A time traveller arriving in 2019 from two decades ago wouldn’t experience much of a culture shock from the cinema listings. New instalments in the Men in Black, Godzilla, Child’s Play and Toy Story franchises would help them acclimatise, as would Disney’s remorseless campaign of photorealistic, computer-generated remakes of its animated back catalogue. Now that the trend is in full swing, it’s probably time to decide on a collective noun for such movies. An inevitability? A despair? A flog?
Though the studio has plundered older material such as The Jungle Book and Dumbo, remakes of its Nineties titles are providing rich pickings, with Beauty and the Beast (over $1.2bn worldwide) the most successful yet and Aladdin ($960m) not far behind. Mulan is forthcoming, and now there is The Lion King, which boasts such an intense degree of photographic detail that the film resembles a David Attenborough documentary with show-tunes.
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