What’s next for post-remake Disney?

Dis­ney has announced plans for a ​“live-action” (that is to say, pho­to­re­al­is­tic ani­ma­tion) ver­sion of Bam­bi. Now, a whole new gen­er­a­tion of young­sters can have their child­hoods deci­sive­ly end­ed by the sight of the beloved deer watch­ing its moth­er die, her blood and vis­cera ren­dered with tech­no­log­i­cal fideli­ty from which no one under the age of 12 will ever recover.

That’s just one in a hand­ful of slat­ed remakes com­ing down the pike over at the Mouse House, a line­up includ­ing a Robert Zemeck­is-direct­ed Pinoc­chio, a revi­sion of Peter Pan from David Low­ery, a fresh Snow White with Marc Webb attached, and a revamped Lit­tle Mer­maid star­ring new­com­er Halle Bai­ley. It all nat­u­ral­ly pos­es the ques­tion of when the stu­dio will reach the end of the line and run out of ani­mat­ed clas­sics out of which they can squeeze more money.

They’re fast approach­ing that very point, and a major shift in the busi­ness mod­el can’t be evad­ed much longer. The cen­tral col­umn of the Dis­ney palace has begun to show wear, and if they want to secure their future, there must be a plan to move forward.

One pos­si­bil­i­ty is that Dis­ney will con­tin­ue to strip-mine their own back cat­a­logue, scrap­ing a bit clos­er to the bot­tom of the bar­rel. Name-brand recog­ni­tion has always been the X‑factor mak­ing these pro­duc­tions so appeal­ing to exec­u­tives, but the appeal of recy­cling mate­r­i­al they already own may be too great.

I wrote last year about Disney’s run of live-action movies dur­ing the lat­ter half of the 20^th cen­tu­ry; maybe they’ll give The Com­put­er Wore Ten­nis Shoes anoth­er whack, hav­ing already adapt­ed the 1969 film for TV in 1995.

Per­haps they’ll fol­low the exam­ple of their recent suc­cess­es and hunt for anoth­er Moana or Coco by fun­nel­ing mon­ey into ani­ma­tion that doesn’t pur­port to be real life. Kid stuff still sells, ​“kid stuff” still means ​“things that kids like” and not ​“things appro­pri­ate for chil­dren nonethe­less sold to an audi­ence of adults,” and kids will always like car­toons. This is nature’s law, Frozen-mania proves it, and Dis­ney would do well to start cap­i­tal­iz­ing on the thing they’ve always been best at.

Or per­haps they’ll go a step fur­ther and bring that adven­tur­ous spir­it to the actu­al live-action divi­sion, plac­ing a greater empha­sis on projects with flesh-and-blood actors. They haven’t had much luck sell­ing the pub­lic on releas­es like Queen of Katwe or A Wrin­kle in Time, but the healthy gross­es of 2015’s McFar­land, USA proved that more mature films out­side of the ani­mat­ed realm can be viable for Disney.

But maybe the way for­ward lies in the past. Think back to the late ​’80s, the last time Dis­ney was sore­ly in need of a win. They found their sal­va­tion in pub­lic domain, tap­ping fairy­tales from the Broth­ers Grimm (Cin­derel­la) and Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen (The Lit­tle Mer­maid), myths from abroad (Aladdin), chap­ters of his­to­ry (Poc­a­hon­tas), and free-use Shake­speare (The Lion King). That’s how they end­ed up with Frozen, an Ander­sen sto­ry spiffed up for mod­ern audiences.

With so much mon­ey and such an out­sized influ­ence in the indus­try, there’s lit­tle doubt that Dis­ney can read­i­ly weath­er any storms that might await them. But they can’t keep doing the same thing for­ev­er. Just as the Mar­vel uni­verse approach­es a great reck­on­ing in a post-Cap­tain Amer­i­ca, post-Iron Man world, so too does Dis­ney prop­er need some new inspi­ra­tion. If noth­ing else, the next two years will be piv­otal for the enter­tain­ment sector’s biggest player.