ByPaul Tassi,
Senior Contributor.
The first trailer for the live-action version of Moana went live yesterday, which is almost a 1:1 shot-for-shot remake of the original movie, leading to a common question: Why?
Why take an extremely good animated movie like Moana and slap a live-action cast over it in the exact same scenes and sequences? What’s the point of this? The answer, of course, is money. Not just money, but money money. Easy money, in this case for Disney, where it now seems almost mandatory to do these live-action remakes every year. We are talking serious cash here. Take a look:
Given the popularity of the original Moana, I don’t think there’s any way that we see less than a billion-dollar gross for the live-action movie. It’s a “free” billion, at that. No, obviously the cost of the movie itself will be high, but it’s just…look at the original movie, recreate all the shots and dialogue, and you’re good to go. That hasn’t been true of all of these, but that appears to be the case with Moana here. Even if not, there is no amount of work that goes into a movie like this that will not justify an inevitable billion dollars at the box office. God help us when the live-action Frozen movie comes out.
