Twice Upon a Time and Too Many Times Thereafter
Why are sequels and remakes dominating cinemas?
Disney released the live-action remake of Dumbo last month, the first of twenty-one live action remakes Disney has in the works. A few months prior, the public celebrated the sequel to the innovative 1964 musical Mary Poppins. Looking at the rest of Disney’s list of films to come out in the next year or so, one can’t help but notice how familiar the names are.
Among the films Disney is sending to screens this year are Aladdin, Toy Story 4, The Lion King, Frozen II and Star Wars: Episode IX. The common link between these, and others unmentioned but available on IMDb’s aggregated list, is the familiarity with the stories.
Disney’s films have always been familiar. It’s part of their innate charm. Disney’s features became popular because of their ability to illustrate a well known fairytale in a way that reintroduces beloved characters to audiences in a fresh, exciting and musical way. However, now it seems Disney has reached a turning point where they are relying more on their existing story adaptations as inspiration rather than experimenting with new ones.
The next few years are set to be saturated with sequels and live-action remakes of stories we’ve grown to know and love. The reliance on nostalgia is overpowering the opportunity to create new stories for new generations and is instead lazily relying on working with what they already have.
What they already have or can acquire, that is. With Fox now being a Disney brand, Disney has an even bigger grasp on the media sphere. This will undoubtedly change the future of movies.
Take Pixar, for example. Pixar was acquired by Disney in 2006. Before then, Pixar only made one sequel: Toy Story 2 in 1999. After the acquisition, Toy Story increasingly became Toy Stories with a third in 2010 and the fourth coming this year. Pixar also released Cars in 2006, which has since also seen two sequels. Pixar also released a prequel to Monsters, Inc. and a sequel to Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. That’s 7/14 films released after 2006, compared to the 1/7 of their first years as a company.
Once movies are remade again and again and heroes grow tired of fighting another villain and ache to retire, where will the inspiration come from? For Disney, it’s probable that their rides are the answer.
Every Disney park attraction has a rich narrative. Disney has already taken advantage of this with the production of The Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean (another series, but I digress), and now the working progress of the Jungle Cruise movie.
Though the development of rides into feature length films renders a degree of creativity, it’s still based on a pre-existing narrative.
The lack of creativity may come from a reliance on familiarity. People have grown to love these stories, and now with a limited attention economy and audiences who will rewatch tried-and-true sitcoms like Friends on Netflix before they try a new show, maybe familiar is what’s needed to be successful.
Still, this calls viewers to wonder where the imagination Walt Disney built his empire on has gone. Are we left to be fed the same storylines over and over again? For Disney, Pixar and now Fox, it’s not unlikely. Here’s hoping for creativity to be passed down to future generations, not parroted story plots.
