All 20 Disney live-action remake movies, ranked

polygon.com:

Steven Spielberg’s 1991 fantasy Hook feels like the true father of Disney’s massive wave of live-action remakes and spinoffs of its classic animated features, but it wasn’t actually made by Walt Disney Studios. Disney took another two decades to really see the appeal of that kind of big blockbuster brand extension, once the billion-dollar box office for Tim Burton’s CG-filled Alice in Wonderland and the similarly massive take for the villain backstory Maleficent made the live-action formula seem like a gold mine. Disney has been cranking them out ever since, generally producing hits that many people see, and few people love.

The rise of Disney Plus gives Disney even more reason to keep pumping out these movies — with worldwide box office still significantly below pre-COVID levels, the company needs a steady stream of new features to keep subscribers happy. But which of Disney’s live-action cash-ins are actually worth watching, and which are just tedious repeats of better movies? We watched all of them to find out.

What movies qualified for the list? We followed a few rules: They have to be remakes of or direct prequels or sequels to fully animated Disney movies. (For instance, the fabulous Pete’s Dragon isn’t on this list because the original feature was already mostly live-action.) We did include the CG Lion King remake because Disney considers it a live-action feature, even though there’s only one non-animated shot in the movie.

[Ed. note: We’ll continue to update this post periodically as new Disney live-action remakes are released. Latest update: January 2024, to add Pinocchio, Cruella, Peter Pan & Wendy, and The Little Mermaid, plus Lady and the Tramp, which we originally omitted because it never had a theatrical