You’ve seen a horse fly, you’ve seen a dragon fly, you’ve seen a house fly. Now watch as a computer-animated elephant with oversized ears … crashes to the ground from a very great height. The reviews are in on Disney’s new Dumbo – reworked from the 1941 classic with “the imagination of Tim Burton” – and they are not unanimously positive, to say the least. “It transforms a gentle and miraculous tale into a routine story by weighing it down with a lot of nuts and bolts it didn’t need,” says Variety. “Floats just high enough to clear the incredibly low bar that it sets for itself,” writes IndieWire. In this paper, Peter Bradshaw calls it “a flightless pachyderm of a film” with a “pointlessly complicated and drawn-out story”. Roll up! Roll up!

If Dumbo flops, it could represent a major disturbance in Disney’s grand master plan. The corporation’s recent buying spree has left other studios trembling in its mouse-eared shadow. Over the last decade or so, Disney has snapped up plum properties such as Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar, culminating in last week’s $71bn (£54bn) acquisition of rival studio 21st Century Fox.

At the same time, Disney has been re-staking its original territory by making new versions of its own-brand animated classics, with a mix of live action and photorealistic CGI. This makes a lot of sense for Disney: many of those classics were based on fairytales and stories no longer covered by copyright, which means others have been muscling in on the territory – Andy Serkis’ rival Mowgli, for example, or Snow White and the Huntsman, or the new version of Pinocchio that Guillermo del Toro is developing for Netflix.

The strategy has worked so far. Against expectations, The Jungle Book was a critical and commercial hit in 2016; Beauty and the Beast was the second highest grossing movie of 2017 globally (No 1 was Star Wars: The Last Jedi, also from Disney). And there’s plenty more coming down the pipeline: In May, Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin; in July The Lion King; Mulan next year, and more in the works, including Lady and the Tramp and The Little Mermaid.

But recently things have hit a bump at the box office. Last year’s Mary Poppins Returns and Christopher Robin sequels didn’t exactly set the world on fire. Worse still have been the trailers for the new Aladdin. The general reaction to the first sight of Will Smith’s blue-skinned, bare-chested, CGI-augmented Genie has been: “Urgh! Make it go away!” Or at least make it into a Blue Man Group meme. Disney was compelled to respond, stating that it was “confident that audiences will fall in love with the Genie and all of the characters when [Aladdin] hits the big screen this May”. But the company hastily re-cut a new trailer showing Smith’s Genie in a friendlier, more clothed, less blue incarnation (in fact “creepy Will Smith” seems to have disappeared from the internet).

Caillou Pettis (@CaillouPettis) This looks like a blue version of Shrek. #Aladdin pic.twitter.com/7xCEg46WvS

As well as freshening films up visually, Disney’s remakes are also a chance to bring the stories more into line politically. This ought to be a good thing but ends up being part of the problem with the new Dumbo. In Burton’s film, there are no dark-skinned roustabouts singing about how they’re happy to be illiterate and “slave until we’re almost dead”. Nor will you meet an African American-voiced crow named Jim. This version also has more hand-wringing about animal rights – not least Dumbo’s rights to freedom and reunion with his mother. In the 1941 original, it was other animals that came to Dumbo’s aid; this time, it’s sympathetic humans. A circus troupe banding together to liberate their most lucrative beast is not exactly a solid business model, but it ticks the right, 21st-century boxes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito in Tim Burton’s Dumbo. Photograph: Disney Enterprises

Then again, looking at Dumbo, you can’t help but wonder if Tim Burton’s real target is Disney itself. His story focuses on a struggling little family circus whose prize asset attracts the attention of a megabucks entertainment conglomerate. The villain of the piece, Michael Keaton’s VA Vandevere, is an entrepreneur who is in touch with his inner child and runs a huge amusement park with themed areas, rollercoasters, and a world of the future. Ring any bells?

Burton started out as a junior animator for Disney in the early 80s. He made his first movie there: the six-minute stop-motion short Vincent. But his aesthetic was clearly no fit for the House of Mouse, and he went it alone, with spectacular results. Until recently, at least. Now, like so many others, he’s been brought into Disney’s big tent, first with the dreadful Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, now with Dumbo. At the climax of his movie [spoiler alert], Burton brings that tent crashing down in flames. You could see that as a subtle attempt at subversion, but if Dumbo trips over its own ears at the box office, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.