The Jungle Book has been the least awful of these liveaction movies so far, and that's mostly just because of it's stellar visuals rather than its story. None of these film feel genuine. All I see is Disney so desperately looking for a quick buck.
Jungle Book is really the only life action film that makes sense in the Disney cannon as all other live adaptations of the story have been lack lustre because the animals. With CG you can create the emotive characters you want, an essentially do whatever does the story the most in terms of service. Though other films, it's just gonna be a passing fad, and six years from now no ones gonna remember the life action ones.
Disney as a creative enterprise is really circling the drain at this point in my opinion.
It goes with the territory that film studios that get too big to have a major failure are conservative by nature from a money and ideas point of view. Disney is no different, instead of trying to find something new and interesting or come up with a new film or hell a new animated feature, this is what we get, and what we will continue to get until at some point it proves unpopular and you have a Star Wars style box office meltdown, or the luddites run out of material to go watch.
People watch or at least used to watch Disney for their timeless animation films. Even their live actions back in the day, such as Pete's Dragon were also good serviceable films.
They missed the boat with Pixar when they didn't amalgamate it into the main company, so they weren't really ever able to compete with that brand in computer animation, and where Pixar didn't dominate, Dreamworks picked up the slack, essentially putting a Disney's own brand out of the market.
And so instead of actually coming up with new stories, it's easier to "cash in" on the large group of suckers who love the originals and will pay to see the rehash of kids of their own. As opposed to actually re-releasing the original movies for general cinema view.
Either way I won't be seeing them. If I do, I will do so in a way to prevent Disney from being rewarded for their creative bankruptcy.
