Judging from both the pre-release marketing materials and industry narratives that have surrounded both Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (Christopher McQuarrie, 2023) and Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023), one would be forgiven for thinking that Hollywood still retains something of an aversion to digital VFX.
Read MoreRecently returned Disney CEO Bob Iger – reappointed to the company following the abrupt dismissal of his successor, Bob Chapek in November 2022 – confirmed late last week that the celebrated animation studio would be producing a slate of sequels to three of its blockbuster films. News of Zootopia 2 within Disney’s upcoming roster of features was a welcome, if not entirely unexpected, surprise given both the box office success of the 2016 original (the film took $1.02 billion and won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature) and the recent arrival of spin-off web television series Zootopia+ (Trent Correy & Josie Trinidad 2022), which premiered on Disney+ the same month as Chapek’s acrimonious exit.
Read MoreThe great Sam Neill’s character Alan Grant in Jurassic Park III (Joe Johnston, 2001) once said, “some of the worst things imaginable have been done with the best intentions.”
Read MoreCommenting on the fan/ critic division of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977), Todd Berliner (2017) observes that: The original Star Wars (1977) has become one of the most widely and intensely loved movies of all time. Film scholars, however, lambasted Star Wars for its simplicity. Peter Lev calls it one of the “simple, optimistic genre films in the late 1970s.” David Cook says it privileges “a juvenile mythos.” Jonathan Rosenbaum calls the movie mostly “fireworks and pinball machines,” a deliberately silly film that offers only “narcissistic pleasures.”
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