The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018)

[Jake Lipson]

Title: The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018)

Genre: Fantasy, Adventure, Family

Director: Lasse Hallström, Joe Johnston

Cast: Keira Knightley, Mackenzie Foy, Eugenio Derbez, Matthew Macfadyen, Richard E. Grant, Misty Copeland, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, Jayden Fowora-Knight, Anna Madeley, Ellie Bamber, Tom Sweet, Jack Whitehall, Omid Djalili, Meera Syal, Lil Buck, Gustavo Dudamel, Ocean Navarro, Sergei Polunin, Nick Mohammed, Charles Streeter, Trent Owers, Gemma Wilks, Andrei Cotofan, Jessie Vinning, Zoë Scott, Craig Garner

Release: 2018-10-24

Plot: A young girl is transported into a magical world of gingerbread soldiers and an army of mice.

Here's a rare live-action Disney tentpole that isn't based on one of their animated films, but very much seems in the mold of what they're doing on those. Release date is November 2, 2018, where it is scheduled (for now) to open against Fox's X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Those don't seem to overlap much, but I wonder if one of them will move with Disney's pending acquisition of Fox.

Anyway, Entertainment Weekly debuted some pictures, which look beautiful:

http://ew.com/movies/2017/12/08/keira-knightley-nutcracker-and-the-four-realms-first-look/

Also, The Hollywood Reporter says reshoots are happening -- with Joe Johnston directing them instead of the film's original director, Lasse Hallstrom, due to "scheduling issues." This feels odd, especially since Johnston and Hallstrom have very different styles.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/h...sneys-nutcracker-four-realms-reshoots-1066990

Johnston is also in development on the next Narnia film, The Silver Chair. I wonder if his taking charge of Nutcracker will push that at all.

 

[Jake Lipson]

Disney has dropped a very early teaser trailer, which certainly looks opulent:

 

[Edwin-S]

What I think is interesting is that you think this film isn't based on any of Disney's animated films. It is obvious from that trailer that the "inspiration" for this film is coming from the Nutcracker sequence in Fantasia.

 

[Jake Lipson]

Well, yeah. I should have been more clear about my meaning. What I was getting at is that even though it uses that music, it's not being promoted overtly as a spinoff of Fantasia in the way that Beauty and the Beast and The Jungle Book's marketing specifically evokes nostalgia for those films. The storyline of this film seems to be independent of the Fantasia sequence, apart fromthe use of the same music.

 

[Edwin-S]

What I found interesting in that trailer is that the "live action" versions of Beauty and The Beast and The Jungle Book have become The Dark Empire's marketing references. Going forward I expect the animated versions of these films to be relegated to the junk pile of 'B' rate films and eventually be completely forgotten as the stories have made the transition to the "real" film media of "live action".

 

[Jake Lipson]

I disagree. The new versions have become marketing references because they are recent hits. But in their style and execution, those films honor their animated forebears, and will be known in history as the live-action remakes of the animated films, as they well should. The impact of the original films are too significant to be minimized in comparison to the remakes.

 

[Edwin-S]

We'll see. AFAIAC, these live-action remakes are the beginning of the end of the 2D animated versions. 2D animation is already dead as a theatrical format in North America and I doubt any kid, going forward, is going to want to watch a flat, simple, 2D artistic style over a photo-realistic, opulent, "live-action" film. The Dark Empire killed 2D theatrical animation when they shut down the animation unit and now they will kill the classic 2D animated versions with these "live action" remakes. It is inevitable.

The other issue I have with these "live-action" remakes and reimaginings is how brutally overproduced they all are. Just from watching the trailers, these films all feel oppressive and "air-less" with their overdone production values.

 

[Jake Lipson]

We have been over variations of this discussion in other threads before, and we just keep going in circles around the same opposing points. I don't see any point to continue this, since neither one of us is going to convince the other one to come around to our point of view. Therefore, I'm out, and we can just agree to disagree.

 

[Edwin-S]

Yeah, too true, too true. Don't abandon your thread though. I'll try to stay the hell out of here.

 

[Jake Lipson]

Don't abandon your thread though. I'll try to stay the hell out of here.

I'm not abandoning the thread if someone else would like to enter the discussion on this film, nor am I suggesting that you should stay out of it if you want to continue to discuss this movie. I'm simply withdrawing myself from the circular discussion on the general merit of these remakes.

 

[Jake Lipson]

 

[Jake Lipson]

The Hollywood Reporter says that Lasse Hallstrom and Joe Johnston will both be receiving credit as co-directors: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/h...joe-johnston-will-share-screen-credit-1125240

That Johnston was working on the film has been known since my original post, but that he has done enough of the final cut to receive credit means it must be a significant amount of footage.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

That's interesting. Sounds like it was amicable, by all parties.

 

[Jake Lipson]

Yeah. I'm not entirely sure of the specific circumstances, but what has been stated publicly is that Hallstrom simply wasn't available for reshoots during the period in which Disney needed the reshoots to occur. Why that would be the case is unclear, but it seems to be much more about scheduling and "Well, someone's got to finish it," rather than Disney actually being unsatisfied with what was being provided to them and wanting to push Hallstrom out. If he had been available for reshoots, it doesn't sound like there would have been a need to bring anyone else in, at least from what we are being told.

Also, I saw a different trailer for this in front of Ant-Man and the Wasp yesterday, and wasn't aware they had released a second one yet. I don't think it's online as of now but it looked cool visually, although they're going with the girl-as-Chosen-One approach that Disney last used, creatively ineffectively, on Alice in Wonderland. I hope the movie ends up being more in-depth than that.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

What's interesting is that The Silver Chair had already been announced as Johnston's final project before retirement, so it sounded like he was ready to wind his career down. Jumping into this project last minute feels like the opposite of winding down. On the other hand, this looks like a very VFX-intensive project, and that's very much in Johnston's wheelhouse.

 

[Jake Lipson]

Right, but The Silver Chair doesn't sound like it's near a production start. My guess is that Disney came to him with probably a generous offer, and he had an open window of time, so he did it. The original article said that reshoots were 32 days, so carving out a month window where he wasn't working anyway because Silver Chair isn't a go yet seems reasonable enough, especially since the original plan was for Hallstrom to oversee postproduction. I'm sure they compensated Johnston very well for this, too.

 

[Jake Lipson]

 

[Jake Lipson]

 

[Jake Lipson]

Final trailer:

 

[Jake Lipson]

Another new poster on Disney's Facebook today: