Just a few days ago, an announcement was made regarding an upcoming "feminist retelling" of a renowned novel. It doesn't matter which one.
And maybe a lot of people will read it and enjoy it. Like the many individuals who have presumably preordered
their tickets to attend a "reimagining" of a famous Disney cartoon picture — this time with a Black female lead and in live action.
Just this year, the new "Fatal Attraction" series strips both the sensuality and the thriller from an otherwise highly pleasant 1987 film for so-called "feminist" causes.
"Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies" takes an effervescent, sneakily subversive 1978 classic, diversifies its cast, and renders it completely unwatchable on television.
"Dead Ringers" on Amazon is an awful, female-forward remake of the 1988 body horror film that is so far apart from the original that you wonder why it didn't just exist on its own meager own.
Then there's this year's "The Little Mermaid," which follows on the heels of the aforementioned disaster and leads us back to the major question of why.
A flurry of advertisements talked up the fact that filmmaker Rob Marshall's new film now includes a Black actress, Halle Bailey, as princess Ariel, as opposed to Jodi Benson, a white voice actor, in the excellent 1989 original.
As Vulture's Angelica Jade Bastién put it, "this 'Little Mermaid' only provides the skin of progress, not the bone, marrow, sinew, and guts necessary to change a story on a deeper level."