With the criticism and attendant declining stock value the company has been receiving, I want to speak in defense of the Disney Co. Sort of.
As its most recent animated cartoon, Wish becomes its fifth bona fide flop this year and its losses mount into the billions, you may well wonder what’s going on. I think that what Disney has been trying to do is expand its audience beyond its core audience but is has failed to do that.
Disney’s animated material and related merchandise have long had a target audience of little girls. For each new feature there is a “princess”, dolls, etc. Marvel, on the other hand, has largely had a target audience of teenage and pre-teenage boys. Features with lots of action, fights, explosions, and handsome men and beautiful women largely clad in spandex (in the case of Marvel). The same is true of Lucasfilms (with the exception of the spandex).
Although I stood in line to watch the original three George Lucas Star Wars movies and the first two Indiana Jones pictures on the days they opened, I don’t think I’ve seen any Marvel or Lucasfilms movie in the theater since. But I’m not the target audience for them.
I think Disney is trying to expand the audience for its own products by appealing more to little girls who aren’t primarily of European descent and to expand the audiences for Marvel and Lucasfilms products by appealing more to girls and women. It can’t seem to accomplish any of those objectives and hold onto to its original target audience at the same time.
Contrast that with Warner Bros. astonishing success with the Barbie movie. Its audience was women and girls under the age of 75 and it knew it. Clearly, it provided the content that audience wanted.
When you combine Disney’s inability to expand its audience while retaining its previous fanbase with the cost-cutting and price increases that have been the companies preferred strategies for staunching the losses it has been seeing from all of its segments, it has been a formula for disaster. I don’t think they’ll make more money by making the parks so expensive no one can visit them or producing fewer live action or animated productions or cheapening those it does produce.
It’s created a vicious cycle for itself from which I don’t see a clear way to recover.
On the film side of the Disney, I see the problem is the 3 money makers Iger acquired for Disney : Pixar (2006), Marvel (2009), LucasFilm (2012) have run out of steam on the creative side.
For most of the 2010’s, Disney’s film success was on IP of those studios developed prior to their acquisitions (Pixar sequels, Marvel’s infinity saga). Or even the live-action remakes of animated films, a definite sign of lack of creative juice. Nostalgia can work for a while, but it does run out.
As to the parks, its time for Disney to build another park in Florida and/or find additional sites (Arizona, Texas). Florida would be somewhat humiliating for Disney and anywhere else would be a massive undertaking.
What Disney’s managers are missing is that Disney has always been a nostalgia company. Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, etc. were all nostalgic when they were first released. That’s even more obvious when you go to Disneyland. It’s based on an idealized version of the 1890s.
Instead of embracing the nostalgia, they’ve tried to replace and, in some instances, even mock it. That’s biting the hand that feeds them.
I think that’s what the cruise ships and resorts are about. Think of them as floating parks. There aren’t a lot of green field sites in the continental United States these days that aren’t quite a distance from a population center. They’re easy to fine offshore. IMO an artificial island would be an excellent choice.
“Instead of embracing the nostalgia, they’ve tried to replace and, in some instances, even mock it.”
That brings to mind The Last Jedi, shudder.
There is creative use of nostalgia, but Disney is doing a lot of boring nostalgia.
I agree with Curious.
And especially with Marvel and Star Wars, they are oversaturating the market. The live-action remakes of classics just seem dumb. People who enjoy the classics won’t appreciate the modern remake with all the modern changes, and modern audiences want something more sophisticated than a badly-modernized live-action fairy tale.
The other problem is all the tie-ins that are wonderful for the rabid fan base but alienate everyone else. Characters and storylines that cross-over to another movie or TV series (or multiple movies/series) – then in the next movie or series, the audience is expected to know what happened in these earlier – and seemingly unrelated – shows and movies. I shouldn’t have to watch a couple of TV streaming shows, the animated series that ended years ago, and a different movie to understand what’s happening in the movie or show I’m currently watching. It’s annoying.
And a lot of the writing and plot arcs are just bad, predictable trash, or take so long to get going that they’ve probably lost most of the audience by the third episode.
Finally, there is good and bad nostalgia. The first season of Mandalorian had great nostalgia for spaghetti westerns. Since then, the series hasn’t been very good as it bounces around.
Andor was a great series, putting a compelling thriller in the Star Wars universe and making it believable. To me, it had the nostalgic vibes of thrillers set in WW2 or the Cold War.
The bad nostalgia is, as Curious suggested, crap like “The Last Jedi.”
And I think Disney hasn’t done itself any favors with bad female characters. Many are the one-dimensional “girl boss” Mary Sue tropes. The only character development is the Mary Sue learning just how badass she always was.
I would first very much agree with Andy about the live action stuff. Redoing the same movie but with live actors mostly sucks. As a play, like Lion King, it can work but not a movie. Beyond that I am also going to agree that the writing has just gone downhill. The princess or equivalent has been a hero in their movies for a long time. However, they have gotten predictable, heavy handed and the story lines are weak in the rush to make the girl the hero.
I dont think everything they do is nostalgia per se. Encanto was very good and not really nostalgia, at least for Americans. Neither was Frozen although I guess you could claim it was just an amalgamation of many princess stories. The Wakanda series wasn’t nostalgia for many people as the Black Panther series was a later comic not really seen until the 70s and was never very popular.
Finally, the music has gotten worse. There used to be at least one very good or reasonably good in almost every Disney cartoon movie. Cruella Seville, Bare Necessities, Under the Sea, Be Our Guest, Let it Go, A Spoonful of Sugar, the Lion Kings songs. The list is long.
Steve
I suspect that management drew the wrong conclusion from the success of the stage versions.
Black Panther is an interesting case. Is it just barely possible that the road to success in Disney’s expanding its audience is material that’s well-written, well-produced, and well-acted as well as having parts that really need to be portrayed by black actors rather than shoehorning black and Hispanic actors into material in which their portrayals are incongruous?
You guys are apparently much, MUCH, more into Disney than I am. But I did some digging before deciding whether to comment at all. And that in the context that Disney is BIG and always in the news here in South Florida.
I think this says a lot:
“When you combine Disney’s inability to expand its audience while retaining its previous fanbase with the cost-cutting and price increases that have been the companies preferred strategies for staunching the losses it has been seeing from all of its segments, it has been a formula for disaster. I don’t think they’ll make more money by making the parks so expensive no one can visit them or producing fewer live action or animated productions or cheapening those it does produce.”
No one ever recovered from not giving their customer base what they wanted through cost reduction. As they say: “duh.”
But despite all the good commentary I’ve seen in this thread, it seems no one wants to touch the third rail: Disney went woke. Its THE topic down here. Explain it away with all sorts of erudite critic-speak if you like. Splain’ to me when Disney’s customer base ever wanted trannies and all LBTQXYZLMNOP all the time?
You have the mother of all case studies right in front of you: Bud Light. When woke identity politics replaces good old high quality entertainment – you are, well, you are fucked. Plus, the writers these days do seem to be B/C grade, no?
I guess my point in this post is that I doubt that Disney management consists of committed revolutionaries. If not, what then? Maybe they’re trying to expand Disney’s market but live in a bubble and don’t understand what their approach will do when it collides with the real world.
I think Encanto and Frozen were two gems in a sea of mediocrity. Both had great music – too good as I got burned out hearing them so often.
I thought Black Panther was one of Marvel’s better movies for the reasons Dave alludes to. It also lacked many of the annoyances I listed above, such as the need to watch a bunch of other Marvel content to understand what’s going on.
As far as “woke,” I think the typical American doesn’t pay much attention to that. It’s really an outrage among the class of dedicated culture warriors who seek – and inevitably find – wokeness, or racism, or whatever under every stone.
Where I think the argument has some merit is the cases when scripts openly promote progressive cultural values. I don’t have a problem with that per se’, but it detracts from the entertainment experience when the presentation is so in-your-face and lacks any kind of subtlety. The Mary Sue, girlboss characters are part of this problem.
A movie like Everything, Everywhere, All At Once has a central female character who has some complexity, and isn’t the Mary Sue girlboss. And the political messaging – such as it is – doesn’t feel like a DEI lecture. It’s a much more interesting movie – at least from a character standpoint – than most anything Disney has done recently with a female lead.
Andy
“Typical American etc.â€
Look at Bud Lights numbers.
And Bud Light is a good example of the dedicated culture warriors. One (as in 1, the number before 2) trans person doing one (again note that number) piece promoting Bud Light. All of the other advertising stayed in place. It provokes hysteria amongst the snowflakes on the right, their dedicated culture warriors and they cancel Bud Light. Still, Drew may have a bit of validity in his complaint. There is certainly a lot of right wing PC going around and if you dont do and say what they like they will cancel you. It doesnt matter if it’s really woke or not.
Steve
Andy- At its peak I sometimes walked around the house humming Let It Go. On the plus side for about 2 months if I was tired I could just say lets watch Frozen and they were all happy to do that. Encanto lasted about a month. OTOH, there is nothing quite like engaging in arguments with 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 y/o girls about which princess is best.
Steve
I think that the other thing that the Bud Light affair illustrates is how effective social media is in organizing opposition.