Disney’s production line of live-action remakes has regularly come under fire, and with good reason. Far too many of them completely fail to justify their own existence, and it wouldn’t be too harsh to name Bill Condon’s Beauty and the Beast as one of the most prominent offenders.
The 1991 original was a game-changer in every sense of the word, reinvigorating the Mouse House’s stagnant animation division on its way to $440 million at the box office on a budget of $25 million, as well as becoming not just the first animated feature to win a Golden Globe for Best Picture in the Musical or Comedy category, but the first to land an Academy Award nod for Best Picture.
The main problem with Condon’s star-studded and admittedly visually dazzling $200 million do-over is that it pads out its running time with a raft of superfluous – and ultimately tedious – additional subplots that are clearly just there to be window dressing. Of course, given that its predecessor came in at a rapid-fire 84 minutes that was to be expected, but you can feel every second of the additional 45 that’s been thrown into the blockbuster reimagining.
Not that it mattered when Beauty and the Beast would go on to net upwards of $1.2 billion at the box office, reaffirming once more that Disney diehards would turn out in their droves based on name recognition alone. The spinoff series may be dead in the water, but the film itself has been dancing in the moonlight on streaming this week, with FlixPatrol divulging that the star-crossed romance between Emma Watson and Dan Stevens’ title characters has been a mainstay of the iTunes charts.
Published: Feb 14, 2023 12:46 pm