The Town of Odyssey

I had never heard a single thing about this being in the works, but suddenly this trailer came out.

Yeah, I hadn't seen anything about this either. I'm not a big 101 Dalmatians fan to begin with, and this whole "make the villain the main character" thing really isn't for me. I don't plan on seeing this one. Maybe something could change my mind, but this really is not of interest to me.

Disney: "We want a Harley Quinn movie."

Studio: "You own Marvel, not DC."

Disney:

Haha, that's cute.

I came up with it myself! Pretty pleased, I'm usually not very good at making memes.

Seriously though, that's exactly what this is and it's really blatant.

That's even better! I assumed you got it from somewhere. I love that you came up with it yourself.

Disney does seem to want to appeal to the "it's dark....but not TOO dark..." crowd. They keep missing the mark on me.

She's such an odd character to put in a lead role. I get what they're going for (the Harley Quinn kinda move that DC did), but still... There are other classic villains that Disney could have made a movie on. Maleficent was a cool concept (regardless of what anyone thought of the execution) because there's so much vagueness & no motive behind her actions in Sleeping Beauty.

Cruella in 101 Dalmations: *literally wants to skin puppies for the sake of her wardrobe*

Cruella in Cruella (2021): I am woman...hear me roar!

Lol. But I really don't know the plot of this movie or anything...the trailer just looked like Cruella causing destruction in chaos. I'm oddly curious though and I can't explain why. Maybe it's just the concept of Disney doing such a film at all. If they try to redeem her or make her sympathetic, that would be awful.

Had no real interest in seeing this but then heard it will be put on Disney Plus so thought I might check it out, but then heard it will be Premier Access not part of the included library so definitely won't.

So nothing has changed I guess.

Hm. This looks terrible, and I will not pay money to see it. However... if it eventually becomes available as part of a regular Disney+ subscription, I might have to watch it to see how, exactly, they justified creating a prequel starring a puppy-killing villain.

I actually ended up going to see this. My brother really wanted to get out to a movie and I wanted to support our theater since they had a really hard time through the covid shutdowns.

It's actually not too bad; I was quite surprised. I don't think I would say I enjoyed it exactly, but that's not a remark about the quality, it's because of the kind of story it is. It's not enjoyable, at least for me; it's a lot of watching awful people being awful people. But that's what it's supposed to be. I thought this was going to be a Maleficent thing where they're spinning a former villain to actually just be misunderstood, but it actually doesn't do that. Cruella is not a good person and they don't try to make you think she is. She's the one you root for in this story, but only because she's the less evil of the bad people we're presented with.

It's worth checking out when it enters the free Disney Plus library in a couple weeks to see how they expanded on this character's story. It wasn't the pointless 'let's throw together a prequel just because it's a known property' movie that I initially assumed it was going to be; they had a definite idea in mind that they wanted to explore with this.

Hmm, interesting. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, bookworm. I still won't pay money to see the movie but you did make me slightly more interested in seeing it once it's free on Disney+. I definitely was under the same impression as you that they were going to try too hard to make you root for Cruella. I'm not a big 101 Dalmatians fan to begin with, so that probably contributes to my low interest as well.

I've only seen 101 Dalmatians once, decades ago, and don't remember a single thing about it. But seeing this movie actually made me want to watch it again just to see how directly it fits in. I haven't done it yet, but I'm going to soon. I got the impression there were some references and set ups that were lost on me by not being familiar with the original, I'm interested to see if that's true and if so to what extent they actually tried to really tie them together. Because they didn't have to, this could have been completely its own thing and it does work fine like that if you don't know the other movie, but if there is apparent effort to connect them in meaningful ways that would further show that there was more thought put into making this than just being a lackluster filler movie they wanted to mindlessly throw together just to expand their library.