On Tuesday, Disney boss Bob Iger announced that the company will make a reboot of the Christmas film ‘Home Alone’. It’s just another classic that Disney is going to put in a new jacket. Lucrative for the company, but the fans seem less happy with these plans.
On Tuesday, Disney added a new name to their list of reboots: ‘Home Alone’, the 1990 family film in which an abandoned Macaulay Culkin has to defend his home against burglars. Not a bad choice for Disney, as the film raised more than $470 million worldwide, making it the most profitable live-action comedy ever, until ‘The Hangover Part II’ broke the record in 2011.
It seems that Disney wants to make some easy money with the reboot. Disney boss Bob Iger also announced the company’s quarterly figures on Tuesday, and despite major successes from home movies, Disney’s earnings fell short of expectations. This is partly due to the acquisition of 21st Century Fox earlier this year.
Not only did the reorganization of the company cost a lot of money, but the revenue from Fox films was also disappointing. ‘Dark Phoenix’, among others, flopped heavily at the box office. Fortunately, Disney knows that recycled classics, of which ‘The Lion King’ and ‘Alladin’ are some recent examples, raise a lot of money.
The nine reboots who played for ‘The Lion King’, for example, already raised around 3.6 billion dollars. And since there are more than twenty other films waiting for a similar freshening up, that amount will be considerably increased in the future.
Ideas exhausted
But it looks like Disney is pushing its recycling rage a little too far. More fans of the first hour criticized the lack of original material and beg the company to leave the classics alone – after all, they have become classics for some reason. For example, a certain David Cottongim writes on Twitter: “Hey Disney!! Stop screwing up my childhood! Quit doing remakes of movies and come up with an original idea for once! Take away comic book movies from marvel and you haven’t had and original idea since 2017.” CineramaFilm also asks questions: “Does ‘Home Alone’ really need a Disney reboot? Or is this yet another sign of a studio that has run out of ideas, clinging to older successes as a cash cow?”
The answer is simple: the studio does indeed prefer to play safely. A remake of those old successes guarantees a low risk with a high reward. Those who saw the films as a child now take their own children to the remakes or go out to watch nostalgia.
Whether the films are well received by critics or not, the curiosity is strong enough to make the register ring. And Disney did not have to take a lot of risk for that. That means a lot at a time when the least flop can be quite a blow to the bill – just think of ‘Dark Phoenix’ that turned the quarterly figures from Disney into the wrong direction.
