No, I don’t mean will Belle team up with her fellow princess’ for a balls-out fight against the forces of darkness.
Rather I speak of Beauty and the Beast’s (BATB) astounding $930 million run at the box office after only three weeks on release. Within two more weeks we’re going to be looking at the first 2017 released movie to break the $1 billion mark.
The sounds of popping champagne corks must be echoing through the halls of Disney headquarters. After the twin success’ of Cinderella and The Jungle Book, Disney really doubled down on the whole live-action adaptations, and man, have they been rewarded in BATB!
But like any major studio success, I sense competitors will soon be sniffing around to try and see how they can profit of such success.
Now to be fair, this has been happening for decades. The release of Star Wars in 1977 meant EVERYONE wanted to jump on the space-bandwagon. Alien, Moonraker, Battlestar Galactica and (*shudder*) Buck Rogers in the 25th Century are just a few of the numerous copycats.
More recently The Dark Knight turned out to have a massive impact on cinema. Remember the ridiculous number of films that kept writing villains who planned to be caught?
But the real big dog is undoubtedly 2012’s The Avengers. With just one film, Hollywood jumped on the whole “shared universe” idea. I’m mean right now we have:
- The DC Cinematic Universe
- The MonsterVerse Universe
- The “Universal Monsters” Universe
- The now dead Spiderman Universe
- The X-men Universe
- The Star Wars Universe
As well as numerous others (Transformers, Hanna-Barbera) that are in development.
And with the success of BATB, I believe we are witnessing the birth of a new cinematic trend: The Live-Action remake.
To be fair, Disney pretty much jumped on this with the success of Cinderella. We can now expect a grand total of 22 live-action remakes including The Lion King, Mulan, The Sword in the Stone and (very weirdly) a Cruella De Vil origin story starring Emma Stone.
But I guarantee every other studio is going to be scouring their back catalogue and frantically trying to decide what animated films could be turned into live-action.
So, I’m calling it now. By 2025 we will have, in some form of production, a live-action version of:
- The Nightmare before Christmas Produced by Tim Burton and Henry Selick (and maybe directed by one of them)
- How To Train Your Dragon (but this depends on how long it takes to get the third animated film out the door)
- The Iron Giant (hopefully with some involvement from Brad Bird)
- Anastasia
- The Land Before Time (possibly done in the vein of The Jungle Book)
Do you have any non-Disney animated films that you’d like to see in live-action? Or do you think this craze will peter out pretty soon? Let me know in the comments!
Sources: Box Office Mojo,
Photo Credits: io9, The Will Box, People, io9, Giphy, George Spigot, Disney Australia, Comic Vine, The Deep Dark Secret, Toonami
Circle of Cinema 
Anastasia is I think a pretty safe bet. How To Train Your Dragon is a bit too mordern I think and it’s successful enough that they’ll probably still be making sequels by 2025. I’m also kinda disappointed that Beauty and the Beast did THIS well. This is in contrast to the comparatively more creative stuff liveaction fare they’ve produced that has flopped (like Tomorrowland, Pan). Now Disney’s not going to try new stuff or take any risks cause it’s got 22 (!) remakes in the pipeline (which might be 20 billion dollars worth of box office returns), that will most probably, following in the vein of BATB, barely differentiate themselves from the source material and just be straight up live action versions of the same stories which unfortunately fails to excite me at all (but a How to Train your Dragon live action movie would be pretty cool)
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I agree. BATB’s success is such a massive blow for original Disney films for at least the next decade. Especially when you add in the Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar films!
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