Currently, the media scene is plagued with remakes, sequels, franchise series, and unnecessary adaptations and continuations of beloved classic movies, TV shows, and books. Disney is the main perpetrator for these remakes, creating remakes of classics such as Aladdin, Cinderella, Mulan, Lady and the Tramp, The Jungle Book, 101 Dalmatians, The Lion King, Sleeping Beauty, Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland, The Little Mermaid, and Pinocchio. Most of their iconic films. These adaptations have been met with varying reviews, with some fans enjoying them and some not understanding the need for a remake.

Snow White, the most recent of these films, is dubbed as one of Disney’s greatest commercial failures. The movie gathered a 1.6/10 rating on IMDb, earning less than half its original $250 million budget. It has been criticized for many factors including the casting of the main actresses, Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, for their polarizing political statements on topics sensitive to viewers such as the war between Israel and Gaza. Additionally, there were many creative liberties in the treatment of themes regarding the race of characters, feminism, and power, love, disabilities such as dwarfism, and rebellion. These points of contention have swayed viewers and critics to dub the film as being too ‘woke,’ a title that many of Disney’s remakes have gotten.

But how has this culture of remakes affected our perceptions of classic literature such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? Seemingly not as dramatic or public as is for Disney, but newer adaptations to the classic novel have been following similar revisions. The 2022 adaption, Beautiful Little Fools, by Jillian Cantor accompanied by similar novels such as The Chosen and The Beautifulby Nghi Vo and Nick by Michael Farris Smith join the conversation about rewriting a classic for the sake of accommodating contemporary diverse audiences, aiming at a different target than Fitzgerald. These novels involve contemporary issues such as struggles with racism, sexuality, abortions, and feminism, rewriting Gatsby for the modern reader.

Though most of these novels seem well-received and worlds more original than a Disney live-action movie could be, they seem to me to be ill-intentioned. Why touch a beloved classic that needs no revisions? It is a classic for a reason and if authors see the need for a specific modern topic, why not create their own characters and worlds for that issue. Understandably, Fitzgerald had biases and personal opinions in the world and characters in The Great Gatsby. He lived a much different life in a much different world than most of his modern readers. I believe in viewing similar works of literature as products of their times. The lapses in contemporary political correctness were not thought or cared for in his original, so why do we care to correct or expand upon them 100 years later? To me, it seems silly. And I’m not sure if these modern adaptations have genuine, good-hearted approaches to rewriting the novel, but seem to follow similar trends to the major media conglomerates such as Disney—aiming to expand upon previously successful and beloved classics to enlarge their profits and viewership.