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« on: May 05, 2023, 03:27:05 PM »
Except for Pete’s Dragon and this movie, Lowery, Halbrooks and Whitaker had nothing to do with these other Disney live-action remakes! Especially the other really terrible ones like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King, or the upcoming Little Mermaid remake (the film hasn’t come out yet at the time I’m writing this, but it looks AWFUL!!), Disney is responsible for these movies! More specifically, the studio executives and other “people in suits” that just want to check boxes and make billions of dollars!
You may be surprised by what I’m about to say, but even though I’ve been bad mouthing Peter Pan and Wendy almost the entire review, and even though I’ve had mouthed other Disney remakes in past posts, I’m not against the concept of remaking these animated movies. What I’m against is the execution that Disney has decided to take since the beginning when Alice in Wonderland came out in 2010! Stories like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Alice in Wonderland, The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Pinocchio and even Peter Pan have been retold in different ways in different mediums for hundreds, some even thousands of years!
Here are some examples of a few of these stories being retold in an interesting way in film:
Beauty and the Beast:
https://youtu.be/IsXkv1mpRUk
Alice in Wonderland:
https://youtu.be/11831Y1y7eA
Pinocchio:
https://youtu.be/Od2NW1sfRdA
And with Peter Pan there’s, of course, 2015’s Peter and Wendy!
There are thousands of ways you can adapt these classic stories, but Disney, a billion dollar company, decides to adapt these stories in the most safe and boring and ugly looking way possible! I don’t even mind if you make a little bit of changes to the story or the characters in your adaptation, as long as the changes makes sense, and the story and the characters still have the same spirit as the original stories! Obviously, Peter Pan and Wendy does NOT have the same spirit as the story or the characters of Barrie’s Peter Pan!
The only Disney live-action remake based on a classic story I really enjoyed was The Jungle Book! Though doing so less than Pete’s Dragon, that remake still did different things with its story and characters and made interesting changes, even from it’s novel counterpart, and they were changes that MADE SENSE to the characters and to the story that they were telling!
Admittedly, I’ve never read The Jungle Book novel, so I’m not completely sure if the remake still has the same spirit of the book, but I thought it was at least a good movie on it’s own, which, again, is WAY more than I can say for Peter Pan and Wendy and a lot of the other remakes!
And at the end of the day, these “suits” at Disney are the ones who are mostly the ones making these remakes, not the directors, not the writers, maybe not even the producers, but it’s the executives! David Lowery is an example of this! I’m not convinced that Peter Pan and Wendy is the Peter Pan film he wanted to make! Not after he’s made films that look great and people actually really enjoy! It’s all Disney’s fault!!
And despite the fact that I already knew that Disney was responsible for these remakes being bad before I saw Peter Pan and Wendy, I still had hope that this maybe, just maybe, might be good, maybe not excellent, but at least pretty good! And yeah, I was probably very naïve for thinking this, but I just thought, especially since Lowery was at the helm, and he made a decent Disney remake before with Pete’s Dragon, and now he’s making a Peter Pan remake, which just happened to be an adaptation of my favorite story of all time, and since it was going to be a straight-to-Disney+ movie, maybe he’d have more creative freedom than other directors who have done the theatrically released remakes, that this movie might be actually be at least decent! But I’ve seen the final result, and that was obviously NOT the case!
And now Peter Pan and Wendy has broken me! Despite the past horrible remakes, this film has broken me to never look forward to a Disney live-action remake ever again!
Before watching Peter Pan and Wendy, I was excited to see remakes of the animated movies that could actually benefit from a remake, like Sword in the Stone, which was actually announced years ago but has yet to have any more developments, and The Black Cauldron, or even Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire! But not anymore! Like those movies, a live-action remake of the 1953 animated Peter Pan film could have been great, at least a bit better than the animated film, but Peter Pan and Wendy turned out to be MUCH MUCH MUCH WORSE than the animated film! I’m nostalgic for the animated film since it was my first exposure to the Peter Pan story, but since I’ve become a major Pan Fan, I recognize it’s many many flaws! But besides the blatant racism in animated movie, even the flaws in that movie don’t even come CLOSE to the flaws of Peter Pan and Wendy! So an adaptation of those other animated films that haven’t had a remake made of them yet, would be just as dull as lifeless as Peter Pan and Wendy! Unless Disney improves their remakes and I hear that they made one that is actually good, then I don’t plan on ever seeing a new remake that they do ever again!
One more positive thing I do want to say is that at least Peter Pan and Wendy is about the same running time as the animated film, so at least the pain is quick! Some of the other remakes are at least a half hour longer than their animated counterparts! The upcoming Little Mermaid is going to be almost ONE HOUR longer than the animated version!
Okay, I think I’m done now! If you read all of this, you have my wholehearted gratitude! And even if you didn’t read the whole thing, you still have my wholehearted gratitude for even wanting to look at my post, even just out of curiosity!
And I want to state one last time, that if you have a different opinion about this movie, PLEASE don’t hesitate to post it on the forum and I will read it and respond to you!