39
votes
Disney’s harsh new reality: Costly film flops, creative struggles and a shrinking global box office
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- Rebecca Rubin,Brent Lang
- Published
- Jul 5 2023
- Word count
- 1810 words
The moral of the story is that Disney reaps what it sowed. It spent years (nearly decades) iterating off of the same franchise formula, each time edging closer to the cliff it now faces. Franchise fatigue is real and it’s predictable, but I don’t think it’s inevitable. Contrast Disney’s current problems with its animation “golden age” from the late 80s to late 90s. On the one hand, the films could arguably be considered “franchise” films because they shared similar elements - animated musicals with similar narrative arcs. But at the same time, each film was unique. The characters were unique, the cast was different, even the animation styles varied depending on which team developed it.
Where Disney messed up, in my opinion, was maneuvering to monopolize “fandoms”. Buying an IP and then milking it dry with relentless film after film, demanding that the audience be fluent in the lore of each franchise. It’s exasperating. As an xennial, I grew up watching Indiana Jones, and Star Wars. I remember the novelty of those early 20th Century Fox X-Men and Spider-Man movies. Each movie stood on its own, some better than others. While you certainly benefited from understanding the lore of each series, it wasn’t a barrier to entry. And most importantly, Lucasfilm, 20th Century, and Disney competed against each other! They weren’t company units striving for synergy in some MBA consultant’s business plan.
What’s the solution? I’m probably in the minority of people who think that Disney could be broken up. Certainly, breaking it up would be a net positive for the entertainment industry. But short of that, Disney could probably benefit from taking more creative risks - instead of investing in one $1 billion franchise block-buster, finance 25 $40 million movies, with novel screenplays and up-and-coming talent. In other words, go back to the approach studios used to take, where risk was an element factored into each film.
I think you're forgetting that Disney's renaissance also ended, and for reasons pretty similar to what they're dealing with right now. They ended up getting really, really bad, and people were dismissing them for no reason other than "it's just a Disney movie". The film industry as a whole is failing to realize that repeating the same formulas over and over again is in itself a substantial risk. Movies live and die based on the creativity they display, and there's only so much you can tread the same ground without stepping on one of your footprints; eventually, you need to break some new ground.
The sad thing is that even Disney produces great things every once in a while, but they hedge their bets a bit too much. Turning Red was a fantastic movie, but it feels like it was a fever dream how quickly it came and went. I have literally never heard anyone talk about American Born Chinese even though it's fantastic and has a lot of the talent from Everything Everywhere All at Once. For some reason everything they release to Disney+ seems to just kind of disappear from the public consciousness.
I certainly agree with you that Disney needs to diversify, and breaking them up is probably the best way to do that.
In a world full of multiplying streaming services at ever increasing costs, a lot of people opt out of Disney+. If anything gets released exclusively there, to me it might as well not as exist.
I think franchise fatigue is often over pushed as the problem.
Sure it's a thing, but precious few things actually hit that. Loooong before consumers get sick of content you often see an EXTREME drop in quality which is much more often the problem. People then drag out franchise fatigue as the scapegoat when it's really as simple as "your writing and pacing sucks". Disney is cutting corners left right and sideways (see their entire live action film line) and it shows in the quality, and consumers react to that.
I'll also throw out that the farming out of movie trailers to "firms" that basically slap a template on it and shuffle it out has made me basically blind to movie releases, because they're all the same. It's a small thing in the scheme of things, but it's something else i've noticed that often leads to me saying 'Oh right that was coming out' when I find it on streaming months after it already released.
Also, 9/10 times the entire movie is contained in the trailer (hell, often the best scenes) and there's no need for me to actually see the movie.
I'm just turned of movies that have no pacing. Nothing to allow you a moment to actually absorb the experience. It's most prominent in the Marvel franchise but it's so prevalent to have that typical "serious-quip-serious-quip" that nothing matters.
Sigh. Star Wars is very much in this boat, I mean look at the last season of the Mandalorian. That was a shitfest of a season to the point where I am literally done with Star Wars as a whole, I was going to hold out for the Askoka tv show (which they changed from a limited series to a full-blown series) to get an ending for Rebels. But fuck it, there was literally no reason for the Imperial segment in that show, especially the torture scene (remember this is suppose to be a kids show) in that segment, other than be filler for a pretty mediocre tv show, yes the first season was really good, but there a literal visible difference in the quality between the first season and the second season. Or when the Book of Boba Fett became the Mandalorian season 2.5 for some reason, another reason why I jumped ship from this IP.
They seemed far more interested in destroying that lore and rewriting it at the cost of alienating 'original fans' that they allegedly wanted to cater to - that is after all why they bought those properties. It couldn't be because they were out of ideas twenty years ago, could it? Then they failed to deliver, and had the gall to attack fans who pointed it out. Marvel's best movies were still weak soup compared to the original comic stories.
We're talking about a company that was too stupid (or arrogant, according to some) to get han, luke, and leia back into a single scene together. When you insult your customers, you lose your customers. Disney insulted me for many years with their terrible taste, vapid adaptions, and worse writing than one finds in teenage fan fiction. I'm not paying them for this garbage. I don't even bother pirating it to check it out anymore. The Disney name is synonymous with shitty McCinema, it's zero calorie trash. I want steak, and they don't sell that anymore.
You will find me in an adult-only theater that serves good food and beer with the movie, and ejects anyone who makes a fuss during the film... probably watching a Tarantino movie. Disney can drop dead, and I'll consider it karma for fucking up copyright law with that Life+75 nonsense if nothing else.
Soon enough, it'll be easy enough that just about anyone can 'create a movie' the classic way with drone cams or the new cgi way with ai doing the post or animating the entire thing in any style you can imagine. We won't be able to keep up with the content, and they won't be part of a large corporation or bullshit guilds. They'll just be kids having fun making movies, and blurring the line between cinema and gaming.
Monolithic dinosaurs like Disney have no place in that world. Remember that when they ask for bailouts.
While I prefer a breakup, I think these companies are more than capable of taking financial risks. The issue is none do, because nobody wants to be on the hook for a flop.
This is a bit like saying that hedge funds could benefit from investing in GameStop rather than using their crazy computer investing strategies. Sure, they could make more money, but they mostly are trying to play it safe.
Edit: also, apparently this is a four-day-old comment...
That definitely seems the case. Have you seen Nimona? Blue Sky was making it when Disney acquired Fox, but Disney eventually killed it. Netflix picked it up and finished it. It's on Netflix now.
The movie is fantastic. The art design. The animation. The characters. The story. They enhanced the graphic novel it's based on, too.
It just shows what Disney literally could have been, but simply isn't.
Nimona was lovely, thank you for the recommendation.
I remember the trailers for Frozen 2. It looked like it was going to be this epic lore filled adventure of two bonded sisters embracing Elsa’s curse for the good of a kingdom.
Instead we got the usual dredge of trope bickering and movie that makes me thing, “this whole problem could have been solved with an email.”
As someone who hasn't seen the movie, I find your take hilarious. Please tell me: what would be written in that email?
I honestly cannot tell if this comment is satire or not.
Please, just let it die already.