LILO & STITCH - Yep, Another Disney Live-Action Remake

[AndyDursin]

Oh there's no argument, there's no doubt they'll all be forgotten -- and it's a deadly era for cinema, as Disney's desire for quick cash is stifling competition and innovation. This model cannot endure forever.

I'm just saying THIS one is going to do better than THE LITTLE MERMAID and probably ALADDIN domestically because the character is hugely popular. It's not even the movie so much as the character.

The original LILO AND STITCH was not a blockbuster when it came out -- it certainly wasn't THE LION KING. It did fine, but it really was a good, quality film and more audiences got to it on video for years.

Between the series that followed there's just a big, huge amount of young viewers/teens who love the character and have consumed all of that content on Disney+ and Disney Channel before it. I've never seen Disney World where every other shirt literally was Stitch. They are primed up for this movie. This isn't like "Black Ariel" you know?

If they just have him running around doing his shtick that audience is going to be happy, which is why reviews/quality of the movie -- especially in this instance -- is going to matter LESS than some of the others they've turned out.

[Monterey Jack]

Oh there's no argument, there's no doubt they'll all be forgotten -- and it's a deadly era for cinema, as Disney's desire for quick cash is stifling competition and innovation. This model cannot endure forever.

As much money as these remakes gross in the short term, they're strangling the imaginations of an entire generations' worth of children, forced to choke down the movies their Millennial parents grew up with on VHS and DVD, only with all of the charm, vibrancy and hand-crafted appeal leached out in favor of chiding social-conditioning lessons ("Screw 'Ohana', or wishing to be a real boy, that's not realistic...!" ). And it's not even their own properties Disney's been doing this to for the last decade, shooting out Rob Bottin-style tentacles to ensnare and engulf things like The Muppets, the Marvel comics characters and Star Wars, replicate it on a cellular level, and put out a hollow facsimile that looks like what you remember from childhood, but with all of the humanity stripped away.

[Monterey Jack]

So charming, so whimsical, so heartwarming...!

[AndyDursin]

Well, I voted to cut the lawn instead, but Theo liked/loved it, and Joanne said it "was perfectly decent," and she'd be the first to tell me it sucked.

My guess is this movie probably isn't the worst of these Disney films but the critic-koolaid drinkers have decided to crap on it because they couldn't dump on Rachel Zeigler. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's not good, but I have a hard time believing it's as bad as a couple of those reviews claimed.

[Monterey Jack]

My guess is this movie probably isn't the worst of these Disney films but the critic-koolaid drinkers have decided to crap on it because they couldn't dump on Rachel Zegler. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's not good, but I have a hard time believing it's as bad as a couple of those reviews claimed.

Oh, I have zero doubt the violent distaste for this is trickle-down outrage for the last decade's worth of mediocre/awful Disney remakes critics had to bite their tongues over because they thought they'd be branded "racist" for planning them, but as soon as we got one where the characters had the exact skintone as the characters in the animated original, they were allowed to vent. I'll never know, because I've refused to sit through any of these remakes since the dreadful Zemeckis version of Pinocchio. I don't even get any performative frisson out of hate-watching these anymore, they just bore me to tears, the same way I dropped D+ because the recent MCU and SW stuff has all been lousy.

[AndyDursin]

As I said when we went to Disney, this movie's box-office result is the singular most unsurprising thing I've ever seen. We couldn't walk around Disney World without seeing Stitch EVERYWHERE on shirts, blankets, towels...and this was BEFORE this movie's marketing blitz came out.

From Variety's box-office recap today --

Stitch-themed merchandise has been all the rage long before he and Lilo returned to the big screen. In 2024, Disney sold $2.6 billion in consumer products featuring the “Lilo & Stitch” characters

It'll be even higher in 2025.

Maybe the biggest surprise is Disney wasn't directing this movie to the big-screen from the start!