The core appeal of Willy Wonka is that he’s a nigh-omnipotent maniac who uses his near limitless powers over reality to trick shitty people into killing themselves. You can’t make him the protagonist of a whimsical coming of age tale - you have to treat him like Jason Voorhees, or Dracula, or any other horror icon. Give him some new victims and new interesting kills and set him loose, that’s all audiences want.
I feel like I watched a somewhat different movie…
That’s actually not an inaccurate reading of the book, except that his victims are only maimed or humiliated, not actually killed. (Verucca Salt and her parents are publicly covered in garbage, Mike Teevee is overcorrected in the stretching machine to counteract being shrunk and ends up a skinny giant, Violet Beauregarde is permanently dyed purple, and Augustus Gloop is squeezed out thin IIRC.) And the sequel bears this out, although he actually does kill aliens there — the mauled but left alive characters are Charlie’s grandparents (some of them are turned into babies, while one of them is so de-aged that she is un-birthed, then super-aged to become a sort of living mummy). And the whole point of the exercise is that he was looking for somebody to take over from him and keep the tradition alive, apparently.
