Remember Hollywood is a business, so it might be that their focus testing has determined that the public do not really want new ideas, and would prefer to see the same things. Take for example this:

Ex Machina a very good, new, experimental film dealing with artificial intelligence, and what makes a human, human. It took about $ 36 Million world wide. Now lets compare this to Jurassic World, which is a sequel to Jurassic Park. Not a bad film, but no where near as good as the original. It has been out less than two weeks and has grossed over $1 billion dollars. Lets also look at the other top grossing films this year. Furious 7 and Age of Ultron. Both sequels. It seems that that is currently what the people want.

Some of the best villains ever were complex characters which you can despise for their actions but understand why the way they are.

I guess it all depends on how the tools of writing are used. The movie's attempt at humanising Maleficent isn't the worst, it's just that it came at the expenses of other characters' personalities.

But there's nothing wrong with villains who have no sympathetic reasons for their actions. Joker and Disney's version of Claude Frollo are examples of such. The first has such a mysterious background it is hard to tell if he a poor guy who went insane one day or a monster who only got worse one day while the second is frighteningly realistic like Huns from Frozen and Mother Gothel and there's hardly any reasons that excuse his actions.

Ands I hope the trend doesn't go like the 80's and 90's obsession with anti-heroes, and darker and edgier in comics (most tried pulling off Watchmen without understanding that the darkness and edginess was the by product of a compelling and well thought out story, and not that dark and edgy made the story work).

I believe she condemn the girl to go into a coma. The original was the one that had her condemn to death until one of the fairies changed it.

I made an error in the last post in that I should have said that the King was demonised while the fairies were bastardised... still doesn't stop them from being irresponsible, unfunny and annoying characters that somehow can't pay attention enough to notice when a child takes tumble off a cliff because they're slapping each other.

Still feels like a fanfic that had a good idea but only pulled it off decently at best and missed the mark by a yard at worst, at least to me. Then again, talking about the movie is like bringing up the Hobbit movies for both book and movie fans, the new Mass Effect for fans or Metroid: Other M for Metroid fans; lot's and lot's of debating and arguing ensues.