A live-action Bambi is coming: not another one or maybe it will be good?
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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.
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