Why Disney's Live-Action Remakes Are So Bad

Disney's latest live-action adaptation is here in the form of "Moana," an animated movie that came out just ten years ago. Unsurprisingly, it never reaches the heights of the 2016 original ... and that continues a trend. Put bluntly, the Disney live action remakes are just bad. So why is that the case?

There's a whole host of factors here, actually — and you can watch Looper's original video and keep reading to find out every reason. So where do we start? Let's begin with the most obvious issue here: live-action Disney remakes really seem to exist solely to cravenly collect profits. In every single case, the already-great animated movie is right there (and probably streaming on Disney+), but the powers that be at the House of Mouse want to squeeze more money out of the property. This started in 2010 with Tim Burton's live action "Alice in Wonderland" movie, which made a small fortune at the box office but didn't exactly make fans want to travel down the rabbit hole.

Because of the box office part of that though, a trend was born. "Maleficent" — Angelina Jolie's take on the "Sleeping Beauty" baddie — released in 2014, Kenneth Branagh's "Cinderella" hit theaters in 2015, and Jon Favreau's reimagined version of "The Jungle Book" in 2016. That's exactly how we got all the way to the 2026 version of "Moana," which feebly attempts to hit all of the same beats as the original (which, again, only came out in 2016).

There's another issue here, though. Starting with 2017's "Beauty and the Beast," a new problem became apparent: the live action Disney movies are little more than shot for shot remakes. Both "Beauty and the Beast" and "Moana" are almost identical to the originals, so at a certain juncture, what is the point? (Money.)

The 2017 remake of "Beauty and the Beast," which cast Dan Stevens as the Beast and Emma Watson as his Belle, wasn't the only previous live action Disney remake that feels like a lazy retread of the original. "The Lion King" and "Aladdin," both released in 2019, simply hired A-list talent for the roles — Donald Glover and Beyoncé voice Simba and Nala in the former, for crying out loud — and expected that to make the movie better. At the end of the day, Beyoncé voicing a lion doesn't bring in new fans.

Then there's the "prequel" problem, which ends up affecting the original movies in weird ways. A particularly egregious stinker, 2021's "Cruella" — a shameful waste of two-time Oscar winner Emma Stone in the title role — turns the dog-skinner into a fabulous anti-hero, which makes the entire plot of "101 Dalmatians" feel absurd in retrospect. The same is true of Gaston (Luke Evans) in the new "Beauty and the Beast," who's given a full backstory ... but both Cruella and Gaston are better and funnier when we don't care about their internal motivations.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The visual effects in these movies leave a lot to be desired, whether you're deeply unsettled by uncanny valley animals or those effects just look like sludge (a common ailment in modern filmmaking, actually). When the live-action "Mulan" came out, it scanned more like a gritty reboot — especially because it cut fun characters like Mushu the dragon. Returning to Aladdin, could Will Smith ever truly surpass the voice performance by Robin Williams? Sorry, but no. There are so many problems with Disney live action remakes — so watch the video above to see all of them.