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In just over a month, Disney will release its latest live-action remake, Mulan, starring Yifei Liu as Mulan. Last year, Disney released 5 live-action (or, mostly live-action) remakes: Dumbo, Aladdin, The Lion King, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and Lady and the Tramp. Disney won’t stop making these movies as long as there’s an audience for them. In a move that should surprise absolutely no one, Disney’s beloved 1942 classic, Bambi is the latest film to receive a planned “live-action” (thanks to CGI) remake:
The studio has hired Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel, Tomb Raider) and Lindsey Beer (Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, Chaos Walking) to pen the screenplay for the live-action remake.
Depth of Field, the production banner run by Chris and Paul Weitz and Andrew Miano and which is coming off the success of indie darling The Farewell, will produce the new iteration. . . .
Insiders say the studio views Bambi as a type of companion piece to its remakes The Jungle Book and The Lion King, which were not live-action per se but certainly made to look that way. The two, both hits (Lion King generated $1.65 billion when it was released last year), were made using envelope-pushing CG technology to create ground-breaking photo-realistic and immersive worlds of nature. The studio is cognizant that Bambi is less epic in scope and story and is not aiming to shoehorn a larger narrative onto the classic tale.
The live-action remake continues to pay off for Disney as the last two outings, Jon Favreau’s Lion King and Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, were billion-dollar grossers. Upcoming in the pipeline are The Little Mermaid, starring Halle Bailey, and David Lowrey’s take on Peter Pan, titled Peter and Wendy.
This doesn’t surprise me, as Bambi is beloved by Disney fans, so it makes sense that the studio would try to draw them back into the theater with a CGI version: Now they’ll bring their grandchildren or children, who will want to go seek out the original afterward, if they haven’t already seen it. (Full disclosure: I think I’ve only seen it once all the way through, despite growing up fully immersed in all things Disney.) The remake is either going to be great or terrible: There will be no middle ground, and I’m already shuddering to think about how much more traumatizing Bambi’s mother’s death will be when it happens to a real deer.
I’m getting a bit tired of these remakes. Eventually, Disney is going to need to shift back to creating new films, because it’s going to run out of material to adapt. I’m a hypocrite, though, because I’ve enjoyed a few of them. It’s neat to see how Disney has adapted certain aspects of the films to live-action and CGI. I’ve not found them particularly interesting, however, because the stories are largely unchanged. Disney, understandably, doesn’t want to alter them too much and risk alienating fans who don’t recognize their favorite movies in these newer adaptations, but they make for slightly less exciting movie-watching experiences. I think the updated Bambi will be fun to look at, because who doesn’t like following the exploits of cute animals? I don’t think it’s going to be a fantastic movie, though, unless it does new and interesting things with the story, and Disney won’t want to mess with a classic.
Unless they’re going to train deer to perform theater, it’s not live action, it’s updated animation. And it’s dumb.
Good one!
Perhaps they are going to slap antlers, bunny ears, skunk tails, and very disturbing nipples on the actors a la cats? I bet Jason Derulo is free. 🙄
Bambi is a short movie made beautiful by the high quality of its animation.
The “live action” (CGI isn’t live action but whatever) will be bloated and full of Demi Lovato songs.
Correct. All the original movies are short because the story can’t be stretched more. They’re well paced and were carefully curated.
Now it’s add more length because people don’t want to play $12 for less than 90min, and add new song for Oscar bid, add new scene so it’s not a replica, add useless background for characters that adds nothing, and add new world issues heavy handedly with no finesse to actual story- here,
environmentalism or vegetarianism, I’m assuming.
I hate the colouring they used for Lion King.
I don’t even think Disney cares if these are good. It’s such an obvious money grab. They’re pumping them out and gutting the heart and soul of the original animated versions that people spent years working on. Just frame by frame copies. It’s really starting to bother me, actually.
Why does everything need a “remake” of some sorts? I’d loved to see how they’d train deers like Neners said. Maybe not. Still traumatized by Babe.
I think Babe was the first movie I got to see in theatre. I LOVED that one, but it IS a bit traumatizing. But such a cute freaking movie if you can get past that. The little mice always got me.
There’s no way I’d be able to watch a Bambi remake. I’m too emotionally attached to the deer in our backyard.
I mean this is going to be traumatizing right. Does no one remember Dumbos soulless eyes of doom. And they were small!!!!! Now your going to do that to me with fucking Bambi eyes. God damn it Disney.
And my kid will be old enough to want to see this. There’s not enough wine or therapy in the world.
Nope.
No, no, no, NO!
People really have to stop giving money to Disney, because there is nothing new in their life actions movies (especially cartoons). He keeps exactly the same scenarios, the same plans, the same montage, and the same music. The only thing new is the horrible digital effect that use for animated the animals. This digital effect empties the cartoons of all soul and emotion. My favorite disney cartoon is the lion king, the remake they made in 2019 was just awful, the digital effect made the cartoon totally dull and without that magic thing that the lion king had.
They keep making these live action remakes that allegedly do okay at the box office but who is going to see them? I don’t know anyone who has seen a single one. If you’re giving your money for this schlock, please stop and maybe they’ll make better movies
It needs to be the live action version with the Rock that they spoofed on SNL a few years back. I’d pay good money to see that movie lol.
“They are going to pay. Deerly” haha
The thing about Bambi is that it is renowned for the beauty of its art direction and I can’t see them bothering to replicate that. This is just a no from me UNLESS…I can see them using this as a means of promoting saving our wild spaces and wildlife. That would be a savvy angle and one that Disney would have approved.
As for original projects…hey, Disney folks, I got a variation on your Fairy tale genre for you – and it was inspired by those aimless seeming princes wandering around the woods in Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Six young ‘princes’, aged 18 to 19, orphans basically who have graduated out and are off to start their lives. Six different stories meeting up again in the last story. The Wandering Princes.
What say you, Disney folks?
I still don’t understand why Disney doesn’t make modern ANIMATED remakes of Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty.
I hate how all these remakes crowd out new stories that could be told by hogging film budgets, marketing focus and toy production. Imagination deatheaters.