Ranking All Of The Live-Action Disney Remakes

The 2000s and 2010s saw a huge spike in the popularity of revisionist fiction, in which audiences would see the same story from a different character's point of view. More often than not, this new point of view was that of the villain's. Perhaps the pinnacle of this in franchise filmmaking was Disney's Maleficent.

Retooling the narrative of the classic animated film, Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent told the story from the point of view of that film's iconic antagonist. But of all the Disney villains, Maleficent was arguably one of the worst choices to be given this treatment. Aside from baddies like Fantasia's Churnabog, Maleficent from the original animated film was one of the strongest and most blatantly evil villains in all of Disney's catalog. While other villains like Scar or Gaston had shreds of empathy to them, where audiences could at least see their motivations, Maleficent was just a bad bitch who showed up and cursed Aurora at birth.

But in Maleficent, Angelina Jolie played her as a hero done-wrong, who actually spent her life trying to protect Aurora. While the film does at least earn points for trying something ambitious, it never comes close to sticking the landing.

It defangs Maleficient, quite literally, even taking away her climactic turn into a dragon. Instead, all that is left is a generic fantasy film starring Ms. Jolie as a former fairy.