The new Disney’s Haunted Mansion movie is due out on July 28. Think of it as a redo; Disney made a first attempt at a Haunted Mansion franchise back in 2003, but it was both a critical and a commercial failure. Has the company learned its lesson from this prior misstep?
Disney has two distinct approaches to its big-budget, tentpole films. The first is to take classic animated films and convert them into live-action spectacles (or, in the case of The Lion King, a photorealistic animated spectacle). The quality of these films is wildly inconsistent and largely depends on whether the original material had room for improvement. That’s why The Jungle Book adaptation was fantastic. And it’s also why The Lion King adaptation was so bad.
The second approach is even less reliable than the first; it’s to take Disney theme park rides or experiences, and expand them into full-length feature films. The quality of these films is also inconsistent; for every Oscar-nominated blockbuster like Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, we also get a movie like The Country Bears.