Mulan (2020)

Who is this girl I see?

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Christian

Christian

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Disney's latest animation to live action film, filmed in China with an all Asian cast. Great film and one of the more likely to succeed transitions surely. What could possibly go wrong?

Spoiler: everything. This one has been beset by controversy since the get go.

Most of the story is intact but the songs are gone, Eddie Murphy's dragon is gone, the cricket is gone, Li Shang is gone (no bisexual love angle here).

There are however additions of a shapeshifting witch (a very :disco: Gong Li) and Mulan now having Force-like qi powers which enable her to leap around superhero style.

Filming was done in Xinjiang, pumping lots of money into the local economy and the local authorities. Problem is, this is also where the Xinjiang interment camps, sorry Vocational Education and Training Centres, are.

If all that wasn't enough, Liu Yifei (Mulan herself) came out in support of the Hong Kong crackdown on protesters.

Top that off with Wuhan and Corona and you've got a troubled production indeed and about $200m Disney dollars on the line.

Press screenings and at least one premiere happened but eventually Disney bowed to the inevitable and postponed the March opening date multiple times, eventually pulling it from cinemas and plonking it on the Disney+ subscription service. However, because this one hadn't generated enough shitty press already, they decided to charge $30 on top of the monthly subscription to watch it. Unsurprisingly, this gambit has proved to be a big old flop and it's going to be free for all Disney+ subscribers from December.

It did, however, get a cinema release in China in September and... they hate it ("bad press and poor reviews from Chinese audiences") :D

*deep breath*

So does this one bring honour do us all?
 
I thought this was at the better end of Disney's live action remakes but that's hardly much more than faint praise. The animated creatures weren't missed at all but the songs really were. Without it, there's little emotional bounce to the story and it all plays rather flat. Torturoulsly, you occasionally get flashes of the songs in the score but they're whisked away before any one gets their vocal chords warmed up.

Liu Yifei is good but a blank slate and utterly unconvincing as a man. Hardly important but it's chucklesome :D

The Qi stuff is stupid and makes it feel like Mulan has no agency as it's all coming from a higher power rather than her realisation of her own strengths and abilities. None of her soldier comrades make much of a splash but the baddie Bori Khan (the renamed Zhang Yu) is decent. Gong Li's witch is a decent addition though she does pop up at convenient times to give a little bit too much deus ex machina.

It does looks utterly spectacular though with really vibrant, glowing colours and some incredible location shots. Overall though, I'll stick with the cartoon.
 
I think putting it on Disney+ as a paid extra was a bold move and I admire them for it but once you’ve devalued your product so much at £4.99 a month people get fucking outraged at the thought of being charged anything extra without appreciating budget and it being a latest release that should have been on at the cinema but instead they just say “well I’m already paying £4.99. Why should I pay anymore?” :manson:
 
PercyPig said:
I think putting it on Disney+ as a paid extra was a bold move and I admire them for it but once you’ve devalued your product so much at £4.99 a month people get fucking outraged at the thought of being charged anything extra without appreciating budget and it being a latest release that should have been on at the cinema but instead they just say “well I’m already paying £4.99. Why should I pay anymore?” :manson:
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Not sure what's mansonable about people thinking it's a rip-off to pay extra for a new film on a subscription service when Netflix is premiering the latest Scorsese for the base subscription price alone.

It's hardly the public's fault that they cannot go to the cinema, is it. If this film was so expensive and they are so keen to get their money back they could have put it out on cinemas eventually, isn't Tenet raking it up at the box office at the moment?
 
Yeah I’m not exactly concerned about Disney (who apparently made a shit tone of money out of this scheme, more than Tenet). It is a rip off and the movie by all accord is bad.

I find Disney+ to be a rip off in general, they haven’t actually released anything of note other than the Mandalorian and that was a year ago.
 
Tenet is actually going to make a considerable loss on Warner Bros' box office gamble. It's why Wonder Woman has since disappeared from the release schedule. so I don't think box office is really an option for... anything right now and for the rest of this year at least.
 
How did this do for Disney in the end?
 
SDF said:
How did this do for Disney in the end?
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Disney haven't commented (which in itself speaks volumes), so it's all speculation right now. The consensus is that it didn't do very well is borne out by the fact they're removing the £20 "Premier Access" fee in December so it's free to anyone who's a Disney+ subscriber. They also moved a couple of big films that could potentially have gone the VOD route firmly to next year for a cinema release.
 
Wel, I’m sure the cinemas are at least a little bit happy about that
 
I still don’t understand why they didn’t release it in cinemas alongside the premium streaming price. That rental fee was only cover going to be purchased by families of 3+, provided they already have a decent 4K TV setup.
 
Ellie said:
I still don’t understand why they didn’t release it in cinemas alongside the premium streaming price. That rental fee was only cover going to be purchased by families of 3+, provided they already have a decent 4K TV setup.
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I think they wanted to give it a big push to see if the model works for them.

Also usually cinema chains refuse to play movies if there isn’t a few weeks/months between theatrical and VoD. But times are so tough for cinemas that Cineplex (the only chain here in Canada) are playing the new Netflix (The Trial of the Chicago 7) movie for two weeks before it goes on Netflix. Previously they wouldn’t even allow streaming movies to screen in their theaters during TIFF.
 
I’ve heard that, and that definitely needs to change. Lots of cinemas were playing The Irishman last year. I’ve also seen films be available to buy digitally at the same time as playing in cinemas, but those are usually smaller films that wouldn’t have a high level of cinema distribution outside big cities, so it makes sense to make them available for everyone.

It’s the premium “rental” price that stings the most which was almost double what it would be to buy later down the line. Mulan could have generated far more income making it available to buy for £20 across all platforms, but understandably it was a test, just a very expensive one for everyone.
 
Disney are putting this out on non-Disney digital platforms now for £20/$30, so I think we can definitely assume the "Premier Access" approach didn't work.

It'll be included for Disney+ subscriptions from December.
 
I liked this :D
It probably helped a lot that I watched it a few weeks after the Lion King remake, which was an utter elephant turd.

I think this really is the only way the ‘remakes’ serve any kind of purpose for me - take the original story and do something different with it.

Basically I feel like you can’t criticise something like Lion King for being the same story and script and songs, AND then criticise this for NOT doing that. It didn’t have songs because it wasn’t a musical, that’s all.

Old Mulan is still in the world, it’s not being taped over, so this more adult imagining of it, with a mostly female team, worked for me.

If anything that might have taken away from the romance angle, but I get that that wasn’t the point/goal of her story.

I liked the witch, she was cool as fuck. I felt like the story was getting into Crouching Tiger territory at points, which isn’t really bad.

It looked phenomenal, the landscape was incredible (internment camps not pictured). I liked the cast - gagged that Jet Li was the emperor! Also that they didn’t shoehorn a white person in somewhere.

And the love interest was so fucking hot.

I didn’t read all the controversy luckily, so I went in only sceptical of it being a remake, but I really enjoyed it.
 
I can’t remember a thing about it, but I would love to know just how much of a bath Disney took on it.
 
Never heard that phrase either ! Is it YORKSHIRE
 
ButterTart said:
It's an industry term. I've only ever seen it in Empire or Sight and Sound.
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Yeah, it’s used it the context of investment. When I worked in securities it used to be bandied around a lot too.
 
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