Sotiris wrote:If you watched any bonus features or read any articles about the making of Beauty and the Beast, you would know that Disney's story team is mostly responsible for BatB's success. When the team boarded Linda's script unaltered, it was a catastrophe. It wasn't working at all. They had to make numerous changes, to which Linda was resistant and unwilling to co-operate, to make the screenplay work.
As for her work on Burton's Alice in Wonderland, it wasn't mediocre, it was plain awful; it didn't earn a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes for nothing. The film's financial success is irrelevant. A lot of bad movies become box office hits.
In Linda Woolverton's defence regarding
Beauty and the Beast, I was under the impression that she was initially at odds with the story team simply because she didn't understand the storyboard process for animation. Of course, that is Disney's official take on the story. With regards to story, I also think that Howard Ashman should be credited for the film's success on account of the changes he suggested to liven the story.
As for
Alice in Wonderland, I didn't think it was terrible, but I was under the impression that she didn't really get the source material she was adapting, even compared to previous film-makers (if anything, consider the battle scenes).
DisneyDude2010 wrote:Wonderlicious wrote:
And for the record, I have similar negative feelings towards
Oz: The Great and Powerful, which I can definitely imagine disappointing at the box office.
I think Oz the Great and Powerful sounds a lot more promising than Maleficent. The Oz film is actually based on the books in the series.
True, true. But I honestly think it would never exist had
Alice in Wonderland not been a success. I can't help but think it's cashing in on a current trend. I've also become less of a fan towards Oz within the past few years. As far as the books are concerned,
The Wizard of Oz is a classic, but I really the sequels get more and more clueless and childish as the series progresses. I'd agree that MGM's
The Wizard of Oz is a classic, but it has become so ingrained in people's minds that it becomes hard for people to accept an Oz as depicted by MGM (hence why
Wicked, which is set in an Oz similar to MGM's, has been successful, while things like
Return to Oz or
Tin Man weren't so much).