The greats Dustin Hoffman and Julia Roberts starred in the 1991 film Hook alongside the legendary Robin Williams. It’s highly unfair that Peter Pan & Wendy would be compared to such an beloved film that will go down in history as a classic.
There is a take to Hook that the new Peter Pan & Wendy doesn’t have. The story that J. M. Barrie originally imagined back in 1911 was of a young boy who ran away from his parents and when he returned, he found them with a new child and thought they no longer wanted him. So, he lives in Neverland as the leader of The Lost Boys and only returns every once in a while to make friends with children, particularly Wendy Darling as well as her brothers John and Michael. That’s the story Peter Pan & Wendy follows when Wendy wishes to never grow up.
In Hook, Peter Banning is a successful lawyer who has lost connection with his family because he’s always thinking of work. His wife Moira is Wendy Darling’s granddaughter and on a family trip to London to visit her, his children are kidnapped. Tinker Bell comes to Peter to let him know where his children are and finds a grown man with no memory of who he actually is. Robin Williams brings that role to life as an adult acting like a child once he gets his memory back. The script was a beautiful adaptation because it dared to color way outside of the box.
The 2023 adaptation follows the rules and doesn’t even tinker with the story even though it has such great actors as Jude Law, Jim Gaffigan, Alan Tudyk, and Molly Parker along with the new talent of Alexander Molony, Alyssa Wapanatahk, Joshua Pickering, Jacobi Jupe, and Yara Shahidi. Ever Anderson, who plays Wendy, is Hollywood royalty with actress Milla Jovovich as her mother and director Paul W. S. Anderson as her father. With everything the film had going for it, it refused to take any risks or go in a different creative direction with the story and fans are not pleased with it at all. Having a diverse cast and including the female twins Skylar and Kelsey Yates as Lost Boys isn’t enough of a creative stretch to stop the negative reviews.
The fact that the story of Peter Pan has been told in film so many times from 1953 to the present means that it’s hard to surprise an audience with something refreshing they’d remember for years to come and want to share with their children. While fans are telling the movie industry to move on and find other stories to tell, Hook is the one that generations will continue to enjoy.