With Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey in talks to helm a live-action remake of Tangled, it’s clearer than ever that Walt Disney Pictures is determined to remake as many movies as possible in the Walt Disney Animation Studios canon. No matter how critically derided or creatively bankrupt these projects may get, they prove lucrative enough at the worldwide box office to get Disney executives excited. Snow White and Lilo & Stitch are on the way for 2025, while remakes of Moana, Hercules, and Bambi are in various stages of development. This cinematic trend cannot and will not be stopped.
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Even as Disney begins to exploit 2010s Disney Animation Studios canon releases, it’s worth remembering that not every title from that collection of movies is bound to get a live-action update. As you’ll see ahead, certain Walt Disney Animation Studios releases have larger issues at play ensuring they’ll almost certainly not get a live-action update. History could prove this list was comically off-base, but right now it looks like these productions won’t be coming to a theater near you in live-action form anytime soon.
Pocahontas
Pocahontas has not aged well, though it was always cringe-inducing and controversial with Indigenous viewers. The film’s ham-fisted “both sides” treatment of colonizers and American Indigenous community’s first meeting would take so much reworking to function as a modern movie that you might as well just make a fresh feature. Composer Alan Menken has even explicitly said Pocahontas isn’t on the table for a live-action remake. Unless it’s a brief Pocahontas cameo divorced from her solo movie like in Ralph Breaks the Internet, don’t expect this character and “All the Colors of the Wind” to appear on the big screen in the near future.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Every few months, a clickbait website will claim that Tom Holland or another hot young white actor is in talks to play Milo Thatch in a live-action Atlantis: The Lost Empire remake. However, there’s absolutely no way Walt Disney Pictures is going near this title or fellow early 2000s action animated feature Treasure Planet for the live-action remake treatment. The biggest of these Disney remakes are fantasy musicals. Eschewing that mold for explosions didn’t help Atlantis back in the early 2000s, it certainly wouldn’t lead to box office success as a live-action movie in the 2020s.
Zootopia
Now that Walt Disney Pictures is dipping its toes into the 2010s Disney Animation catalog with updates of Moana and Tangled, maybe a Zootopia remake in the mold of The Lion King or The Jungle Book eventually transpires. Don’t count on it, though. Even by the standards of Disney remakes, just doing another CG-animated version of Zootopia but with fewer colors and vivid facial expressions just doesn’t sound like an exciting or marketable concept. It wouldn’t even provide a new medium of animation for characters like Judy Hopps to exist in, whereas the two modern Lion King movies upgraded Simba and company to CG.
Home on the Range
Home on the Range was a detested box office bomb when it first opened in theaters in April 2004 and time hasn’t improved its reputation. While fellow early 2000s Disney Animation bombs Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire have sizable cult followings, Home on the Range has languished in obscurity. That alone suggests it isn’t primed for a live-action remake. To seal the deal, though, Range is a Western, a genre with limited international box office appeal. Considering these remakes are supposed to pull in $1+ billion globally, Home on the Range is a non-starter as a live-action remake.
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The Black Cauldron
Doing a straightforward remake of Disney’s The Black Cauldron doesn’t have much appeal, especially since the feature was a box office dud that’s mostly unknown today. Disney returning to the film’s source material, The Chronicles of Prydain, and doing a more faithful live-action adaptation of that saga — now that has potential. Walt Disney Pictures was once pursuing such a project, but it’s been years since there were any other developments in the production. If a live-action iteration of The Black Cauldron was going to exist, it would’ve already happened.
Tarzan
Tarzan is by far the oddest entry on this list because it seems, on paper, like prime fodder for a live-action remake. It has a largely human cast. The 1999 Tarzan was a massive box office hit with songs people still hum today. Disney’s exploited it plenty of times after 1999 with things like direct-to-video follow-ups and a Broadway show. However, the extra wrinkle here is that Tarzan is based on characters Disney can’t just use whenever it wants.
Unlike nearly all other Walt Disney Animation Studio protagonists (who are either original or fully public domain creations), the character of Tarzan is still under trademark from the estate of author Edgar Rice Burroughs. Even though the earliest Tarzan stories are in the public domain, a live-action update of the Disney movie would require collaborating with an outside entity. With that issue at play, the Mouse House won’t be approaching live-action versions of songs like “Son of Man” anytime soon.
