This seems to be the way with Disney these days. Their film roster is nearly all remakes or sequels with very few new ideas. Unfortunately, they are safe bankers.
These are their releases planned for this year:
Snow White - Live action remake of the 1937 animated classic.
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Road Trip - sequel to 2014 film.
Lilo & Stitch - Live action remake of the 2002 animated film.
Elio - new Pixar film
Freakier Friday - sequel to a film that has been made about 5 or 6 times.
Tron: Ares - second sequel to the 1982 film
Zootropolis 2 - sequel to the 2016 film (also called Zootopia and Zoomainia)
Of all this year’s releases it is only Pixar that are doing something new. And even there, that studio seems to be bogged down in completely unnecessary sequels to Cars and Toy Story.
I believe some of these remakes of very old films are to protect the copyright of the original characters, but most of these are just cash cows. Pixar is allowed some creative leeway, but Disney itself doesn’t like taking risks. Looking at their highest grossing films, Zootropolis was the last truly original idea (we watched it again recently, having just rewatched The Godfather of all things, and it is a near perfect family film).
Ultimately, Disney are a commercial firm and will invest where the best returns are. But they have also been innovative and they now look to be stuck in the sort of creative rut that they found themselves in during the early 1980s.
I’m a big fan of Alex Garland’s work, I really liked Civil War as well. Not sure what people expected - it seems that anything that doesn’t rely on action sequences or literal and complete explanation of the plot is destined to be review-bombed by masses.
The sniper stand-off sequence was the key to the whole film for me. If one focuses on it and its meaning, then the whole “who started first” and “which side is which” debate is rendered pointless. I also speak from the point of view of someone who grew up in a war-torn country, so the film has a different meaning and perspective for me.
Garland has another war film coming out called Warfare and it’s supposed to be based on a true experience of an American soldier fighting in Iraq. Knowing his previous work, I doubt it will be a propaganda piece and I fully expect it to be a critique of war, which audiences probably won’t take too kindly, just like Civil War.
It has become incredibly difficult to get people to show up to the cinema to watch something new. The relationship between marketing expenditure and box office performance has just disappeared. That makes new IP a huge commercial risk. If you are Fox Searchlight you have no option but to find new ideas to make, but studios like Disney that has an extensive IP library is just being incentivized by the market to squeeze that IP and give the audience what they are showing they will pay money for.
Yeah that was great. For me it was the Jesse Plemons sequence. Apparently he was a last minute replacement and was only drafted in because he’s married to Dunst and so was hanging around the set for a day or two.
Yes it is one of about 10 studios under the Disney Studios umbrella, but it is only the legacy studio of Walt Disney Pictures that has access to what people think of as “Disney” IP.
Pixar is an interesting test case as that purchase was predicated on retaining complete independence, yet they have increasingly moved towards a “one for corporate and one for us” roadmap. A Pixar studio that gets pulled too much under the Disney umbrella makes them no different than the legacy studio and eliminates their value.
I watched you hurt my feelings last night, a comedy about problems that start in the marriage of Julia Louis-Dreyfus after she overhears her husband say he does like her new novel. It’s totally a unimportant film, but also really enjoyable if you can deal with that snobby NYC style neuroticism.
And Im also annoyed that Im at an age where the themes resonated with me
Dune 2 was awesome in my opinion, I was lukewarm on the first but Dune 2 was an epic.
The actual books go completely mad so I’ll be interested to see how they tie up the movies. Will they take us all the way to Leo Atreides turning into a Sandworm Hitler to save humanity?
So many ways to read this film; the only thing I would say is to watch the dubbed version, not the subtitled one, in order to fully appreciate the cinematography.
Okay, it’s a bit cliched in places, but it’s still one of the best films I’ve seen recently. 8/10.
I enjoyed that one, although I did read up about the actual events afterwards. It is like a few war films in recent years that has the feel of a 1970s war comic.
The BBC’s SAS Rogue Heroes series is in a similar vein.
