Whoa, what went wrong??

It was boring......

I'm guessing it's because such people didn't know what to expect. And yes, Sondheim's style IS difficult to sing. But they pulled it off well for this movie IMO.

It had a great cast, I liked the story, but musicals always, always come off as corny. I'm only watching it for the cast, tbh.

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One of the failures I really found striking was that the play had many humorous scenes, but every humorous attempt in the movie was a total failure. "Agony" wasn't ridiculous enough, and should have more close up shots of the Princes' expressing their first world problems. Prince Charming has that great line "I was raised to be charming, not sincere", but it was so flat. When the bakers' wife sings about the woods, she doesn't ham up that great line "Who can live in the woods???". I get that the lack of a laugh track or audience reaction would affect that, but I blame Rob Marshall for being a lousy film director. I think they tried to make the actors reactions too film-like (flat & realistic) rather than a "tounge-in-cheek" style.

I think the whole wolf sequence a total failure. The Wolf is supposed to be metaphor for a slick operator, and Depp was decked out like "Cat in the Hat" makeup. Something about baker trying to take the hood the first time struck me as all wrong. And there was no way to portray the abdominal rescue of the grandmother & Red, so why bother??? What was it supposed to add to the film? The whole point of the second half (after the happy endings) was to stress that fairy tales are B.S. and reality is about moral ambiguity. Without structuring the scenes to reflect that (which they made abundantly obvious in the musical), you don't really get what they're doing in the second half, or its significance. On the other hand, its an epic demonstration of what Disney does to every great fairy tale; castrate the meaning and impact of the story events, in order to have a happy ending, devoid of remorse for the heroes' actions.