Because Miramax pushed the release of Shaolin Soccer back several times, it stands to reason that Weinstein actually saw the film after he snatched up the rights, and realized that this ball of crazy might not get a lot of English-speaking asses in seats. So, he went into Harvey Scissorhands mode, chopping the 112-minute Cantonese and Mandarin film down to an English-dubbed 87 minutes. (Truth be told, Chow previously did some tinkering himself, extending the film into that 112-minute cut after a less-than-satisfying 99-minute version premiered in Hong Kong). Weinstein trimmed scenes (a wacky sequence of Sing defeating a gang with a soccer ball had a bit more vomiting and fart noises) and fully removed others, like a tonally-all-over-the-place moment involving a facially disfigured female baker/kung fu master (Zhao Wei) who has a crush on Sing. The monster even excised the obligatory blooper reel at the end.

This heavily truncated cut of Shaolin Soccer was dumped into theaters in April 2004, a week before Miramax released Kill Bill: Volume 2—basically an appetizing bit of trifle before the main course. The critics who actually reviewed gave it some love: Roger Ebert wrote a three-star rave (“It is piffle, yes, but superior piffle”), while Elvis Mitchell said “it’s so unabashed in its cheesiness that it could be spread on crackers; it may spike your cholesterol levels.” These notices are evidence that, if Miramax distributed Shaolin Soccer as the weird, wild crowdpleaser it already was, it might’ve had a chance to become a word-of-mouth sleeper. 

Unfortunately, Weinstein tried to force some kind of widespread appeal, making the film look like a triumphant sports romp for the whole family. (Just check out the trailer that Miramax cut.) Shaolin Soccer may have made $42.7 million worldwide, but its take in the U.S. was only a pitiful $489,600. When it was all said and done, Chow—who aimed to reach a global audience with Shaolin Soccer—was predictably crestfallen and predictably upset with how his film was handled. “What can I say? I really don’t know what happened,” he said. “I didn’t know the Western market—they are the experts. And once I work with someone as a partner then I totally trust them, or I won’t work with them again.”

Like so many filmmakers who’ve been burned by Weinstein, Chow moved on and found success elsewhere—almost immediately, actually. Later that year, Chow got with Sony Pictures Classics and released his chopsocky gangster comedy Kung Fu Hustle. It became another smash for Chow, grossing $100 million worldwide, with $17 million of that coming from American theaters.

As the United States hosts matches for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Shaolin Soccer has had a resurgence thanks to anniversary screenings. (The New York Asian Film Festival will screen the film next week.) Albert Rodriguez, film administrative and production coordinator for the Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston, recently programmed it for a soccer-themed series that also included Beckham. “The audience reaction was more than expected,” Rodriguez tells The A.V. Club. “Not only were there continuous laughs, but even applause at the goals made and boos at the defeat of the antagonist characters. It almost felt like a roller coaster with the reaction inside the theater.”

For Rodriguez, the appreciative response from moviegoers took him back to his younger years, when he and his buddies discovered the film and became Shaolin Soccer disciples themselves. “It was also one of those films that got us to play outside as soon as the credits were over,” he says. “It was quite inspiring, we even started a Friday Football League, with quotes and stunts from the movie we performed weekly when not trying to score.” 

Even after Weinstein hacked away at it and tried to sell it as something it isn’t, Shaolin Soccer was still strong enough to become a cult fave for American cinephiles who prefer their sports movies overflowing with comedic chaos.

Yet Disney kicked off the 2010s with Tangled, and the Rapunzel retelling became the biggest-grossing Disney cartoon since The Lion King. Three years later, Frozen obliterated those records with its innovation of including two Disney Princesses in a single film (and giving one of them superpowers; very au courant in a post-Marvel world). Three years after that, Moana completed this unofficial trilogy of computer-animated movies that didn’t just include princesses, but were actively about them, attempting to represent a fuller spectrum of life experiences than the marriage-centric concerns of even the more progressive ’90s characters. With The Princess And The Frog serving as a transitional text, Disney had finally made princess movies as strong as their fanbase’s devotion to them. 

Among these three very good CG-princess cartoons, Moana stands out because its growing pains are vastly less obvious on screen. The hero’s-journey story of Moana (Auliʻi Cravalho) defying her chief father to venture onto the high seas and find Maui (Dwayne Johnson) in order to save her ailing island proceeds smoothly on a screenwriting level, with the heroine eventually summoning the self-confidence, ability, and humility to match her wanderlust. The seams on Tangled and Frozen are far more visible, sometimes to those films’ advantage: The odd rhythms of Frozen make it particularly unpredictable, as if the characters (and filmmakers) are finding themselves in real-time alongside the audience, unconsciously aware that it could easily all fall apart before the climax. But on a level of pure, confident craft, Moana is the apex of the Disney Princess form. Even so, the movie is slightly sheepish about that label; in response to Maui calling her a princess, Moana herself protests that she’s actually the “daughter of the chief.” Maui’s retort, though, cleverly serves as both a critique of Disney stereotypes and a just-go-with-it entreaty: She’s got a dress and an animal sidekick; in Maui’s eyes, she counts.

Johnson’s Maui is key to the movie’s success, not because he overshadows Moana but because Cravalho is allowed to overshadow a performance from the biggest movie star in the world at the time. Maui might even be Johnson’s best performance; he’s certainly one of his best-rounded characters, and gives Johnson the opportunity to do comic wisecracks, show genuine emotion, and bring the house down with a showstopping musical number. Yet the emotional core of the movie belongs to Cravalho’s Moana, in large part because the movie takes the formal responsibilities of a princess seriously; Moana grapples with how to express her love for her people (adventuring versus traditional obedience), rather than yearning for a fairy-tale ending or an escape from that obligation. It is genuinely thoughtful without resorting to corporate-driven girlboss clichés; Maui’s more self-regarding starting place for his own journey, more conscious about his own supposed heroism, serves as a productive contrast. In fact, their contrast encapsulates the appeal of the Disney Princess in general: The princess characters are more connected to the worlds around them—whether the animal kingdom, an outside world that they yearn for, or a greater kingdom—than to their own egos (even if that means earlier princesses expressed their connections and kindness during their long wait for a princely boyfriend). By the time the princess movies reach Moana, they’ve reconciled how a Disney Princess would involve genuine leadership rather than making baby-steps away from passivity. 

The quality of those movies, Moana in particular, also underlines the difficulties of translating the Disney Princess into live-action. Some of those difficulties are the unavoidable and unfortunate byproduct of the scrutiny women receive on and off-screen; look at Rachel Zegler, who gave a perfectly charming movie-star performance in Snow White, only to become the poster child for the movie’s financial woes and the target of a bunch of anti-woke grifting. (It didn’t help that she was stuck in a benign-nightmare theme-park version of an animated classic; at the same time, it’s not as if the forgettably likable fellow who played Aladdin faced that level of vitriol.) More broadly, though, Disney characters are often caricatured by design, and a real actress embodying those qualities must jump through near-impossible hoops. Lily James got better notices for her 2015 version of Cinderella than Zegler did as Snow White, largely focusing on the radiant sunniness of her portrayal, but then, those earlier caricatures of trilling femininity have a lot more room for expansion than their 2010s counterparts.

As much as the ghastly Lion King remake proves that talking animals are far more expressive and emotionally “realistic” in a cartoonier context, the modern Disney Princess may be an equally difficult type of cartoon to translate into live-action. It’s not the fault of Catherine Laga’aia, the young actress tasked with bringing Moana to life in 2026, that the character doesn’t work in live-action. Laga’aia is poised, likable, and has a nice singing voice. She also doesn’t have room to move like Moana, with the cartoon’s mix of youthful bravado and knockabout slapstick; she often looks frozen in place by comparison. That points to flat direction, but also animation’s facility with showing a character so connected to her environment. It’s hard to portray Moana’s one-ness with the living ocean when she looks like a person and the ocean looks like a bunch of shiny pixels.

The Disney Princess age range—old enough to read as responsible and self-sufficient, but young enough to read as innocent and not fully formed—also presents a problem. It means whoever embodies Moana must put forward some form of gawkiness while nonetheless hitting their marks with precision; a true novice would seem too literally lost at sea, while child-actor polish would be off-putting. The interplay between Cravalho’s vocal performance and the physicality supplied by the animators results in the ideal give-and-take that allows bigger, broader gestures than can comfortably exist in live-action. For anyone, kid or parent, who has seen Moana a dozen times or so, Laga’aia is competing with Cravalho’s line readings; it often feels like she’s shrinking from them. For a cartoon princess to become live-action without reading flat probably requires something like Amy Adams’ work in Enchanted: high-wire performing with notes of satire. The older model of Disney Princess provides more to work with; there’s nothing about Moana, Elsa, or Rapunzel that begs for sly satire.

Ultimately, the reasons that Disney Princesses are such tricky live-action propositions are similar to those cited as the difficulties of existing as a woman in the live-action version of Barbie. That movie’s climactic speech about the impossible contradictions of womanhood easily applies to the fictional women of Disney, who are expected to endear global audiences while maintaining some degree of cultural specificity, to delight stereotypical girls without alienating stereotypical boys, to preach individuality while adhering to rigorously high standards of adventuring and singing. Perhaps that’s why, even faced with the global success of Frozen and Moana, Disney could barely bring itself to make another unabashed princess movie (Wish has more of the trappings; Encanto more of the spirit). Mostly, the studio fixated on Frozen II, Moana 2, and so on. The 2016 Moana may have been the last time a Disney Princess could function as her own person: Comfortably feminist, largely insulated from culture-war nonsense, yet not dismissive of previous movies’ forms of femininity. Plenty of younger viewers may get that from the live-action Moana, but they won’t be watching nearly a century of animated tradition come together. They’ll be watching a brand built on past triumphs.

Treves’ interest is meant to mirror our own. His is a piercing stare both sympathetic and ambitious, one that begins shedding a single tear and only becoming more self-aware over the course of the film. Initially, though, The Elephant Man encourages the curiosity of a circus act, delaying a direct look at Merrick for half an hour. Shrouded by masks, cloaks, and a medical curtain that mirrors the showman’s sheet hiding him from a gawking audience, Merrick’s body is approached by a conflicted film, one both whetting our interest towards and protective of its subject. 

When Merrick is revealed, the reactions from those who see him are almost uniformly panicked (though some respond with a commingling of the grotesque and erotic that wouldn’t be out of place in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights). Artist Christopher Tucker earns the screams; his work on the film is the main reason the Oscars now have an award for Makeup and Hairstyling. Though films like Planet Of The Apes earned special commendations from the Academy, An American Werewolf In London won the first award in the competitive category a year after The Elephant Man hit theaters. Tucker took on the role, turning Hurt into Merrick using casts of the real man’s body (so real, in fact, that the plaster still had Merrick’s hair embedded in it), after Lynch failed to create a version of the makeup himself. This is another moment where Brooks stepped in; a worried Lynch thought he’d be sacked right before filming began, but Brooks assured him that his time would be better spent focusing on directing.

With Hurt adeptly transformed, Lynch was free to focus on the acting, blocking, and the soundscape. The film, handsomely framed in classical set-ups with the same kind of respect for the past as Young Frankenstein, sinks into the haunting quiet of the era, with the rush of gas lights and the tocking of a clock tower the main accompaniment to Merrick’s saliva-flecked wheezing. Unearthly hums and whooshes, that would persist throughout Lynch’s films, create an ominous and encompassing white noise (black noise?) that do nothing to prepare the audience for the loud punctuations of Lynch’s more abstract moments. These, mostly in the bookends of The Elephant Man, distort the screaming of Merrick’s mother to resemble the trumpeting of an elephant. Her head tosses and turns in pain as the city churns out mechanized industry and human cruelty in equal measure. These quintessentially Lynchian sequences are more memorable than Hurt reciting Merrick’s favorite psalm, or receiving a kiss from Bancroft’s sympathetic stage actress, or even the wincing conscience of a little boy played by Rocketman filmmaker Dexter Fletcher.

And they almost didn’t make it into the movie at all. Paramount pressured the filmmakers to trim these dreamy freakouts, until Brooks put his foot down. “We are involved in a business proposition,” Brooks said. “We screened the film for you to bring you up to date as to the status of that business project. Do not misconstrue that as our soliciting the input of raging primitives.” 

This hilarious protectiveness likely comes from a few factors: Brooks has a history of shutting down studio notes, and likely felt that The Elephant Man was a proving grounds for Brooksfilm, as his company had only previously made Bancroft’s directorial debut Fatso. But underneath, Brooks’ kinship both with Lynch and Merrick seemed personal. The producer saw Merrick’s story as analogous to discrimination faced by Jews (“My films, even if they’re comic, they’re about: ‘Let’s accept the bizarre. Let’s learn more about these creatures, or these Jews.'”), and from his Midwestern stiffness to his unapologetic eccentricity, Lynch never quite fit in with conventional Hollywood (Brooks referred to him as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”). These were men who could relate to someone who was treated as mere entertainment, trotted out by benevolent and exploitative forces, their uniqueness bringing in the cash for an establishment they couldn’t ever really join.

This shared outsider status lends The Elephant Man‘s ending another touching layer. When Merrick chooses death by deciding to sleep on his back, with a single pillow, as someone without his unique physicality might, it is born from a desire to be closer to normalcy. Yet, even this suicidal gesture is met with something out of the ordinary, the moment of the movie most representative of its filmmaker: An abstract view of Merrick’s soul, rushing into space, meeting a translucent vision of his mother in the stars, who quotes Tennyson’s “Nothing Will Die” as the Elephant Man does just that.

That helped Álvarez’s 2013 remake stay loosely faithful to the original Evil Dead (including the infamous tree scene), but he made it his own by changing the reason these friends venture out to the woods. This time, it’s to detox their friend struggling with drug addiction, and her erratic withdrawal symptoms initially mask her possession by a demon. As the demonic possession spreads like a virus, Álvarez’s film quickly ups the ante on bodily harm, showing off Saw-like injuries as the demon makes characters burn themselves, carve up their own face, stab another with a needle near their eyes, or in an effort to escape, take a machete to the knee or tear off one’s arm. Although Álvarez’s short features no main characters, it does feature the same kind of encompassing, all-hell-breaks-loose chaos—which here meets a similarly destructive conclusion, featuring a blood-soaked chainsaw and a torrent of red rain.

Instead of following the characters from the remake, the next installation, Evil Dead Rise, was a standalone film from Irish director Lee Cronin. After a series of shorts, Cronin broke out with 2019’s The Hole In The Ground, a suspenseful mystery where a mother begins to doubt that the little boy who lives with her is her son. The house where the son and mother live is in a remote area surrounded by a large forest, not unlike the cabin in the woods of many of the Evil Dead movies. Already, Cronin is playing with some of the domestic tensions also in the Evil Dead movies, where demonic possession turns loved ones against each other. While The Hole In The Ground is not as juicy as the gore-filled Evil Dead films, there’s enough to hint that the director would be up to spilling buckets of fake blood.

That opportunity would come the following year. Riding the Sundance wave with The Hole In The Ground, Cronin began working with Raimi on a new Evil Dead story, which the filmmaker first teased on Reddit. Before that film came to fruition, though, Raimi invited Cronin to work on his Quibi anthology show 50 States Of Fright. Cronin helmed the two-part story “13 Steps To Hell,” which followed a grieving family unwittingly walking into a curse in a cemetery. The split short lays the groundwork for Evil Dead Rise, as that family happens upon the Book Of The Dead and some deeply cursed records below the parking garage of their building. Further, while previous iterations of Evil Dead mostly cast adults as the victims of demonic possessions, Cronin put kids in the crosshairs. Like in The Hole In The Ground, children were not safe from violence, and could, thanks to the supernatural, wreak some gnarly havoc of their own. But of course, this bloody family affair comes to an end thanks to a chainsaw, until the next victim arrives. 

If the work of Cronin’s Evil Dead successor, Sébastien Vaniček, is any indication, the spilling of blood and guts will continue until morale improves. The French director’s previous film, Infested, is quite possibly the most disturbing audition film of the revived Evil Dead trio. Set in a state-run housing complex, one young man’s obsession with spiders accidentally unleashes a mutant arachnid that rapidly multiplies and attacks residents throughout the building, unassisted by authorities who have abandoned their neighborhood. The body count is high, the kills become increasingly more creative as the spiders grow in number and size. For the arachnophobes among us, it might be some version of hell. It’s also a monster movie with a social message and plenty of kindling for nightmare fuel, like spiders bursting out of walls or under the furniture.

It’s easy to see what attracted Raimi to Vaniček’s film, as Infested had many of the hallmarks of an Evil Dead premise: a group of friends/relatives stuck in a claustrophobic scenario they can’t escape as dangerous forces creep closer and closer, thinning their numbers. The trailer for Vaniček’s Evil Dead Burn hints that the story, while different from Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, will once again focus on a family torn apart by loss and about to get besieged by Deadites. The violence is wince-inducing, with one character drinking melted wax, one landing on a pile of knives, and another possessed figure’s rigor mortis movement looks right at home with the rest of the franchise. Vaniček looks like he’s returned the series to the woods and, with a bigger budget than his previous film, intensified the gore with plenty of close-ups of burning flesh.

Each incarnation of Evil Dead takes the series in wild and unexpected directions. From The Evil Dead to Evil Dead II, Raimi developed a horror-comedy that was gruesome and disturbing yet wickedly twisted. The next entry, Army Of Darkness, took its main hero’s battle to a new dimension. While these latest iterations have returned to the earthly realm, each new director has taken a different approach to the lore, the aesthetic, and the rampant bodily harm while keeping a few mainstays of the series intact: gallons of blood, a dash of campy flair, and a free-floating camera searching for its next victim. Like the song example given by Raimi, the Evil Dead series is in the hands of the next generation of filmmakers, who, like DJs, sample and remix familiar beats until something unique to their sensibilities crawls out. The classics will always stay golden, but this is the rare franchise that views those classic elements as the basic tools for the new kids on the block.