The Disney Live Action Remake Saga

It's Live action Remake mania over at the House of Mouse. It seems like you can't go one day without Disney announcing another live action version of one of their classic movies is now in development. With the success of Alice in Wonderland from Tim Burton (financial success at least) as well as last year's Maleficent and this year's Cinderella, Disney looks to be remaking their entire animation lineup in live action form as quickly as possible.   So for those who can't keep track, here's a quick rundown of every movie that's currently in development.

The Jungle Book
April 15th 2016

Ok so this one is really quite interesting.  See most people view Alice in Wonderland as the movie that really kicked off this whole live action remake trend. And it did, but it wasn't the first time that Disney remade their classic cartoons as live action movies. They did the same thing in the 90s, most famously with 101 Dalmatians but also with The Jungle Book. Twice in fact. So this is the third time that Disney is remaking The Jungle Book in live action. This time around there is a whole slew of famous people voicing the animals (the first live action remake featured non talking animals) including Bill Murray as Baloo, Ben Kingsley as Bagheera, Idris Elba as Shere Khan and Scarlet Johonssan as Kaa the snake.

Alice in Wonderland: Through the Looking Glass
May 27th, 2016

The live action film that started it all (if you start counting in 2009) is getting a sequel. Now, I personally am already a bit miffed that the original Alice in Wonderland was at the very least a sequel to the original story with Alice being much older and going back to Wonderland, so this seems to me, to be the fourth time that Alice is going to wonderland. Tim Burton won't be back to direct (he may or may not be busy with a movie further down the list) but both Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are scheduled to return so it will still look like a Tim Burton movie.



Beauty and the Beast

March 17th, 2017

While Maleficent was Sleeping Beauty as told from a different point of view, the live action Cinderella was more or less a straight forward version of the Disney movie. And now, it looks like Beauty and the Beast will not only be a straight forward version of the movie, but it will have the songs from the animated classic in there as well. Still though this one is in good hands and thought worried about the quality of the finished product probably don't need to be. Disney has been adapting Beauty and the Beast to live action for years on Broadway at this point and they've been quite successful at it. Its a pretty star filled cast as well with Emma Watson having been cast as Belle and Kevin Kline as her father as well as Luke Evans as Gaston and Josh Gadd (who voiced Olaf in Frozen) as Le Fou.

Winnie The Pooh 
TBA

This was only announced earlier this month so there's no casting details, no release date, and no indication of what exactly live action will mean when we're talking about stuffed animals. Actual stuffed animals? 3D characters in a live action background with a live action Christopher Robin? we don't know yet. What we do know however, is that this Winnie the Pooh story is going to feature an adult Christopher Robin returning to the Hundred Acre Woods. So it's the Alice in Wonderland route with a grown up version of the child from the first time around.

Mulan
TBA

Mulan is easily the most recent animated film to be getting a live action remake having only come out in 1998. It's also interesting to note that there was a Chinese film version of the legend of Mulan that came out as recently as 2009. I don't expect that many people have seen the 2009 live action Mulan film, at least not in the United States (It apparently won several awards in China) but it looks like the story of Mulan is getting a new movie about once every ten years at this rate.

Dumbo
TBA

In what might be the strangest entry on the list, the 1941 movie Dumbo has been slated for live action and to helm the project is director Tim Burton who directed the earlier Disney lives action Alice in Wonderland. It should be noted that the original Dumbo movie barely broke 60 minutes in run time. They will surly have to add something to make it feel like a feature length movie for modern day audiences. Also, we have to at some point stop and wonder exactly what live action will mean here? Surely animals are going to talk in this movie right? And so those animals will be animated in some way right? Maybe the Ringleader will get a much bigger role this time around. (I also should mention that I'm terrified to see how they're going to turn elephants on Parade into a live action sequence.)

Chip 'n Dale
TBA

It's not exactly a remake of a classic Disney movie, but it fits so in line with the theme of this column that it needed to be mentioned anyway. Chip and Dale first appeared in 1943 and were in several Mikey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Pluto shorts before perhaps most famously staring in Chip n' Dale: Rescue Rangers in the late 80s. It's the Rescue Rangers version of these characters coming to life in this live action/CG hybrid movie. But all of the main characters in that show were animals. And fairly small animals at that. I guess some brand new human characters are going to have to be introduced, but take one look at the Alvin and the Chipmunks success and you can see where this idea is coming from.

Pinocchio 
TBA

This one is one of the most recently announced with very little known about it other than Peter Hedges (screenwriter of What's Eating Gilbert Grape and About a Boy) has been hired to write the screenplay for a movie that is "loosely inspired by the tale of Pinocchio." Nothing else is known, but it's a pretty clear indication that Disney plans to give the live action treatment to every movie that they can.

It should be noted how many of these movies have yet to be cast, there is no filming, only somebody writing a script. So it's very possible that many of these films will never actually make it to the big screen and eventually fade away entirely. But as long as the live action remakes of Disney Classics continue to be a success, you can bet you'll see all of these and more slowly make their way to the big screen.