Remember Coraline, the freaky 2009 stop-motion fantasy directed by Henry Selick, the guy behind The Nightmare Before Christmas? Based on a novella by Neil Gaiman, it tells the story of a young girl disenchanted with her ordinary, workaday parents who finds a hole to an alternate reality where her parents are cool and everything is fun but also everyone has buttons for eyes and it’s off and weird and her button-parents might want to lobotomize her. It’s a trippy, twisted little flick well worth a revisit:
Fast-forward 10 years. Disney is remaking all of its animated classics as live-action blockbusters, some of which are received better than others. Suddenly, everyone is wondering about what other animated films could be given the live-action treatment, and somehow or another, Coraline came up:
Hear me out,,,
— ash | SEEING TAYLOR WEMBLEY N1 & N4 (@evermore_ash) July 9, 2019
Live action Coraline with Natalia Dyer as Coraline pic.twitter.com/X5MGO6CiOh
If we are getting a live action “Coraline” movie, can Billie Eilish please be the star of it🙏🏼 @billieeilish pic.twitter.com/cd5IJnSyp8
— Paul Butcher (@ThePaulButcher) July 16, 2019
Then, as is the way of things on the internet, once people started speculating about the possibility of a live-action Coraline, the backlash to the possibility began:
Get that idea for a Coraline live action movie out of your head right this minute
— Candice Frederick (@ReelTalker) July 16, 2019
coraline took almost 2 years to make. thats 2 whole years of not only moving little tiny body parts frame by frame but hair, faces, etc. to get the finished product. the animated movie in itself is such a masterpiece that a live action version would be so unecessary.
— justine (@biticonjustine) July 16, 2019
If you were coming into the discussion at this point in the internet outrage cycle, it might have been easy to miss that the speculation and the backlash to the speculation all happened without an actual live-action Coraline movie ever being on the table in any meaningful way. So it goes sometimes online, where rumor is truth and truth rumor. It got to the point where Gaiman himself stepped in and told all these kids to get off his digital lawn:
If anyone has any idea where this "live action Coraline" nonsense started can you send me a link? All I can see is thousands of upset people who have apparently all heard it from each other.
— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) July 16, 2019
If I ever come up with a Coraline story better than Coraline. https://t.co/WW1YR51G1W
— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) July 16, 2019
So there you have it: the internet speculated about a movie that didn’t exist, the discussion got away from them to the point where the uninitiated thought they were talking about a movie that did exist, and the writer of the story on which the original movie was based confirmed that the new movie did not, in fact, exist. It’s the circle of life, as the opening to a live-action remake of an animated movie currently in theaters might put it.
So no harm done, bit it is yet another fascinating example of comments on the internet taking on a life of their own. Robot dominion, here we come.
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h/t The A.V. Club