News: We’re Getting Yet Another Spin-Off from Disney…

I feel like I start a lot of posts like this, but around the ages of 9-ish to 11, I was a huge fan of Disney’s Descendants, a series of movies that were based off of the Isle of the Lost series written by Melissa de la Cruz. I watched all the movies, had all the books (heck I still have those books…I should do a review of them), and eventually dyed half the length of my hair purple because I loved the look of the VK’s (Villian Kids) hair. To this day, I kind-of enjoy the story because though it was definitely cheesy, it was still somewhat original (though, in my opinion, they did rip off Ever After High to an extent). The series was supposed to have ended with the third movie and an animated series about Mal (Maleficent’s daughter) getting ready for her wedding to King Ben (son of Beauty and Beast), but apparently Disney decided that they just can’t stop there and they needed to make a fourth movie and I have several issues with this.

First of all, I feel like we need to address one of the big issues with this and that is the death of Cameron Boyce, who played Carlos, the son of Cruella de Vil in the original three movies. While this fourth movie called The Rise of Red seems like it will focus more on the other Villian Kids instead of the original four, Mal, Evie, Jay, and Carlos, it will still be hard to make up for Carlos not being there, especially since he was one of the best characters in the original trilogy. It would be a disservice to the fans if we got to see the remaining three of the group but didn’t see him. It makes me wonder what Disney’s plan to make up for this will be. Will they use AI to put Boyce into the movie? Did they start filming it before Boyce’s death (which is doubtful)? Will they ship his character off to somewhere else? I’m curious to see how they will fix that problem.

My second issue with this is the fact that from what we’ve learned from the teaser trailer, Wonderland is going to be added to the world of Auradon. While I can give the creators some props for expanding the Descendants world, my main problem with this is that it was already done in Ever After High, which – funny enough – was canceled in 2016 because Mattel knew that they simply couldn’t compete with the first Descendants movie because it was Disney, even though it arguably had a better, more original story line. Ever After High had several characters from Wonderland, including Bunny Blanc (daughter of the White Rabbit), Alistair Wonderland (Alice’s son), Lizzie Hearts (Daughter of the Queen of Hearts), Kitty Cheshire, Madeline Hatter, Courtly Jester, and so on. While not all of these characters are necessarily bad like I think they may be portrayed in the new movie, they do play a huge role in the story and get up to all sorts of mischief later on.

On top of that, we also are going to be getting characters from Cinderella’s story and several others that were also included in Ever After High, making me wonder how much of this is straight-up going to be stolen from Mattel’s fairytale retelling. The only difference here is the fact that Disney also took from High School Musical and has characters from their own original stories. I guess you just can’t be too original when you’re essentially writing fanfiction.

My last issue with The Rise of Red is just how bankrupt Disney is on ideas. While the first three movies were fine, this feels like a desperate cash grab, like so many movies nowadays are. It feels like Disney saw its stock tanking and thought, “I know that we basically ended this series five years ago, but let’s just resurrect it and see what happens.” I don’t think the new one is going to have as many views, especially given how little trust there is in Disney anymore and I wouldn’t be surprised if they put more woke messaging into it.

Until next time,M.J.