Mirror Mirror & Co.

Everyone knows it, everyone talks about it: Hollywood newest trend is making fairy-tales inspired movies. This buzz is contagious to TV shows as well, so that there goes ABC's Once Upon a Time. However, is it really a new trend? In fact, it looks to me like it has been out for some years now: what's new is the concentration of Snow White adaptations that has made everyone talk about it. Let's take it from the start...or from what I think is the start. 

Alice in Wonderland (2010). Tim Burton and Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter? These three are a three pack deal or something. Of course the buzz is high when it comes to them. However, I must say that this film was not up to the buzz: great scenography and costumes, some witty dialogues, but, at the end of the day, quite boring and purposeless.

Red Riding Hood (2011). Emerging names on this one, like Amanda Seyfried's. It looks like no one liked this film, but I honestly did. I thought that the harsh and cold woods were a great setting (the natural component seems to be the trademark of director Hardwicke) and that the plot was not half bad and it gave a fresh perspective to a so known take, without betraying its spirit.

Beastly (2011). Oops: sorry, did not see this one! I cannot seem to be able to make myself take Vanessa Hudgens seriously!

Mirror Mirror (2012). I was really excited to watch this movie and it was a huge disappointment. Childish is the only world I can think of and, coming from one who still gets excited about the 1937 Disney's Snow White, it is quite an adjective. I know it is a fairy tale, but this does not mean that both kids and adults cannot enjoy it. The dialogues, the plot, the jokes: everything was immature.

Snow White and the Huntsman. I am even more excited about this one because I like almost everyone in it, so it'd better be good.

Details aside, these movies seem to have a few things in common: they all leverage on traditional tales and try to give them a new perspective, mostly in a darker key but some in a comedy one; they give more importance to a typically secondary character, like the Evil Queen or the Mad Hatter; they turn the defenseless victim into an heroin; they have really cool scenography. 

If we take these elements, we notice that this is a pattern much common to Hollywood adaptations in general. How is this trend any different than others? Fairy tales are sources of inspiration just like novels, old movies, legends, games and so on and so forth. The sad thing is that Hollywood always makes the same thing out of them. Maybe that's why the success or failure of these movies is ultimately all about the buzz and not about the actual thing.