Pinocchio

New movies streaming or in theaters this weekend: Tom Hanks stars in a new "Pinocchio," while "Thor: Love and Thunder" arrives on Disney+.

[Colonel Tom Parker](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/06/21/elvis-review-austin-butler-rules-king-over-musical-mess/7652227001/) in "Elvis," Hanks is back in ["America's Dad"](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2020/03/16/tom-hanks-10-essential-roles-coronavirus-crisis/5056649002/) mode as kindly Italian woodcarver Geppetto in a decent revamp of the 1940 cartoon. [Tom Hanks](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/06/26/tom-hanks-colonel-tom-parker-favorite-elvis-song/7688237001/), while the Mouse House also releases a bonkers horror movie probably not for kids, wooden or otherwise. In director Zach Cregger's head-scrambling chiller, a researcher (Georgina Campbell) rents an Airbnb in suburban Detroit and finds it's been double-booked when she meets a strangely polite guy (Bill Skarsgård) already staying there. 15) The houseguests feel something's wrong but stick around instead of escaping, leading to an unbelievably brutal third act. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a so-so choice for Pinocchio's dapper insect conscience Jiminy Cricket, but as the Blue Fairy, [Cynthia Erivo](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/09/17/cynthia-erivo-debut-album-ch-1-vs-1-emmys-aretha-franklin-childrens-book-disney-role/8363326002/) sings a stellar "When You Wish Upon a Star" that dares you to stop the waterworks. [Where the Crawdads Sing](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2022/07/16/where-crawdads-sing-movie-biggest-changes-from-book/10037952002/)," an adaptation of the Delia Owens novel, is now streaming on [Apple TV](https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/where-the-crawdads-sing/umc.cmc.4jxbvck9zakqjsb34ccw09mub), [Vudu](https://www.vudu.com/content/movies/details/Where-the-Crawdads-Sing/2064554)and [Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/Where_the_Crawdads_Sing?id=M1pP5Ex6sPA.P&hl=en_US&gl=US). Wilson and fellow Brit Tom Burke have a winning chemistry in this immersive, mature character study. [Marcel the Shell With Shoes On](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/06/25/marcel-shell-movie-jenny-slate-interview/7696547001/)," starring Jenny Slate as the voice of an adorable, sneaker-clad shell, is on [Apple TV](https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/marcel-the-shell-with-shoes-on/umc.cmc.23mlvs843dhgo7ir7bk727xm2)and other on-demand platforms. [on demand](https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/mack--rita/umc.cmc.6z0mzebv8x0hjpju062hwdp8z)is the body-swap comedy "Mack & Rita," with Elizabeth Lail as a 30-year-old who wishes she was more like her grandma and [Diane Keaton](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/08/11/mack-and-rita-movie-diane-keaton/10281391002/)as her 70-year-old wish-fulfilled self. [Queen Latifah](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2022/06/08/queen-latifah-red-table-talk-discusses-weight-journey-obesity-stigma/7539334001/) hits the road with ["Fast and Furious"](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2019/08/01/every-fast-and-furious-film-definitively-ranked-best-worst/1856145001/) regular [Chris "Ludacris" Bridges](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2020/07/28/ludacris-starts-education-through-music-kids-new-kidnation-site/5524968002/) for a Netflix thriller, and British actress [Ruth Wilson](https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2018/08/28/why-little-stranger-and-affair-star-ruth-wilson-always-delight-amid-darkness/1122483002/) ("The Affair") plays a woman looking for love – and finding a flighty boyfriend – in an English drama. [fall movie season](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/09/06/fall-movies-2022-most-anticipated-releases/7894249001/) out with a new take on a classic.

Tom Hanks, Cynthia Erivo, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Keegan-Michael Key, and Luke Evans star in Robert Zemeckis' live-action remake of the 1940 animated classic ...

It will be difficult to forget the image of Pinocchio staring at a pile of horse manure and touching it out of curiosity. (Coincidentally, his The Witches remake for HBO Max is the only other serious contender against Pinocchio for his worst film.) When Disney Plus first kicked off in 2019, one of its opening-day original films was [the Lady and the Tramp remake](https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2019/11/12/20961761/lady-and-the-tramp-review-disney-plus-remake), which is predictable, lifeless, and entirely unmemorable. Though the 1940 version of Pinocchio isn’t as aggressive and rowdy as his fellow boys on Pleasure Island, he’s perfectly willing to dive into bad behavior, aping his cigar-smoking pal Lampwick. Where Jiminy Cricket performs it as a quiet, telling moment in the original film, the 2022 Pinocchio truncates it and gives the shorter version to the Blue Fairy. It’s a gross image in a film that otherwise doesn’t add in scatalogical humor, a gag that isn’t in the original and has no purpose in the remake, and a weirdly unnecessary cost in a film that struggles to merge CG and live-action elements. The story’s outline will still be extremely recognizable to anyone with a passing familiarity with the animated film or Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. Because this is a modern film, though, apparently someone felt the film needed to scoff a bit at its own flights of fancy. Unfortunately, remakes of [Aladdin](https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637207/aladdin-film-review-disney-live-action-remake-will-smith-guy-ritchie-mena-massoud-naomi-scott), [The Lion King](https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/11/20690363/the-lion-king-2019-review), [Beauty and the Beast](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14962212/beauty-and-the-beast-review-remake-gay-lefou-bill-condon-controversy), and others had less room to stretch. These are answers to questions best left unasked — many of the small touches in the original Pinocchio are haunting because they defy explanation. Like the animated version, the straight-to-Disney Plus live-action remake tells the story of a wooden marionette (a CG creation voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) brought to life by a magical Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo), who sends him on a journey to become fully human by exemplifying the traits of bravery, truthfulness, and selflessness. Songs such as “Give a Little Whistle” and “Little Wooden Head” have been jettisoned in favor of four lifeless new songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard. He also explains why he refuses to sell off his dead wife’s treasured cuckoo clocks — which feature characters like Rafiki and Simba, Roger Rabbit, and Sheriff Woody, which may go down as one of the most painful bits of corporate synergy in film history.

(AP) -- After a string of live-action remakes, from "Beauty and the Beast" to “The Lion King," the Walt Disney Co. has finally gotten around to “ Pinocchio.

But if we're being honest here, he's always been a bit of a dud. has finally gotten around to “ Pinocchio.” Along the way, there have been some nice performances, enormous heaps of CGI and, lest anyone forget, one very blue Will Smith. Whether any of these movies have done much to improve the originals is very much up for debate, and undertaking “Pinocchio” poses even more particular challenges.

Tom Hanks stars as Geppetto and Keegan-Michael Key and Joseph Gordon-Levitt provide voices in Robert Zemeckis's live-action adaptation that falls short of ...

It’s a toss-up whether “Pinocchio” qualifies as a musical—the songs don’t dominate, though there are a couple of undistinguished new numbers and reprises of “I’ve Got No Strings,” “Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee (An Actors Life for Me)” and “When You Wish Upon a Star.” The last of these might be a revelation to the youngest viewers, who’ll recognize the company theme music even if they never knew its source. It’s only when Pinocchio disappears that Geppetto sells his handiwork, to finance a search that will lead to the belly of a sea beast and some special effects straight out of Cecil B. Zemeckis, who cowrote the screenplay with Chris Weitz, adds some depth, albeit obliquely, to the old Disney version (and the Collodi tale, too, for that matter) by framing Geppetto as a grieving parent. A second would be Disney’s devotion to its own catalog, which it recycles with self-referential abandon: When Geppetto’s workshop goes haywire—a scene lifted, like so many, from the 1940 cartoon—who should pop out of the cuckoo clocks but Cinderella, the Seven Dwarves and Woody and Bullseye from “Toy Story.” Green is the dominant hue in the Wonderful World of Color. Keegan- Michael Key is Honest John, the fox; Cynthia Erivo is the Blue Fairy, and Jaquita Ta’le is a new character, the puppeteer behind Sabina, one of Pinocchio’s co-stars in the exploitative marionette show run by Stromboli ( Giuseppe Battiston ). Add the insipid voice ( Benjamin Evan Ainsworth now, Dickie Jones then) and Pinocchio is hard to warm to.

Prepare to lose your bearings in Pinocchio, Disney's regeneration of its 1940 animated landmark. The movie is being sold as live action, or thereabouts at ...

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Even taking it as a given that Disney's animated classics will all receive live-action makeovers eventually, "Pinocchio" feels like an unnecessary exercise ...

Mostly, "Pinocchio" itself washes ashore into a kind of no-man's land -- too uninspired to bring anything fresh to the material, dutifully playing like a pallid redo of the 1940 classic, arguably one of Disney's most beautiful animated films from that pivotal stretch in its early history. They build toward his encounter with the seafaring Monstro, upgraded to "sea monster" status, having maligned whales quite enough. But "Pinocchio" unfortunately mirrors the lifelessness of Zemeckis' early experiments with animation and doesn't much augment the well-known story with the snippets of music added, other than Cynthia Erivo, as the Blue Fairy, belting out "When You Wish Upon a Star."

Can 'Pinocchio,' which five years ago would have been in theaters, pull Disney+ viewership on par even with theatrical bombs like 'Lightyear'?

However, I don’t know if there’s an equation for ‘losing X dollars in theaters for Y streaming viewership gains.” As for Pinocchio, it’s a disappointment, to be sure. It may not be worth spending tens of millions of dollars for a film like Pinocchio to bomb in theaters (with resultant bad press and tisk-tisking from pundits like myself) to boost its streaming potential. However, it’s also a way for Zemeckis to indulge his decades-long interest in pushing the technical envelope now that Hollywood can’t afford to spend $100 million on films like Contact and Cast Away. Disney+ is dominated by MCU television shows (whose success was predicated upon the theatrical popularity of the Marvel movies), theatrical Marvel movies (Thor: Love and Thunder debuted just today), Star Wars shows and Disney/Pixar animated films. That caused a (primarily online) kerfuffle when The Help (an Oscar-winning and Best Picture-nominated film that grossed $169 million domestic in 2011) became Netflix’s most-watched movie during a moment of intense civil protests against arguably improper (and racially motivated) police violence. Netflix gets high-end third-party films while Sony gets a cushion and a financial motivation to take the chance on the next Where the Crawdads Sing or the next Baby Driver. [just dropped for the week of August 8 through August 14](https://www.nielsen.com/top-ten/), and Lightyear earned 700 million minutes. Prey is the best Predator movie since the first Predator movie, and offhand The Harder They Fall may be the best mainstream western since Open Range. As much as any of the lesser Walt Disney remakes over the last decade, it alternates between being a redundant rehash of the 1940 animated feature and a needlessly watered-down adaptation of the same. As noted in 2019, that audiences flocked to Batman doesn’t mean they wanted a big-budget version of The Shadow. Likewise, that audiences showed up in theaters for Aladdin doesn’t mean they would do so for Dumbo. I would argue the end game has been to create the definitive live-action version of these respective oft-told tales to sit alongside their already classic animated adaptations.