Live action adaptations are a largely debated topic as of the last decade, with successes, in terms of gross revenue, like the ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ movie franchise and ‘Detective Pikachu.’ However, adaptations like ‘Snow White’ and ‘Mulan’ have had minimal success. Live-action adaptations of classic movies and video games are a controversial and complicated matter. Some think they are cash grabs to make money off of a nostalgic audience, but others think they’re good when made by the hands of a caring producer.
Cole Renardo – Senior
“I feel like they can be done more tastefully than they have been, because right now they’re all kinds of commercial cash grabs going on as nostalgia. I feel a lot of them nowadays are kind of taking away from the original story that was told. [In] ‘Lilo and Stitch,’ for example, had a character in the animated one, [known as] the sunburn guy who always loses his ice cream. The idea behind that guy originally was [that] all these tourists that are going to Hawaii were ill-prepared. [The tourists] were kind of, showing up all over the place, and taking up space they shouldn’t be. In the live action movie, they made him a Native Hawaiian, which takes away from that whole criticism that the original character was meant to be.”
Richard Meeker – Senior
“It’s basically just capitalism. Obviously, they do it for the money, like [the] Minecraft movie, I don’t think it was meant to be a good movie. I think it was meant for people to meme on it and then make ticket sales to go see it. With the chicken chicken jockey trend, yeah. Because they know these older movies, like the Lion King, for example, it’s a great story. Everyone loved that. But they’re just taking it and they’re just remaking it every 10 years, and they know people will go and see it, if it’s good or not.”
Jayce Morris – Sophomore
“My opinion on live action adaptations [is] I think the [original] movies are pretty good… [What] live action needs [in order] to [be] good is [to have] a steady fanbase …What makes it bad is when people just [review] bomb the movie and call it trash and stuff like that.”
Finley Hearn – Sophomore
“[It’s] a pretty cheap method to capitalize on nostalgia by making it look more mature when it isn’t. So you take something like ‘The Lion King’, which is a beloved franchise that has been shown to do well in the box office and stuff, because this [remake decision] is about profits, right? And so obviously, you have this big demographic of people in their 40s who really like that franchise, so you want to remake it. But when you’re making it for profit, it just feels low effort.”
