This year, Disney remade yet another classic animated movie, The Little Mermaid, in live-action. But ask anyone, and they will argue that the 1989 animated original is better. What’s happening?

Flash back to a generation ago. In 2007, the Walt Disney Company decided they wanted to try something relatively new. Picking up an old classic, they reimagined it and turned it around into a shiny new product.

Alice in Wonderland had been given another chance at life. Making a billion dollars in the box office, it became the second highest grossing film of 2010. These were numbers Disney had not been close to seeing with its traditional animated movies, or even its 2010 animated movie, Tangled.

Granted, this was no new idea for Disney, who had already released their live-action 101 Dalmatians with success. However, the runaway hit of Alice In Wonderland proved to Disney that live-action remakes could result in blockbuster success.

Thus, the grind began. Live-action remakes were thrown at us left and right. The Jungle Book, The Lion King, Aladdin, Dumbo, and more – they just kept on coming.

Now in 2023, we live in a world where Disney regularly throws out remakes, with no plans of stopping. Looking at an upcoming slate of Disney movies, you will see many remakes of already existing Disney movies on the list.

There’s a good reason for this, too. These movies have consistently raked in Disney’s cash, without spending too much time writing a script or putting out an original idea.

Four of the fourteen remakes so far have made over a billion dollars in the box office and the combined gross of all remakes is close to ten billion dollars. In addition, five of these movies are in the 100 highest grossing films of all time, and The Lion King remake is the ninth highest grossing film of all time.

Despite all the box office receipts however, these films have not gotten an exceptionally positive response. Ask pretty much anyone if they prefer the animated movie or the live-action, and most people will say they prefer the animated movie.

Why is this? An obvious factor for our generation is nostalgia. The age of Disney remakes began at a time when most of us were already older and had watched the originals, therefore having no reason to have to watch a remake. And because we saw the original first, we may just prefer that one as it’s the one that really stuck with us.

Also, as said above, there’s no real reason to remake a movie in live action. We’ve all pretty much seen it before, so why see it again with real actors and actresses? Or in the case of movies like The Lion King, do we really need the same exact thing with photo-realistic animals and landscapes?

The medium of animation also tends to appeal more to these movies. The dilemma is that these live-action remakes are intended to be a more realistic reimaging of the original movie.

For example, if a talking crab sings a funny song in animation, everyone laughs and no one bats an eye. If a realistic CGI crab decides to sing to a real human, it will generally be seen as creepy and unnerving.

Looking at the website Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates critics scores and determines what percentage of them are positive, only the Jungle Book and Pete’s Dragon remakes have high critic scores.

While we may think these remakes are unoriginal and unnecessary, Disney doesn’t care. As long as the remakes are making money, there will be more of them.

This plan is not without its flaws. As Sony CEO Tom Rothman said, “…even Disney will run out of animated movies to remake.” However, with many still not remade classics, upcoming prequels, and money flowing plentifully, it is unlikely that this trend will come to an end soon.