One of the most depressing things about getting older is having to watch everything around you decay and turn to absolute shit — from pop music to internet services, once-great cities, and even movies that were at one time a beloved staple of your halcyon childhood years. That is, before a certain cynical, soulless vampire corporation decided to feast on them, drain them of their lifeblood, and spit them back out as corpses of their former self.
I’m referring, of course, to Disney’s ongoing cash grab of a remake strategy that’s seen one original masterpiece after another get recycled from an animated work of art to an inferior live-action knockoff. Absolutely no one prefers the live-action remakes of films like The Jungle Book and The Little Mermaid over the delightful OG films, but when you’re ostensibly a creative enterprise that’s bereft of vision, you fall back on the timeless strategy employed by the bereft since the dawn of man: You flail. You spray and pray in the tried-and-true “maybe something will work, even though it hasn’t yet” fashion.
I’ve written previously about the internet’s devastating critique of Disney’s upcoming Snow White remake, for which we just got a first trailer in recent days (spoiler: It looks absolutely terrible). If you, too, have watched with horror as Disney continues to vaporize every remaining shred of dignity it has left — along with continuing to ruin once iconic entertainment brands like Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar to a lesser extent — I’d urge you to read an excellent new article from the UK’s The Telegraph that dives deep into why all this is happening, and why it sucks.
Film critic Robbie Collin eviscerates the House of Mouse for its lack of artistry in forcing “inferior, computer-generated versions of its hand-crafted masterpieces” upon audiences that don’t want anything to do with them. “The question we’re left with,” he writes at one point, “isn’t why does Disney keeps remaking their films — it’s because they still pay — but what will happen once they’ve remade them all.” And then he answers his own question with the most cynical and infuriating response of all: Most likely, Disney will simply wait a few years, and then start the whole cash grab all over again and repeat the entire cycle.
For most of us, the idea of “enshittification” (which is coming for “absolutely everything,” according to a recent commentary in The Financial Times), is a way of explaining the general decline we see around us. Leave it to Disney, however, to consider the idea as something else — a call to arms.
