Major spoilers ahead for Disney’s live action remake of “Lilo & Stitch”
Disney’s live action remake of “Lilo & Stitch” is here and yes, it makes a pretty major change to the ending of the story. And some fans are pretty mad about it.
For the most part, the new version sticks pretty closely to the 2002 animated film. The story centers on two sisters, Lilo and Nani, who are navigating life after the death of their parents. Nani, a teenager just about to head to college, struggles to hold down a job and watch out for her sister, who is a bit chaotic.
When an even more chaotic alien crash lands in their life, things go from hard to harder (but in ways that are mostly fun to watch). Throughout both films, the big concern is social services taking Lilo away from her sister.
Now, this is your last exit ramp before spoilers occur. Still with us? OK, your call.
In one of the biggest changes to the original story, the live action “Lilo & Stitch” actually does end with Lilo and Nani getting split up — but not how you might think.
Social services doesn’t take her, though Nani does come close to letting them. But in the end, Lilo ends up going to live with their neighbors, who look in on the girls through the whole movie, and Nani goes to her dream school to study marine biology (or be in the marines, if you ask Lilo).
Fans aren’t loving this tweak though. One even called Nani “one of the most bastardized characters in any of these remakes.”
“This feels like an attempt to girlboss Nani by giving her more ambitions, but they so easily could have just expanded on what the original implied,” another wrote.
Indeed, in the 2002 film, Nani fought with everything she had to keep Lilo in her care, never once considering the idea of letting her go.
“Nani not giving up custody of Lilo and fighting for her WAS the point,” one fan angrily wrote. “Nani and Lilo bounding due to Stitch WAS the point.”
Of course, the live-action “Lilo & Stitch” also makes it much clearer that Nani is a teenager, whereas the original didn’t spend much time on the fact that she was 19 years old. Additionally, in the original, there were no other options for people to care for Lilo — she and her sister did not have any close neighbors or anything.
Still, the splitting of the sisters is arguably the biggest change this version makes — alongside scrubbing the character of Gantu and splitting Cobra Bubbles into two characters — and for many, flies in the face of the original.
You can see more fan reactions below.