Atlantis and Treasure Planet Would Make Good Live-Action Remakes

I’ve had some thoughts about Disney’s recent live action remakes, so I figured now would be as good a time as any to write them up since The Lion King just came out recently and we’re coming off a four month stretch that saw three total release (and with two more coming in the next four months).

I have my issues with them, I guess. I usually get around to seeing them eventually, but none of them really strikes me as substantially better than the original. Maybe The Jungle Book, since it seemed to have more of a unified through-line the original? But the original was never one of my favorites growing up, so I haven’t seen it in years and might be remembering things incorrectly.

Really, I just don’t have strong feelings about any of them so far. But I know they’re going to keep coming since they make so much money, so I figured I’d throw in my two cents on what I would do, for at least a little bit (since that will clearly influence Disney CEOs and make them restructure all of their plans).

And really, my two cents boil down to “make live action versions of Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire”. And yeah, some of this is that those movies were two of my favorites growing up. But there are plenty of reasons I think remaking these two films specifically would be a good move outside of my personal nostalgia poisoning.

Meet the Robinsons Is Two Clicks Off of Being a Disney Classic

I love Disney movies (that may have been obvious already, not sure), and I love time travel movies (may not be as obvious), so I figured it was long overdo for me to revisit what remains to this day the only film in the Disney Animated Canon to tackle time travel, 2007's Meet the Robinsons.

The movie has kind of been forgotten, which maybe isn't too surprising; it did come out at a rather low point in Disney's history, after all, on the heels of a string of failures in the first few years of the millennium.* But, it came right before the turnaround that lead to the re-invigoration of the studio, where we find it today once again something of a juggernaut, and appropriately enough, contains a lot of very strong points in what's otherwise a solid but occasionally uneven movie.

*I don't feel like getting too into the nitty-gritty of each movie, but I feel like it's pretty safe to say the only unqualified success for the studio in the early 2000s was Lilo and Stitch. And while there were some good movies in that stretch that underperformed, I don't think I'll run into too much resistance in saying that the three films immediately preceding Meet the Robinsons, namely Chicken Little, Home on the Range, and Brother Bear, are all among Disney's weakest feature films.