‘Artemis Fowl’ Fans Hate the ‘Artemis Fowl’ Trailer and Disney Can’t Blame Sexism For It This Time

Disney is finally releasing the Artemis Fowl movie they’ve had in development for years and fans of the YA novel series are not happy with the trailer they dropped yesterday.

The problem, in short, is that the movie bears little resemblance to the novel series. For those not familiar with Artemis Fowl, the title character and protagonist Artemis Fowl II isn’t the hero of the book, he’s a villain. A phantom thief in  the vein of Arsene Lupin, Batman’s nemesis and love interest Catwoman or real-life air pirate D.B. Cooper, the Fowl of the novel discovers a world of fairies and proceeds to use blackmail and kidnapping on the magical people to regain his family’s lost fortune.

The trailer for the film, on the other hand, portrays Artemis as some sort of protector of the human world fighting against the bad fairies with the help of the good ones, like Holly Short, The Zenigata to Fowl’s Lupin III in the novels.

Fowl has an entire journey over the course of the novels from unrepentant villain to antihero and finally just one of the good guys, a journey along the lines of Vegeta in Dragon Ball or Han Solo in Star Wars. And just like Han Solo, all the moral nuance is being stripped from the character in order to present a sanitized, streamlined product to consumers.

Here’s a taste of how fans reacted to that.

That new Artemis Fowl trailer had me like… pic.twitter.com/uHNVCpJWSQ

— Bryn Clayton Jones (@Brynion98) March 2, 2020

This is becoming Disney’s normal modus operandi and it’s becoming concerning now that they own basically half of the entertainment industry. Artemis Fowl is a successful young adult novel series, it doesn’t need to be dumbed down and cleaned up for a family audience, it’s already for kids. And it was very successful in its original form. So why does it need to be genericized as a film unless Disney is just going to be entirely averse to any sort of risk or outside-the-box thinking at all.

And the insane part of all this is Disney is the company most bale to take raises and try new things. They basically have a controlling interest in all of Hollywood, a few failures here and there on the road to creating new and interesting franchise would be a drop in the bucket for them. The last time they tried doing something different that subverted expectations it was Frozen and that worked out pretty well for them. Now they’re just doing live-action remakes of their animated movies and making Marvel movies that all use the same script with different characters and they’ve made Star Wars so bland the only thing they have on the horizon is some novels set 2000 years before the first movies. Artemis Fowl could have been something new and different instead of just using the same script from the Marvel movies but with Josh Gadd.