Lilo and Stitch (2025) and How to Train Your Dragon (2025) are Disney and DreamWorks’ newest additions to their collections of live-action remakes of animated movies. In recent years, notable releases include Snow White (2024), The Little Mermaid (2023), and Peter Pan and Wendy (2023). Despite the supply of remakes of classic animated movies, box offices and ratings show that audiences don’t appreciate them, and neither do I. I, along with many other movie-goers, have noticed that recently, almost every movie that comes out is either a sequel, a remake, or part of a huge franchise. We are in a drought of original, modern stories. I blame Disney and their constant remakes.  

The biggest argument out there is to invest in new stories instead of rehashing old ones. Unless there are new interpretations or modern updates to a story, a remake is just money at the box office and noise in the media. Remakes often don’t have anything to add; for example, the new How to Train Your Dragon (2025) movie was almost a complete copy of the original 2010 movie. I enjoyed it, of course, because the first movie was amazing, but that doesn’t mean it is worthwhile to make a new movie.  

Disney and Pixar’s newest stories have generally been successful; here are some original stories they have released within the last five years and their Rotten Tomatoes score.  

Encanto (2021) – 92%  

Luca (2021) – 91%  

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) – 93% 

Soul (2020) – 95% 

Elio (2025) – 83% 

Elemental (2023) – 73%  

Turning Red (2022) – 95% 

Onward (2020)- 88% 

Of course, Rotten Tomatoes is not an unbiased, objective source, but it generally measures how audiences receive a movie. Clearly, we enjoy unique stories. Now, let’s compare how audiences liked original animated Disney movies compared to their recent live-action adaptations.  

Aladdin (1992) – 95% 

Aladdin (2019) – 57% 

Mulan (1998) – 91% 

Mulan (2020) – 72% 

The Lion King (1994) – 92% 

The Lion King (2019) – 54% 

The Little Mermaid (1989) – 92% 

The Little Mermaid (2023) – 67% 

Beauty and the Beast (1991) – 95% 

Beauty and the Beast (2017) – 71% 

Snow White (1938) – 97% 

Disney’s Snow White (2025) – 39% 

The average score of original movies is 94%, a great score by Tomatoes’ standards. The average score of remakes is 60%, which tells of a pretty bad movie. So why are these studios still investing so much time and labor into movies that are probably not going to be thoroughly enjoyed by viewers? Why are they revisiting old stories when we clearly don’t want them? 

The newest original Disney Pixar movie, Elio (2025), is an animated coming-of-age Sci-Fi adventure about friendship and family. I recommend the movie, although it’s not among other iconic tear-jerker movies from Pixar, such as Up, Coco, and Inside Out. I believe this is because Elio’s identity wasn’t explored in the movie the way the director intended. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Adrian Molina, the original director and a gay, Latinx man, planned on Elio being a queer character with an interest in fashion. However, higher-ups at Pixar stepped in and erased Elio’s queerness from the film. “Suddenly, you remove this big, key piece, which is all about identity, and Elio just becomes about totally nothing,” one of the co-directors of the movie, Madeline Sharafian, says. Evidently, the movie “bombed with just $20.8 million domestically, the lowest opening frame at the box office in Pixar’s history.” Disney blamed fans for the movie flopping, saying “Stop complaining that Disney doesn’t make original stories if you don’t show up to movie theaters and support them in the first place.” The problem isn’t original stories; it’s original stories with new perspectives from passionate creators instead of money-hungry studios.   

Perhaps you’ve seen the new Moana (2026) live-action movie trailer. Of course, I can’t legitimately critique a movie that hasn’t been released, but I already have a few problems with it. First, nearly every shot from the trailer is a shot-for-shot remake of the original movie, showing that the number of changes between the two is minimal or nonexistent. Secondly, so much of the movie will be animated anyway. All shots of magic and fantasy creatures such as Te Fiti and the little coconut guys will be CGI, so the only difference will be the human actors, but everything else won’t be. How is this adding to the story or making any kind of statement that the original movie didn’t? Lastly, it is way too soon to have a remake. Let the kids who watched it grow up before even thinking about a remake.  

The original animated movie was released in 2016, so not even a generation has passed. Other adaptations, such as The Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Mulan, have around 20 to 25 years between them, which is adequate for a remake. They have the right amount of nostalgia for older watchers and introduce the stories to children today.  

Older movies such as Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty came out between 65 and 90 years before their remakes, which makes the stories even more fresh and novel to viewers, and it also gives the remakes more opportunities to modernize the stories to fit today’s climate. 

One remake that came out this year is Lilo and Stitch (2025), which many people had issues with.  In the original 2002 film, it ended with Lilo, Nani, and Stitch all staying together as an Ohana, but in the new movie (spoiler alert), Nani moved to California to study marine biology at UCSD, leaving Lilo behind in Hawai’i. In my opinion, it missed the entire point of the original movie, leaving this one to make no sense.  

All in all, most remakes are made without creativity or modern amendments, so what is the point? Especially when there are dozens of original movies and TV shows coming out every year that could be watched instead of something you’ve already seen. 

Create new stories, recognize new perspectives, and stop making live-action remakes.