Just because public domain stories are ready, willing, and able to be adapted by anyone in any way they see fit, it doesn’t always mean it’s the wisest course of action. It might be a stroke of fortune that Peter Pan & Wendy can only be found on streaming, then, because recent history hasn’t been too kind to the iconic fable at the box office.
Pete’s Dragon and The Green Knight director David Lowery’s lavish live-action remake of the 1953 animated classic marks the third feature-length Peter Pan blockbuster to arrive in the last 20 years, and the other two both tanked spectacularly for their troubles. P.J. Hogan’s more faithful adaptation of the source material may have won decent enough reviews, but it lost a fortune.
Joe Wright’s Pan somehow managed to fare substantially worse, with the widely-panned flight of fancy failing to recoup its mammoth $150 million production costs, going down in history as one of the heftiest bombs in cinema history. Peter Pan & Wendy never needed to exist, but the Mouse House must mine any IP for all it’s worth, so debuting it exclusively on-demand was at least a sensible compromise.
It may be under fire by way of a targeted review-bombing campaign, but Peter Pan & Wendy has at least conspired to do the minimum that was expected of it by becoming the platform’s biggest hit overnight. Per FlixPatrol, the largely pointless and entirely forgettable redux has claimed the number one spot on the Disney Plus charts in 46 countries, even though you get the distinct impression nobody’s going to be talking about it a month from now.
