Josh Gad has said that the underestimation of viewers has led to films being “dumbed down”.
In a new interview with The Independent, the Frozen star discussed his enduring love of the classic films from his childhood.
“You look at a movie like Jaws, and the shark isn’t on the screen for more than 20 minutes,” Gad said.
“I think we’ve got bombastically dumbed down in terms of what we think an audience can handle in terms of telling a story slowly, not feeling like you have to go a hundred miles an hour in every single scene.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Gad discussed appearing in Disney’s first “exclusively gay moment” in the 2017 live-action Beauty and the Beast remake and the controversy that surrounded it.
The actor’s character LeFou was briefly seen dancing with another man in one scene, leading critics to say that the film did not deserve praise for such a minor snippet of LGBTQ+ representation.
“We didn’t go far enough to warrant accolades,” Gad agreed. “We didn’t go far enough to say, ‘Look how brave we are.’ My regret in what happened is that it became ‘Disney’s first explicitly gay moment’ and it was never intended to be that.
“Frankly, I don’t think we did justice to what a real gay character in a Disney film should be… If we’re going to pat ourselves on the back, then damn it we should have gone further with that.”
Gad is currently starring opposite Isla Fisher in Wolf Like Me, which is now available on Prime Video.
