live-action actors of mixed heights in these crucial roles – one with dwarfism and six without. But rather than weather the storm over representation this would have inevitably stoked – does such an approach dispel stereotypes about shorter actors, or just cheat them out of work? – the argument has been dodged, and the whole lot have been replaced with digital recreations of their hand-drawn counterparts. As glimpsed in the trailer, they are – to put it mildly – utter nightmares, wibbling around their woodland cabin like sentient bags of blancmange.
A leaked 22-second extended version of the trailer sequence, which offers a longer look at a terrifyingly vacant Dopey, has since begun circulating on X, and does nothing to allay the nerves.
With seven months still to go before Snow White’s release, there’s still time for emergency tweaking, if only to avoid a Cats-style debacle. But with the budget reportedly having now surpassed $300m (it was originally shot in 2022, with reshoots still happening as recently as this June), the will to do so may now be thin on the ground.
Experiment 626 has entered the chat! The live-action #LiloAndStitch is coming only to theaters in Summer 2025!pic.twitter.com/2fhRGW7GC5
In a sense, it may not be worth the trouble: why not just spend the money on the Lilo & Stitch remake also currently underway, or the five more, including Moana and Bambi, in various stages of development? Snow White the film may yet be improved, but Snow White the product is now a fixed object.
“Who else but Disney could pull off a weekend like D23?” Iger began his speech by asking, and on this point he is indisputably right. As both a work of corporate theatre and a spectacle of loyalty and power, the event has no rival. But loving your heritage is one thing; getting trapped underneath it quite another. We can but hope the old boss decides to learn some new tricks.