Ranking All Of The Live-Action Disney Remakes

In recent years, Walt Disney Studios has stumbled into a gold-mine: recycling their animated films by remaking them as live-action films.

On the one hand, it leads to even more established intellectual properties taking the spotlight away from potential new stories. But on the other hand, it offers filmmakers and audiences a chance to experience these films in an entirely new way. What better way to gauge and measure the changes in pop culture than to compare two versions of the same film, made decades apart?

This also offers filmmakers the unique opportunity to provide commentary within these films themselves. While some have certainly been straight-up remakes, more often than not, these films have made tweaks both big and small to the original story. And it is here that these films can get really interesting.

So with Christopher Robin hitting theaters and with nearly a dozen more of these live-action remakes on the way in the next few years (!), let's take a look back at the films that have been released so far under this business model. To see what worked, what didn't, and what fell strangely in the middle.

At first glance, it seems like a perfect fit. Tim Burton, the modern master of all things macabre and Expressionism-inspired, taking on Alice in Wonderland, one of Disney's trippiest and most out-there properties. One could easily see a potential version of this resulting in an all-out Burton classic, that could sit proudly alongside the likes of Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands.

Alas, what audiences actually got in 2010 was a trainwreck. From the narrative to the visuals to the casting, everything about this film is about as colossally misguided as possible.

Burton opts to adapt a mish-mash of Carroll's work rather than just Alice in Wonderland. Instead, he essentially rips the story from the original Alice Through the Looking Glass novel, only to then copy-and-paste the most iconic sequences from Dinsey's original film. To top things off, he slaps on a big CGI final battle in which Alice has to slay a dragon, referred to as a Jabberwocky in the film's limpest attempt at tying into Carroll's source material.

The movie simultaneously wants to be a nostalgic trip back into Wonderland and a dark and gritty look at the real Underland. The end result is a film that is a disgrace to Carroll's original stories and Disney's animated film.