Kenneth Branagh and the Art of the Adaptation: or, It’s Beyond My Wit, Your Majesty

Ken does Disney with 2015's Cinderella and 2020's Artemis Fowl.

Before 2015, Disney had remade a few of their most iconic films (I remember liking the Glenn Close version of 101 Dalmations as a kid, I fell asleep during Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and I worked at a movie theater when Maleficent came out and won't soon forget when a very intoxicated gentleman approached the box office window and said, "Uhhh...one for...uh...Malignant please."), but it feels like the success of Kenneth Branagh's Cinderella remake was the first to show that these screen-to-screen translations could be viable.

We've been debating the pros and cons of these rip-offs (does it count as a rip-off if you're ripping yourself off?), as well as the ethics of Disney just pumping them out for fifteen years now (it's a total coincidence that this piece comes out that same day that Snow White, the latest remake, also does.) In that time, we've also gotten absolutely nowhere in that discussion. Luckily, that is not the purpose of this series. We're here to talk about how Kenneth Branagh has, more successfully than not, adapted different texts for the big screen. This is the first time that the text is another film.

These Disney remakes are hard and often just an impossible task. Ask Jon Favreau - he made one of the better ones in 2016's The Jungle Book, but nobody remembers that because his 2019 version of The Lion King was probably the worst one.