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That’s absolutely fair. I have seen a few of those films as an adult and without kids in the room, but I think all but one of those occasions was when my younger sister put one of them on when we were back visiting my parents.
I will say that I got more enjoyment out of rewatching those old Disney classics than I get watching most new movies. But the same holds true for most older movies and TV shows. I probably just have old-fashioned tastes.
I haven't seen many movies in the past few years, just a few on airplanes. They were pretty bad. The newest Star Wars was a mess. Live action Beauty and the Beast was inferior to my memories of the old animated version. Not sure why anyone had any inclination to make that movie.
At this point I'll probably enjoy watching old Disney movies with my child much more than the Disney junk I've seen recently.
I think the cliche that as movies have become more expensive, pre-existing franchises that already have fans and/or that can play on nostalgia have become more appealing to studio execs is probably true. And I'm guessing Beauty and the Beast was well into production before the The Jungle Book live-action remake made almost a billion dollars, but it probably helped to motivate Disney to fast-track all the ones that came after. And, to be fair, they kept making money, and lots and lots of money, until they didn't.
To me, the whole thing has the look of a kind of cargo cult. They saw the massive success of those old movies and thought they could replicate it in live-action for even more success, and it worked for a while, since they did get a lot of the superficial similarities right. But as they kept making more and more, the audience has been wising up to the fact that they really lack the substance that made the originals great.
What I don't get is how Disney execs could be so incompetent as to not understand this. Their flagship films like The Lion King (CGI remake) make basic, fundamental, amateur errors in things like writing, acting, cinematography, even music (the entire sequence where Nala discovers adult Simba - a pivotal, very important moment in the film's narrative - is egregious in all of these, including setting the song Can You Feel The Love Tonight during the day). From what I've heard, their more recent ones like The Little Mermaid are even worse in many ways in that regard. It's like they tried to build all the decorations of a house to look like an older house without bothering with the foundations and support structure. Studio execs, just out of naked selfish interest, should understand that it's important to get this right! And studio execs at the exact same company 30 years ago seemed to understand this! Where did all that expertise and knowledge go?
And with Star Wars, Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Lucasfilm, gets a lot of the blame, but she herself was a producer in the old Indiana Jones films, i.e. the good ones. Where did all that filmmaking expertise that she herself had go? How could she sign off on "Somehow, Palpatine returned?"
As someone fairly out of the loop for modern films, that last Star Wars film was shocking. I was amazed at how bad it was. It was ultra fast paced rushing from one thing to the next. Just a jumbled mess rather than a film.
How the old Indiana Jones films and their creators could degrade into this is beyond me. I'm hoping this was some sort of high water mark for ultra fast paced filmmaking and everyone will take a deep breath from now on.
Either that, or with generative AI, we're at the cusp of an era that makes the current pace and everything that came before it look sluggish.
I do think the rapid pace at which they pump these out is definitely a factor. Again, I don't understand the mentality of the execs who signed off on this kind of crazy release schedule, where we're getting like 2 or 3 live-action remakes a year, including ones dumped onto streaming and such, and a similar number of Marvel shows. Strike while the iron is hot, get while the getting's good, and all that, but did the idea that audiences have a refractory period between big releases and so finding the right rhythm of releases instead of just flooding them with content just not occur to them? And obviously the quality suffers, with CGI being a well known issue but also the important stuff like writing.
It's like the execs thought their audiences were vending machines, where you just insert latest content and get money back out, and the more content you insert, the more money comes out, with no limits. It doesn't take a genius businessman to know that this isn't how that works, and Disney isn't just a business, it's the top of the top of the top in its industry, the metaphorical New York Yankees of Hollywood. These execs should know enough about business not to treat their audiences like that, if only out of naked selfish interest.
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what. the. fuck.
I've been ignoring the Disney Death Spiral, but how do you screw that up that badly? There are furries who would kill (figuratively, right?) to be involved in the storyboarding for that particular scene. I can get why they'd skip out on the bedroom eyes, but I hope whoever was in charge of that scene isn't getting fursuit heads in their bed.
Given the visual style of the CGI remake, my guess is that decision maker is less a furry and more an enthusiast of actual interspecies erotica. By which I mean that I'm guessing Jon Favreau likes to fuck cats.
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