Every Disney Live Action Remake, Ranked
Updated May 2023 to add The Little Mermaid and Peter Pan & Wendy
For over 25 years, Disney has been looking inward for inspiration for its live-action films, using its vast and beloved catalog of animated features as source material for remakes. Buoyed by mostly strong box office numbers, those remakes have been increasing in frequency in recent years, with six arriving just since the start of 2019 and many more expected to arrive in the next few years.
In the gallery above, we rank each of Disney's live-action remakes (from 1994's The Jungle Book to the just-released The Little Mermaid) from best to worst by Metascore, which reflects the critical consensus for each film.
Remake of The Lion King (1994)
You may not consider an almost entirely computer-animated film to be a "live-action" remake, but Disney sure does. Regardless, critics appear to be just about the only people who didn't love Disney's 2019 remake of its 1994 hit. Directed by Jon Favreau and featuring a cast led by Donald Glover, Beyoncé (who also released a companion album), Seth Rogen, and Chiwetel Ejiofor, the new Lion King easily became the highest-grossing remake (Disney or otherwise) in history, exceeding $1.6 billion in worldwide receipts. And the film's animated nature enabled it to become the rare Disney remake to return one of the original film's stars: James Earl Jones, reprising his role as Mufasa.
But critics found the result, which at times veers into shot-for-shot remake territory, artistically inferior to the original, with the new film's photorealistic animation diminishing, rather than boosting, its overall impact.
“While it’s a near shot-for-shot remake of the original, this version of The Lion King lacks much of the emotion and expressiveness that keeps people coming back to the first. ... Someone who’s never seen the original version could probably enjoy this strictly inferior clone. But why should they?” —Kendra James, The Verge
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