The increasingly rotten trend of turning classic Disney animations into wretched live-action, or photorealistic, remakes looks set to reach its nadir with next month’s release of The Little Mermaid, already a viral nightmare for its horrifying confirmation that adding lips to both a crab and a fish is indeed a crime against humanity. Its looming ugliness does at least help to make this month’s far more hushed release of the inoffensively fine Peter Pan & Wendy seem dreamy in comparison.
It almost seems foolish at this stage to question the necessity of such a thing, given the crushing commercial inevitability of it, but it’s impossible to watch yet another take on JM Barrie’s impish hero without wondering why we’re here once again. Unlike so many of Disney’s other remakes, the story of Peter Pan has also been told elsewhere on an apparent loop since the studio’s 1953 animated adventure. Within the last 20 years alone, PJ Hogan had a go with 2003’s Peter Pan (a major, almost $100m-losing flop), Joe Wright tried again in 2015 with the more radical Pan (another massive failure, this time rumoured to have cost the studio almost $150m), Benh Zeitlin went even more radical with the underwhelming Wendy in 2020 and, with far less fanfare, we’ve also seen 2011’s Syfy series Neverland, a much-ridiculed 2014 live retelling on NBC, 2020’s semi-homage Come Away with Angelina Jolie and 2022’s little-seen The Lost Girls. It’s been a bombardment especially given how so many of them have been, ahem, panned.
