The Best Disney Live-Action Remake, According To Rotten Tomatoes

In 2010, Disney scored an unexpectedly large hit with Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland," a film that cost a sizable $200 million to make but which inexplicably raked in over a billion dollars worldwide. I say "inexplicably" because the film wasn't terribly well-liked by critics; it currently holds an unimpressive 51% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Although it had the same title as Disney's 1951 animated film "Alice in Wonderland," it was more of a sequel than a remake, following Alice (Mia Wasikowsa) back into Wonderland after she had already become an adult. There, she found the fantasy kingdom had been split by war and violence, leading her to don a suit of armor and take up a sword to make things right.

Disney had remade some of its animated movies before ("The Jungle Book" in 1994, "101 Dalmatians" in 1996), but "Alice" ushered in a new trend for the studio. Over the 15 years that followed, Disney re-milked its own properties with pointed aggression, peppering theaters with a vast slew of nostalgia-bait reboots. Some of the films in this trend served as reexaminations of familiar characters ("Maleficent," "Cruella"), while others were outright remakes that went so far as to reuse the same songs as their predecessors ("The Jungle Book," "Beauty and the Beast," "The Little Mermaid," "The Lion King," "Aladdin," "Snow White"). These films have, for the most part, been wildly successful, even if most strike audiences as being creatively bankrupt.

Importantly, all of these Disney remakes took elements, character designs, and plots from the animated features that inspired them, ensuring that Disney, the company, still had absolute mastery over these stories. Indeed, the Mouse House insists on controlling the "default" version of certain fairy tales, even those that come from folklore or literature. The remakes re-up the studio's cognitive "ownership."

In terms of quality, the remakes have been mixed at best. That said, Rotten Tomatoes can at least point us to the films that have been most warmly received by critics.

As of this writing, Jon Favreau's 2016 film "The Jungle Book" is the best-reviewed Disney live-action remake, with a 94% approval rating. The movie is, of course, but one of many adaptations of Rudyard Kipling's 1894 adventure novel of the same name. But, really, it's a remake of Wolfgang Reitherman's animated adaptation that Disney released in 1967. It has several of the same songs (by the Sherman Brothers), and Favreau's visuals were clearly constructed to evoke that film. In a special effects coup, the bulk of "The Jungle Book" is animated, with the talking animal characters and most of the backgrounds being CGI. The only consistently live-action element is Mowgli, played by Neel Sethi. A spate of celebrities also voiced the animal characters, including Ben Kinglsey as Bagheera, Idris Elba as Shere Khan, Scarlett Johansson as Kaa, Christopher Walken as King Louis, and Bill Murray as Baloo.

Critics praised Favreau's film for its visuals while also finding it to be more thoughtful and meaningful than the 1967 animated movie that inspired it. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane was one of the rare detractors, arguing that the dazzling visuals were in service of advancing technology and didn't communicate story or humanity very well.

Favreau would use a similar approach to all-encompassing special effects when he remade 1994's "The Lion King" in 2019. Despite often being described as a live-action, the film is almost wholly animated in a photorealistic fashion (save for, literally, a single live-action shot) and also used the same songs as its predecessor. The result was less well-received, however, as the photorealistic lions were inexpressive; they looked too much like real animals. What's more, "The Lion King" is one of the worst-reviewed movies in the Disney-remake trend, sporting a 52% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was, however, an even bigger hit than "Alice in Wonderland," making $1.66 billion at the box office. A prequel, titled "Mufasa: The Lion King," was released in 2024.

The second-highest approval rating for a Disney remake on Rotten Tomatoes was given to the 2016 version of "Pete's Dragon," which was directed by David Lowery and holds an 88% rating based on 244 reviews. It also stands apart from the studio's other remakes since "Pete's Dragon" is strikingly different from its predecessor, taking a more soulful, realistic approach to the material. Up next after that is Kenneth Branagh's 2015 redux of "Cinderella," which has an 84% approval rating and actually bothered to flesh out its story in interesting ways. Notably, the Wicked Stepmother (Cate Blanchett) was given a sympathetic backstory that made her feel a little more tragic (but not so sympathetic that she wasn't a villain).

Sitting in fourth place on the list is Stephen Sommers' live-action 1994 adaptation of "The Jungle Book," which holds an 80% approval rating. Notably, however, that movie wasn't hearkening back to Disney's 1967 animated film; it was just a new interpretation of Kipling's original tale. This brings us to "Cruella," the fifth highest-rated Disney remake and an only-okay-at-best character study directed by Craig Gillespie. The 2021 movie was based on an odd idea in that it aspired to create a complex and myth-heavy backstory for Cruella De Vil (Emma Stone), a woman who merely wanted to skin a bunch of Dalmatian puppies to make a fur coat in "One Hundred and One Dalmatians."

Skipping ahead to the bottom of the list, we have Robert Zemeckis' "Pinocchio," which poured tons of money into a live-action and CGI revamping of Disney's 1940 animated film yet felt pointless and visually busy, earning it a 27% approval rating. It's rated even lower than 1996's "One Hundred and One Dalmatians" reboot "101 Dalmatians," a live-action movie starring a brilliant Glenn Close as Cruella De Vil.