Disney Developing A Live Action Winnie The Pooh Movie

[KremlingWhatnot]

http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/news/426035-disney-developing-live-action-winnie-the-pooh#/slide/1
If I had to choose a time to say Oh Bother, it would most certainly be now, as a new live action Winnie The Pooh movie that is in development will be about an adult Christopher Robin returning to The Hundred Acre Woods. oh bother indeed. since Disney's other live action movies (haven't seen Cinderella yet) have been stinkfests. I wouldn't be too surprised if this was too. I actually wish this would've been an April Fools joke because of a lot of reasons. oh well, it was bound to happen eventually.

 

[Drtooth]

The animated Winnie the Pooh movie hurt them bad. Poor timing was the problem. While an alternative for younger audiences to the darker and more grown up Harry Potter franchise seems like a great idea, Disney did so much damage to the WTP franchise in years before that. In other words, due to preschool programming and merchandising focus, WTP became a baby franchise. Now, which preschool franchise has had a successful theatrical outing? If you guessed not even Sesame Street, that's right. Kids that age are too young to be taken to theaters, and older, nostalgic Pooh fans weren't going to give the movie a shot due to that awful CGI series.

Yet, Disney casually ignored when the film was successful. On home video. Home video is pretty much the reason WTP's 1990's and beyond popularity existed. The horrible omen was that WTP was Disney's cash cow franchise to the point of shoving Mickey in back (waaaay in back)... after the movie essentially made back just barely it's slim budget, Pooh was essentially dead to them. Even The Muppets got more faith in them after their last film made a little money just barely. I've never seen Disney drop something that hard since Home on the Range. All because of one movie that's a drop in the bucket of the Pooh franchise.

Cinderella and Maleficent have made a crapload of money. There's a long line of other live action sort of remakes including Beauty and the Beast (fun fact, LeFou is being portrayed by the guy who played Olaf in Frozen, essentially being 2 wacky sidekicks), Jungle Book (which isn't even the only live action Jungle Book project to come out), and Mulan for some reason (guess it's not going to have the talking Dragon). It only makes sense to try and hook Pooh up to that success. But the whole "grown up Christopher Robin" bit? Don't like it, and I don't think they can get it to work. But as long as Jim Cummings is still involved as Pooh and Tigger, I can't complain.

 

[Iscah]

Disney and Winnie-the-Pooh and "grown up Christopher Robin" makes me cringe. Every time they've adapted the final chapter of the book* they have handled it badly. Different people in charge every time probably, but it doesn't give me a great amount of hope for it.

* in the final chapter of the second (final) book, Christopher Robin is "going away" - growing up - though the animals don't understand and it's never clearly explained. (Even before I was old enough to properly understand it, it just seemed like something solemn and Important was happening. I loved it even though I was never keen on the book as a whole - I appreciate them much more as an adult than as a child.) And at the very end, a promise that somewhere in an enchanted place - really, within the book itself! - "a little boy and his Bear will always be playing".

As well as not liking Disney's past efforts with it, I feel like showing anything beyond that "captured moment" of the ending 'breaks' it somehow.

 

[mr3urious]

I don't see this working, both creatively and financially. Christopher Robin as an adult comes across as a little unnerving-- along with a potentially uncanny valley-looking CGI Pooh-- and Disney did enough damage to the silly old bear by Flanderizing him and his friends into a preschool series and merchandising him to an obnoxious degree, so much so that it hurt the critically acclaimed 2011 movie's box office potential.

So yeah, this is the wrong way for Disney to give Pooh another chance.

 

[Drtooth]

This sounds like if you changed the characters to something a little more generic, it could be rife for potential to be some dark humor, kind of like.....

WAIT A FREAKING MINUTE!!! They're trying to make Ted out of Winnie the Pooh!!!

 

[Schfifty]

I don't have high hopes for this project. I'm shaking my head at the fact that it's live-action.

I'm curious what the live-action part means, though. It looks like Christopher Robin will be human, but will they have the animals be CGI, or will they be Creature Shop puppets? Seems like they'll be CGI, but it somehow struck me that using puppets was possible.

 

[Iscah]

Puppets would make sense. They're toy animals to begin with (except, from memory, Rabbit and maybe Owl) so they don't even need to be realistic creature puppets.

...now I want to see a proper puppets-and-live-action adaption of the books. Wouldn't that be lovely?

 

[Drtooth]

Puppet Winnie the Pooh (even though we already had one of thems) seems like a solid idea, mainly because Pooh and co are plush toys and all.

I honestly see there's merit in a live action Pooh film. Just not with this stupid concept.

 

[mr3urious]

Puppet Winnie the Pooh (even though we already had one of thems) seems like a solid idea, mainly because Pooh and co are plush toys and all.

I could see them go the Where the Wild Things Are route and have Pooh & the others be puppets with more fluid and expressive CGI faces.

 

[fuzzygobo]

While Eeyore frets,
and Piglet hesitates,
and Rabbit calculates,
and Owl pontificates,
Pooh just is.

Some parts of Milne's books can never be improved upon.