Every Disney Live-Action Remake, Ranked
Disney's utter dominance at the global box office looks like it's just getting started (Marvel Phase Four, commence), and a major part of its winner-take-all business model is increasingly built around live-action adaptations of its most popular and beloved animated classics, most recently Jon Favreau's The Lion King, a radical technological achievement and a musical ode to various kinds of hyper-realistic beige rocks and sand.
The latest remake is a miss for me, but down the years, Disney has landed on a few winners as it slowly takes a do-over on its most well-known properties. Here's every live-action Disney remake so far, in order of worst to best.
13. Alice Through the Looking Glass
You'd be forgiven for completely forgetting that 2010's Alice in Wonderland got a sequel. Through the Looking Glass absolutely bombed at the box office, making just $300 million compared to its predecessor's cool billion. It was also an absolutely bonkers CGI-ridden mess of murky colors, murkier character design, and a nonsensical story that would even have made Lewis Carroll be like, "...the hell is going on here?"
12. Dumbo
"You know what was missing from our absolute classic banger of an elephant movie? The interior lives of the humans who caged him up." This, I assume, was the pitch in Disney's creative meeting before making this movie. Tim Burton's on an ice-cold streak lately, and Dumbo was a mama elephant-sized mess that not only focused on an entirely uninteresting story, but turned the baby elephant we all know and love into a dull-eyed monstrosity.
11. 102 Dalmatians
Another sequel nobody asked for. Even Glenn Close phoned in her reprisal as Cruella de Vil this time around. I did not rewatch this film while writing this list, but the fact I had entirely blocked out going to see it in theaters as a kid must mean it had very little to offer. I was so stupid—I loved anything back then.
10. Alice in Wonderland
Another stone-cold masterpiece undone by Tim Burton, Wonderland at least had a couple of great performances to keep it chugging along, though the film's pathological need for Johnny Depp to pop up every 10 minutes was a mood-killer. For all its misplaced energy, there's a little bit of weirdo charm at the center of Alice in Wonderland. It's just a shame more of that wasn't allowed to shine through.
9. Aladdin
"Guy Ritchie's Aladdin" will never not be a sentence that makes me feel warmly, perversely amused. Disney! Y'all handed over the story of the Arabian "street rat" to the director of Snatch, and you can never take that back. I love it. Anyway, the movie itself is a fine retread of the better animated version (noticing a pattern here?) Jafar isn't nearly as cool, Will Smith looks like he simply wandered onto set accidentally without reading the script, and the whole thing looks weirdly cheap for a $200 million-dollar movie. Still, some of the songs remain bangers, and Jasmine actor Naomi Scott is a burgeoning star waiting to happen.
8. The Lion King
A stacked vocal cast and cutting-edge animation tech can't save this disappointingly bland remake from being utterly inferior to its source material in every possible way. Even with Donald Glover and Beyoncé, most of the songs fall flat (and "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" is performed in daylight? Did anyone read this script?). A big swing and a miss.
7. 101 Dalmatians
That's still too many Dalmatians.
6. Beauty and the Beast
Oscar-winner Bill Condon did his best to assemble a good film here, though its legacy will always remain that one behind-the-scened shot of a CGI-suited Dan Stevens on stilts carefully walking down some stairs.
5. Maleficent
Disney's answer to Wicked is this not-quite-officially-a-remake origin story for Sleeping Beauty's greatest enemy. Angelina Jolie is brilliant, dialing her camp performance up to a solid 11 to carry this fairly routine film into one of Disney's better attempts. Things seem to go smoother when you're not trying to recreate classics shot-for-shot. Who'd have thought?
4. Christopher Robin
What a delightful and weird-ass movie this is. Unlike a lot of other ill-fated attempts to bring its animated characters to 3D life, Pooh's worn-down IRL look is perfect for the character, who never much minded how muddy he got if he was having fun along the way. A secretly great stoner comedy lies within the heart of this one.
3. The Jungle Book (1994)
Maybe you'd forgotten about this one, but I sure hadn't. It was my first introduction to a live-action remake, and it blew my young mind. The animals, helpfully, are real animals, and the ridiculous cast features the likes of John Cleese, Lena Heady, and Sam Neill.
2. Cinderella
Kenneth Branagh's Cinderella deserves far more respect than it gets as one of Disney's best attempts at bringing human life to its legends. Lily James, now a huge star, excels in the company of Helena Bonham-Carter and Cate Blanchett, which is saying something. This is a no-frills and loving take on an already-great story, and it works.
1. The Jungle Book (2016)
While Jon Favreau might have slipped up with The Lion King, his first attempt at Disney realism hit the nail on the head. The Jungle Book is everything you want from a live-action retelling of a blockbuster cartoon: It's well-acted, it's beautiful, and, above all, it's willing to get dark and weird. If that isn't the classic Disney we all want to see more of, I don't know what is.
Originally Appeared on GQ
