Blockbuster movies don’t get much stranger than the Disney live-action remake. Beginning in earnest with 2015’s Cinderella (2014 if you count Maleficent, which I do not), there’s been at least one new film every year, culminating in 2019 with a staggering four live-action remakes of animated classics. Just about every single one of them is an oddity: massively successful but never really beloved — buzzed about more for the litany of ways they disappoint than their box-office success. You’d think some of them became billion-dollar films by accident, falling ass-backwards into piles of money the vast majority of filmmakers have never dreamed of making.
Watching them all — and you can watch just about every one now, thanks to Disney Plus — feels weird more than anything else. If you’re someone who grew up with the animated classics they adapt, screening most of these…
