Disney’s Hunchback Remake: A Real Chance

TV & Film

Aug 15

It’s no secret that Disney has changed up their business model in the past several years. Instead of putting out fun, family friendly films like they used to, now it’s Star Wars and Marvel TV shows and movies, sequels, and, of course, the dreaded live action remake. There are some outliers like the excellent Encanto, but on the whole, Disney is kind of in a rut, with their park attendance and box office numbers reflecting that. The 2019 remake of Aladdin cost 183 million to make, and pulled in over a billion dollars at the box office.

On the flipside, the controversial remake of The Little Mermaid cost 250 million to make and brought in less than half of what Aladdin did. Basically, people are tired of the live action remakes, which have ranged in quality from “decent” to “Scuttlebutt.” A studio that was once on the forefront of cutting edge, fresh ideas is now a shell of its former self. Now in 2024 (theoretically, depending on the current strikes), we’re getting a remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Not too much is known about it right now, but it’s unlikely to recapture the success of the remakes of Aladdin and The Lion King.

However, if Disney plays their cards right, they could have a real golden opportunity on their hands.

RELATED:

Featured

With So Much Good Media How To Prioritize What To Watch?

Ideally, the biggest reason to remake a film is to improve on the original. It’s really to make money, but ideally its to improve on things in the original. One of the better examples of this is the True Grit remake. In it, the protagonist hires a drunk gunslinger to help her find the man who murdered her father, and the movie ends with everyone happy and John Wayne riding off into the sunset.

The remake ends with the protagonist growing up to be a hollow shell of a person, her quest for revenge taking everything from her. It’s a much more interesting idea, and is a big reason that the remake is far better than the original.

That brings us back to Hunchback.

It’s no big secret that the original 1996 Disney film is… inconsistent. When the film is on its A game, it’s some of the best content Disney has ever produced. You have the highs of the opening “Bells of Notre Dame” sequence and, of course, “Hellfire” AKA, the greatest song Disney has ever written full stop.

Then you have… the gargoyles. Oy.

It makes sense why they’re in there. It’s not a happy movie, matching the source material, and there have to be a few moments for the audience to stop and catch its breath a little bit. They just did it with some of the worst characters in the Disney canon.

The original Hunchback film was made right in the middle of the famous “Disney Renaissance” which brought the studio back from near destruction, starting with The Little Mermaid. However, it was when Beauty and the Beast not only made a ton of money, but scored an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, the most coveted prize in all of cinema, that Disney came back with a vengeance. The mega hit Aladdin came next, followed by the mega mega mega hit The Lion King. With the success of Beauty and the Beast, Disney was trying to shatter the animation glass ceiling and make a film that would finally win the coveted prize. Then Pocahontas. Oops.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame was a real risk for Disney. It wasn’t based on a popular fairy tale, or lend itself to funny, wise cracking talking animals. It was based on a book whose theme was that architecture is humanity’s common language, and where pretty much everyone dies horribly. Esmeralda dies and Quasimodo starves to death cradling her corpse. That screams happy Disney. However, they took a risk and ended up creating a fairly decent, but overall inconsistent film.

However, now that they’re creating a remake, they have the opportunity to go back and fix those mistakes. They can tap into what remakes really should be.

We already know what works. When the movie embraces the source material, or at the very least the tone of it, it’s amazing. “The Bells of Notre Dame” is arguably a better opening to a Disney film than the super iconic “Circle of Life.” “God Help the Outcasts” is a heart-wrenching cry out to a god that Esmeralda might doubt even exists, but at the lowest point for her and her people, she asks for help anyway. “Hellfire” is an evil man who believes he is the only good person in Paris wrestling with impure thoughts that he’s never dealt with before, begging God to help him while at the same time blaming everyone but himself for how he feels and the actions he’ll take. When the film works, it works.

Then you have “Out There” which is a standard, cliche “I want” song that a lot of other Disney protagonists have had their own version of.

If “Hellfire” is the best Disney song ever, then “A Guy Like You” might be their worst one. The gargoyles as a whole ruin every scene that they’re in, even severely weakening the otherwise powerful assault on Notre Dame at the end of the film.

So the ultimate question, then is how should Disney go about making their remake? Well, what will most likely happen is that they take some of the iconic moments and redo them beat for beat, the gargoyles will have an even bigger role in the film and somehow be even less funny, a lot of the complexity of the story and characters will be removed, and overall they’ll do everything they can to play it safe.

Well, if they want to lose money, then they should follow that blueprint exactly.

Alternatively, they should do something that they haven’t really done in quite some time: take risks. Real risks. Remove the gargoyles, find some way to add some breathing time to the film that isn’t “comedy”, and keep the complex characters and ideas, even adding some more from the book. That doesn’t mean that the movie would end the same way as the book, although wouldn’t that be something?

Overall, this is the one movie that Disney has the actual opportunity to fix. And no, that doesn’t mean fix in terms of making the female protagonist the best at everything. If there’s a scene where Esmeralda grabs a sword for the first time and fights with it like a master, it doesn’t matter what else they do, the movie will suck. Instead they have the opportunity to look at the original film, see the inconsistency in quality and tone, find what worked, see what didn’t, and really tighten things up. If they do, they might actually go back to the box office successes of the live action Aladdin, Lion King, and The Jungle Book.

But… they’re probably not going to do that. They’ll spend 200 million on it, break even at the box office at best, then move on to, I dunno, live action Rescuers Down Under or something like that.

READ NEXT:

Featured