With the Little Mermaid abortion I ran across an interesting trend for films that is probably going to accelerate quickly: "Reimagining" a film.
For an example I'm going to use Malum (2023)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9472334/
Vs Last Shift (2014)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2965466/?ref_=tt_trv_trv
This is the exact same director, 9 years after making Last Shift he just 'reimagined' it with a black lead instead of the white lead. Basically the same film except a few minor changes, basically all of them for the worse but pushing modern social 'narrative' points.
This is a bizarre trend, especially when it is the exact same person doing both projects. Financing your original film except now blacker should be impossible, at this point it is clear Hollywood is financing special interests and not actual quality. There's no excuse for funding shit like this.
There's a lot of other examples of works being 'reimagined' recently but this one stands out quite a bit, and people are even cheering the 'reimagining' as some sort of progressive stance on their original films.
Who is excited for Cameron to 'reimagine' some of his classics? We may be seeing just the tip of the iceberg for this bullshit. I wonder when they'll just begin removing the originals from streaming options and only keeping the 'reimagined' versions.
Gaming Companies are the ones that started that Scam. The "remake vs reimagining vs rerelease" thing has been ongoing since at least the PS3 era when porting games to a new console became the biggest money maker.
Which then used those new labels to excuse doing less work or massively changing things when the "new" game came out.
Gameboy Advance had a ton of ports. From Doom to Breath of Fire 1 & 2. Link's Awakening had a fucking port from Gameboy to Gameboy Color for christ's sake. This isn't remotely new.