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 ▣ Aladdin (1992)
A very blue (and not in the R-rated sense) Will Smith attempts to fill the shoes of the late Robin Williams in the role of the wisecracking Genie in this 2019 take on Disney's hit 1992 film from director Guy Ritchie—not exactly the first person you'd think of to guide a Disney film. But mediocre reviews and some pre-release controversies about casting decisions didn't hamper the film's commercial prospects; instead, Aladdin grossed over $1 billion worldwide.
“No one really needs this mostly middling, fitfully funny and never unpleasant movie. And the movie itself seems cheerfully aware of that fact as it deftly lifts lines, beats, characters and songs from its 1992 predecessor, every so often punching up the comedy, wrinkling the plot and injecting a dash of politically corrective subtext.” —Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times