It has been a long time since we had a good outer space thriller or horror movie. The market may be primed for a comeback. And for Disney, there’s a great property just waiting to throw its gravitas at the genre.
This article is a guest submission from Martin Stone. Thank you to Martin for sharing this topic with our readers!
Disney’s slate of remade classics have been money makers, and therefore not business mistakes. In fact if anything, you can say it’s a safe play in an era where regular people use terms like “intellectual property” and a legion of content creators are ready make reaction videos for announcement teasers so long as enough people know the search terms to use. So safe one might even say the strategy is timid.
Where do we begin with Disney’s remakes? That’s a serious question, because arguably Disney’s foundation is taking existing stories and adapting them for middle American sensibilities. It’s a tale as old as time.
You think you hate what Disney did to Star Wars or your favorite Marvel hero? You should read what Tolkien thought about Disney’s take on folklore. So, let’s limit ourselves for the time being to Disney retelling stories that they’ve already told. But that leaves a lot of space too, so let’s further limit ourselves to those times where the story was updated for a modern audience. Alice (In Wonderland) was once a stubborn little girl who ran away from her nanny? Nope, now she’s a liberated woman that the world can’t handle! Maleficent is an innate force of evil? Nope, she’s the victim of a very personal assault and is seeking revenge on her assailant which regretfully involves an innocent.
There are a lot of factors at play in this wave of reimagined nostalgia-based cash-grabbery. Disney’s storytellers, for instance, seem less interested in honoring the achievements which paved the way for their opportunities and more interested in claiming the space for themselves. There’s a lot of “SEE DAD! I HAVE IDEAS!” running around Hollywood today. There’s also clearly some fan baiting going on. Those remakes in the ‘90’s and early ‘00’s weren’t advertised as something brave or challenging, they were comfortable with a few changes. I get the feeling that if the Shaggy Dog were remade again today there would be an anti-police undertone where the main character (a district attorney) would see the brutality of what he’s put people through.
Still though, all these remakes are timid and weak-willed. They are monolithic in the global metropolitan world view. How brave is it to use shareholder money to pester your suburbanite siblings while your friends cheer you on?
Creatives, would you like to be brave? Take something that didn’t work, pull it apart, clean the pieces, put it back together again and see if you can make it run. Do it with love for the audience and the people who did their best before you got there.
There were other times when Disney was in the creative doldrums and each project was like the last, but whether out of bravery or desperation (which is bravery without another choice) they struck out on another path. The Disney of the late 1970’s was being left behind by the new era in film making where big budget features were being made with the energy of
Saturday serials and the king of them all was Star Wars. Disney decided to leverage their talent for special effects and jump into Science Fiction in a big way with The Black Hole.
The Black Hole wasn’t an adventure movie like Star Wars, or a drama like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Black Hole featured a space station on the edge of an event horizon run by a mad scientist on the edge of sanity. It was a throwback to science fiction’s true origins: horror.
Alas, Disney was not ready to make that kind of movie, and we’ll never know if America was ready to see it from them. Eventually we would see them make Something Wicked This Way Comes and nearly see them make The Black Cauldron, but this first outing could have been something special.
If you want to recast Robert Forrester’s character as a black guy, go ahead, Idris Elba would be
great in it. Cut out the cutesy robot, fine I guess, but what’s Alan Tudyk going to play? You can play in this sandbox all you want and NO ONE will mind so long as you make it into the Sci-Fi Horror epic it was always meant to be.
I guess what I’m saying is remake The Black Hole, you cowards!
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