Disney has been doing quite well remaking its animated classics, so it's little surprise that Disney is already turning to the vast Fox library it just acquired and is already looking to see what it can do to bring back those movies as well. Yesterday, Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed the studio already has plans for the comedy hit Home Alone as well as several other Fox brands. However, Iger called these movies re-imaginings, rather than remakes. Also, they're all planned for Disney+ rather than the big screen.
Yesterday, the Walt Disney Company held it's regular quarterly conference call for investors and Bob Iger revealed that Disney is already looking at ways to leverage the various film properties it now owns following the Fox merger. As part of that, the studio is planning to re-imagine Home Alone, Cheaper by the Dozen, Night at the Museum, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, among, one assumes, many more. All of these projects are apparently planned for Disney+ rather than traditional theatrical release.
This isn't really too much of a shock considering that leveraging Fox's library for streaming content is the main reason Disney bought the studio in the first place. Putting the original content on the service is certainly part of the equation, but building on it is standard Disney operating procedure, so we can expect this won't be the last Fox titles that we're going to see brought back on Disney+.
What's interesting here, at least potentially so, is the use of the word "reimagining" rather than remake. It's at least possible that we're not looking at direct remakes of these films, at least not of all of them. We could see new twists in the formula, or perhaps some of them could become series rather than films.
With some of these titles something other than a straight remake might make sense. It's only been two years since we got a Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie, though it was a straight-to-DVD affair. It's only been five years since the last attempt to breath life into the Night at the Museum franchise.
Home Alone was the highest grossing domestic movie of the year (and number 2 globally) when it was released in 1990. It's certainly the biggest name of those revealed by Bob Iger. It made a superstar out of Macaulay Culkin when he was just a kid. Culkin made one sequel and a pair of additional sequels, including a Made-for-TV follow up in 2012, were subsequently released.
Disney+ is looking to have a mass of both library and original content when it launches in November, and in the months and years that follow. It's going to make the service incredibly attractive to a lot of people, likely making the service a major player in the streaming game from the beginning.
