Dana Walden, the president of Disney, has weighed in on the live-action Moana's disappointing box office, and her diagnosis is a marvel of modern executive prose. The movie, you see, was an "excellent film" done in by "unusual circumstances." Not a bad movie. Not the twentieth remake of a movie everybody already owns. Unusual circumstances, like a fog rolled in off the sea and swallowed the tickets.

I've been watching Hollywood explain away flops since Carter was in office, and the vocabulary never changes. The picture was "misunderstood." The marketing "didn't connect." The audience was "fatigued," which is executive for "they finally caught on." Unusual circumstances is a new one, though, and I'll give Walden points for originality. Vague enough to mean anything, dignified enough to say nothing.

Let's review the circumstances, since they were apparently so unusual. Disney took a beloved animated film from 2016, one streaming numbers say families watched happily at home for a decade, and refilmed it with less charm, less color, and a talking chicken rendered in photorealistic feathers that give children the willies. They charged a family of four a hundred dollars at the concession-stand minimum to see a story they could recite from the back seat. The audience declined. Where exactly is the unusual part?

That's the ordinary circumstance. That's the standard operating procedure that has eaten Snow White, The Little Mermaid, and half the vault. The cartoon worked because it was drawn, because songs sat where songs belong, because the ocean had personality instead of pixels. Remaking it in live action was an accounting exercise with a script attached, nothing more. Families can smell that from the parking lot.

What galls me is the "excellent film" part. I haven't hidden my feelings about this remake wave, and I'll say plainly that a shot-for-shot photocopy of a better movie is a cover band with a nine-figure budget. Calling it excellent insults the animators who made the original, and it insults the ticket buyers who stayed home. When TCM-era studio heads had a flop, they'd shrug and say the public is a mystery. At least that had the decency of humility. Walden's version says the product was perfect and the customers malfunctioned.

And the customers keep "malfunctioning," don't they. Every lecture-first remake with a message quota stapled to it has underperformed, and every time, some executive stands at a podium and blames weather, algorithms, or circumstance. Meanwhile the movies that simply respect the audience, give it a story and characters and a reason to leave the house, keep doing fine. The scoreboard is public. It gets updated every weekend whether Disney's brass reads it or not.

My free consulting advice, worth every penny: stop remaking the cartoons. The cartoons are still here. Put Moana's original back in theaters for a weekend and watch it outgross the remake's second week. That's arithmetic, not a joke.

The Rex Theater in Muskogee had a manager named Mr. Dolan who'd stand in the lobby after a bad showing and say, "Well, we showed 'em." He never blamed the audience. He never blamed the weather. Sixty years later, a man running a single screen in Oklahoma had more honesty about a flop than the president of the largest entertainment company on earth. Unusual circumstances, my foot.