Jungle Book 2 Jungle Book: 4 Reasons Studios Make the Same Movies (at the Same Time)

If you don't see the Jungle Book this weekend, I've got good news: There's another Jungle Book coming out this summer. Technically speaking, it's a Tarzan movie, but it's still about a guy raised in the jungle, fighting animals. Maybe that seems like I'm stretching. But there's also another Jungle Book movie coming out in two years! No, not a sequel to this Jungle Book, (which at the time of writing has a 93% on RottenTomatoes) a different Jungle Book, with the same plot and characters. In case you're one of the 7% of people who didn't like this one... I guess.

It might seem silly, but this sort of stuff happens all the time. Remember 2012 when we had two Snow White movies within 3 months of each other? You could see a trailer for a Snow White movie, while waiting for your Snow White movie. Remember 2016, when there were two Superhero versus movies? Or 2016 when there were two "Animals have there own society" movies? Or even 2016, when there were two movies about children raised in a jungle? How the heck does this happen? Well...

1. Everybody Wants to be Disney

Disney is the studio every studio aspires to be. Their movies might as well come with a box office guarantee, unless they're live action and some part of them is set in the Old West (John Carter and The Lone Ranger). They've got Marvel, Muppets, Pixar, Star Wars, and soon Indiana Jones as extremely viable franchises, not to mention the new Renaissance of their own animated endeavors like Frozen and Zootopia. What do the other studios have that even comes close?

Universal has Fast and Furious movies, along with the rebooted Jurassic Park franchise. Fox has the X-men and Avatar, if James Cameron ever stops announcing sequels and starts making them. Warner Bros. has the DCEU, which looks like it might be in trouble already, and Harry Potter, which would've been done if they didn't stretch it out. Oh, I just realized I forgot about Pirates of the Caribbean for Disney. It's really no wonder Disney World is the happiest place on earth.

This is why Universal made a gritty reboot of Snow White. It's why Warner Bros. are making Jungle Book and Tarzan. The other studios aren't banking on millennials being huge fans of Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Buroughs, or the Grimm fairy tales. They're betting that nostalgia for old Disney movies will put butts in seats. Really though, can you blame them?

In recent years the Internet has become a weird nostalgia-justification engine. Buzzfeed publishes six articles a day asking if you remember 90's cartoons, with click bait headlines that everyone eats up (not that click bait is all bad....). Everyone on Facebook bemoans the next generation for not knowing what DuckTales is, and somehow convinced Coke to bring back the sugar-swill that is Surge. Horray...?

2. Public Domain is Treated Like a Mandate

"Public domain" means something is so old, that it's original creator has been dead for so long, and it's so ingrained into the culture that anybody can use it in any way they see fit, without getting sued. Disney has lobbied to extend the amount of time it takes for something to become public domain, pushing it from 20 years since the original creation, to the end of the creators life + 70 years. It's like if you had an essay due at the end of the month, but convinced your teacher that you'd have it done 70 years after they died (something none of my teachers ever went with).

Still, some things have managed to be that old. Mien Kampf, Hitler's autobiography, just became public domain (feel old yet?) and probably will be the only public domain work that isn't adopted on screen. Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain, which is why we had two TV shows and a movie all with different Sherlock's within 3 years. All the Grimm fairy tales are in there, giving us so much Snow White you'll want a poison apple.

The reason these stories are adopted so frequently is because they seem like safe bets.

Cinderella's reboot changed almost nothing from the original Disney version, and was still a massive success, commercially and critically. Theaters all over the world still preform Shakespeare and Greek tragedies hundreds of years after Henry VIII was relevant. But familiarity breeds contempt, and thus the reboots become gritty.

I'm not really sure why "gritty" is always the direction things are taken. Especially with the Grimm fairy tales, which are in essence very dark to begin with. But rather that tell the original story with all the gory, creepy, disturbingly dark details, they just make everything a sexy action movie. That's what they

know, so that's what they'll do. Everyone's heard the story of Hansel and Gretel, so what if we made them sexy action heroes? People like fairy tales, people like sexy, people like action, this movie is going to be a surefire smash hit. That movie really came out. Like in theaters. People walked into a theater and bought a ticket for the Hansel and Gretel action movie.

3. You Can't Stop a Moving Train

So this follows the last point. Studios don't really like to talk to each other about their "plans" and what "movies" they're going to "release". They hire writers, directors, actors, and craft services all in the shadows, dropping only enough info to the press to get a little buzz going. But in all actuality, by the time the press has a scoop, the train has already left the station, and is on it's way to Movie Town.

Which means that the next day, when a rival studio says "Oh, you're making a Pinocchio movie? We are too!" it's too late to pull the plug. Although Disney looked like the ideal in part one, this is where they kind of start to look a little worse. Warner Bros announced their Jungle Book all the way back in 2012, with Disney not announcing theirs until 2013. This isn't even the only time Disney has screwed Warner.

You might recall that the original date for Batman v. Superman was somewhere in 2015, but it got pushed back. The second date was May 6th 2016, or the same day "Captain America 3" (as it was called at the time) was slated for release. Warner ended up backing down, leaving a lot of people scratching their heads. Why would Warner be worried about a Captain America movie hurting Batman v. Superman? If anything, it would totally crush the Captain, and make Marvel look like the second fiddle for once.

"Oh, you're superheroes are going to fight? Ours are going to fight too. And people already like ours." That's when it was announced that Captain America 3 was actually Captain America: Civil War, about a year after Dawn of Justice was announced. But unfortunately for Warner Bros, the train was already way out of the station, and 2016 was going to be the year superheroes fought each other. Early reviews of Civil War are out, and things REALLY don't look good for Batman v. Superman from a historical perspective.

4. Everyone Thinks Their Baby is Special

But maybe we can have both. We can have Coke and Pepsi, we can have McDonalds and Burger King, we can have analogies and comparisons. Andy Serkis is making his directorial debut with The Jungle Book (2018), and that's a man who I think deserves to make whatever he wants. Serkis has thrown all his motion capture experience behind the movie and promises that the visual effects are going to blow everybody's mind. Heck yes!

Not that The Jungle Book (2016) won't do that... early praise for the movie seems to indicate this is an Avatar-equivalent breakthrough from a VFX standpoint. Multiple of the mo-cap performances have gotten heavy praise, particularly Idris Elba as the villain. Honestly, this looks to be one of the biggest slam dunks of a movie, especially a blockbuster, in recent memory. So what could The Jungle Book (2018) improve on from The Jungle Book (2016)? Nothing really.

Movies aren't just trains, they're also babies. Cast and crew spend months, sometimes years, crafting a specific vision, hoping to make something that will matter to the audience that sees it. They pour their souls into it, and watch it grow from a tiny idea into a massive spectacle. It's a part of the director, etched eternally onto celluloid and projected for the masses. Movies are the babies of the people who create them, and everyone thinks their baby is special... even when it's not.

I'm not talking specifically about The Jungle Book (2018), because I haven't seen it, and actually think it will be quite good. But every director thinks their movie is important, or they wouldn't have made it. Sadly, some movies aren't going to be masterpieces, just like not every baby is going to be an awesome person. There are so many bad movies that directors really cared about, and there are so many awful people that parents loved dearly. It's the sad but true reality, but nothing is inherently special, just because it's loved. Wow. I really bummed myself out at the end. Guess I'll go see the Jungle Book, apparently it's really good.