Every Live-Action Disney Movie Remake Ranked Worst To Best

From the laziest remakes to those that improved upon the original.

By Jack Pooley /

You don't became a monolithic empire like Disney without exploiting every possible creative asset at your disposal, and so since 2010 the Mouse House has industriously committed itself to remaking its most popular animated films in live-action form.

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The results, unsurprisingly, have varied wildly, from disastrous to mediocre to pleasantly surprising, and from project to project it's always tough to tell how the next one's going to turn out.

And so, with Disney's remake of The Little Mermaid out now in cinemas worldwide, what better time to pore back over every single live-action remake the company has ever produced?

Dating all the way back to 1994's live-action The Jungle Book, here's how Disney's canon of live-action remakes have panned out, from the abject, soulless, aggressively corporate disasters to the acceptably mid-tier offerings, and then those few which either matched or even improved upon the original.

Remakes are a tricky proposition at the best of times, but where some of the most iconic movies ever made are concerned, it isn't something that should be taken lightly.

With that in mind, here's how all 23 of Disney's live-action remakes shake out from worst to best...

23. Pinocchio

There's certainly no Disney remake more immediately depressing than Robert Zemeckis' Pinocchio.

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As perfect as Tom Hanks seems to play Geppetto on paper, he's given desperately little to do in this mostly charmless, agonisingly forgettable retelling.

Despite Zemeckis' attempts to tug on the audience's heartstrings, this is an oddly emotionally inert take, planing away the edgier elements of the animated version while indulging in a VFX overload that ranges from vaguely neat to a legitimate eyesore.

Beyond a few solid performances and a stirring musical score from the great Alan Silvestri, this is yet another late-period letdown from one of America's most innovative filmmakers.

And it further didn't help that Guillermo del Toro's stop-motion animated reimagining of Pinocchio was released mere months after this and soundly mopped the floor with it.

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