Deadline has revealed that Disney is now cooking up a live-action Winnie The Pooh, and they’ve hired writer-director Alex Ross Perry (a man with just as many first names as Chad Michael Murray and It Follows director David Robert Mitchell) to write the screenplay.
Deadline’s scoop says that the film will focus on “Christopher Robin as an adult, which brings him back” to the Hundred-Acre wood and his anthropomorphic animal pals, who I highly doubt will have aged in real time along with Christopher Robin.
Look, I know there’s no reason for me to be annoyed by a movie that I’ll never see and was never intended for me in the first place, but there’s something about all these Disney live action remakes that gets me all “old man yells at cloud”. With Pete’s Dragon, The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, Dumbo, Mulan, and now this in the pipeline, it’s kind of a sad reflection of pop culture. I frequently read comments about how studios should just make original things. They WOULD make original things, but the box office numbers say (pretty damn definitely) that most of us prefer the comfort of old things instead. That’s a little sad, I think, because it may be effecting the moviemaking business negatively by preventing more mid-budget originals from getting made.
I know that’s cynical, but don’t get me wrong — I’m not cynical about this movie. This movie is not a problem, or the problem, and I do genuinely want all movies to be good. But there’s something mechanical and weird about how Disney is announcing and developing all these remakes. Disney’s making a big effort to release more movies per year, and that’s good, but there’s so little risk-taking in their process that it seems… downright robotic. “THE HUMANS. THEY LIKE THIS. GIVE THEM MORE.”