What’s that? More potentially insufferable Disney opinions from a guy who loves Disney? Also… Aren’t I a little late? 21st Century Fox, including the 20th Century Fox film division, Fox Searchlight, and all of that company’s TV divisions, was acquired by The Walt Disney Company two months ago!
I thought I’d add a little belated perspective…
Whatever the intentions may have been behind Disney’s acquisition of Fox, whether it was for a massive catalogue for their streaming service or whether it was for just having so much stuff, I think something else was quietly at play here… The acquisition of 21st Century Fox completes Disney’s ongoing attempts at “branching out” into areas beyond the realm of family-friendly entertainment…
Let’s go back forty years… 1979…
At the end of the 1970s, Disney released two feature-length films that were given the PG rating from the MPAA. Now kids, there was a time when the MPAA rating system only consisted of four ratings, and they were, as follows by age-level: G, PG, R, and X. PG basically meant that anyone under a pre-teen age could be admitted, but it was strongly suggested that parents accompany their children. You look at any given 70s PG-rated movie, and it means it. For an animated example, just look at Watership Down, a film with some bloody violence, swearing, and traumatizing horrors. One can’t fathom why it hasn’t been re-rated to a more suitable hard PG-13 in the recent years!
The two films in question were one independent sports film that Disney got the distribution rights to, and an in-house big budget science fiction adventure; Take Down and The Black Hole respectively.
The latter is sort of a pop, an attempt at something a little more ambitious than what Walt Disney Productions were pursuing throughout the decade. The former was one of the few times prior to the ’90s where Disney picked up someone else’s film and distributed it.
Let’s go a little further back to 1976, ten years after Walt Disney’s passing and right around the time The Black Hole was in early development. By the end of 1976, a “Disney movie” basically meant a modestly budgeted family movie that was better fit for a Sunday matinee with the young’uns than for everyone to go and see at night. The summer blockbuster was now a thing, right on the heels of Steven Spielberg’s revival of the ideas and mood of the Golden Age of Hollywood. You look at some of the movies they made during that era, whether it was silly animal comedy Gus or the comedic Western The Apple Dumpling Gang or a Herbie the Love Bug sequel, and they seem like the kind of movies that could’ve been made in 1961 and there wouldn’t be much of a difference. Disney painted themselves into a corner, ignoring what Walt would’ve actually done all the while asking that very question: What would Walt do? I feel that the Disney Enterprises imposed strict budgets on the features, and misunderstood Walt Disney’s early successes that formed the bedrock of the company. It certainly wasn’t innocuous “children’s films.” Disney in 1976 wasn’t really making something of Snow White-caliber, or to use a live-action comparison, of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea-level.
Sadly, by 1976, Disney films and most animation in general was seen as children’s fluff by the general public, in an era of ever-changing attitudes and outlooks. Walt Disney’s animated features, game-changing and blockbuster-level popular with audiences in their day, were now seen as old hat. Part of the old-timey, uncool American establishment, to some circles. Same with his live-action movies, or they were just plain forgotten. Disney’s contemporary films, for the most part, failed to keep up with the audience. Walt was usually ahead of the audience, that was the difference. When Walt and his crew crafted a “timeless” masterpiece, they made something they knew would stand the test of time. Walt Disney also didn’t, in my mind, make “Disney movies”, he made movies. He didn’t make children’s movies either, he just made motion pictures for audiences that adhered to the strict Hays Code that was in effect til the MPAA created the rating system, two years after Walt left the living. But even Walt Disney began to feel pigeonholed in his later years, as his son-in-law and future CEO Ron Miller once recalled. Walt Disney privately screened To Kill a Mockingbird at his home, and was enamored with the picture, he wished he could put out something like that… Why couldn’t he? By 1962, the year that film was released, Walt Disney Productions had already fallen far from where they once were in, say, 1942. The days of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia were long gone, and Disney increasingly became more of a family entertainment company than ever before, what with the arrival of Disneyland the theme park and Disneyland the anthology television series in the mid-1950s.
Walt Disney still committed to some of his films, even in the days when his attention was turned to Disneyland, as most of the money was being funneled into that. Roy O. Disney, brother and business partner, appeared to have favored that more than animated movies. Walt still felt that his films weren’t just for a young audience, Walt still understood storytelling and was dedicated to giving the audience something special with his more personal endeavors. Sure, the silly Dean Jones monkey movies and stuff were the bread-and-butter, the bottom line-building filler, but when Walt was heavily involved with a film, an event was on its way. Mary Poppins, released in 1964, remains one of the finest jewels in the Disney crown and just about as good as any of his best. His final gift to the world, perhaps. Though Mary Poppins was finished in the mid-1960s, much different times from the mid-1950s, the film isn’t old-fashioned or dated or corny. Valuing great storytelling above all made for a genuinely great family film that audiences loved and continue to love…
This was a drive that seemingly died with him. Disney’s version of making something timeless, time and time again in a post-Walt Disney world, sometimes just means “golden oldies.” Your stale old favorites. Halfhearted re-heatings of what worked before, rather than genuine expansion upon the old ideas or the pursuit of new ideas. Disney being more modern is already a hot-button topic (which was very much part of the discourse concerning Disney Animation Studios’ latest film, Ralph Breaks The Internet, for example), so it’s not always easy for Disney to even attempt to keep up with where the public is at in eyes of some of their fans. For me, it shouldn’t even be about keeping up, or falling back on old recipes, but rather making works that will always resonate, and not by giving slightly new flavors to old things. That was the way Walt worked… “You can’t top pigs with pigs.”
They were just getting by in the 1970s, the real ambition and work was going into the theme parks, the ever-evolving Disneyland in Anaheim, the ever-evolving Walt Disney World just outside of Orlando, and an upcoming park based on Walt Disney’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. These projects were what kept Walt’s spirit alive and well, the ambition formerly spent on animated features and live-action films was seen here. Both ends of the film division were on the short end of the stick, and it didn’t help that those who were in charge at the time wanted to stay the course and greenlight corny old-timey family movies that could’ve been made 15 years earlier. It took people like Ron Miller (who recently passed in February) to shake things up. Ron took great interest in The Black Hole after the runaway success of a little movie called… Star Wars.
Released by 20th Century Fox in the late spring of 1977, Star Wars continued the summer blockbuster wave that Spielberg ushered in, and captured the hearts and imaginations of the public. This was a film that Walt Disney Productions should’ve made. They turned it down when it was pitched to them by George Lucas, but to be fair to Disney, several other studios turned it down as well. Lucas admittedly was making something that wasn’t en vogue, either, a big old timey space adventure for big kids that was a callback to the movie serials he loved as a child. He even remarked at times that Star Wars, to him, was the kind of movie that Walt would’ve made. If not for Jaws, one could only wonder what would’ve happened if Lucas made a version of Star Wars prior to the mid 1970s. Lucas’ project may have been old timey, but there was a real sincerity to it. It didn’t feel like a sort of “Remember the good ol’ days? Remember those old favorites of yours?” imitation of what came before. Star Wars had a captivating story, compelling characters, a real sense of joy and fun, arguably the best effects the filmmakers could get, it had bite, action, comedy, everything. The time was right for Star Wars, and Lucas and his production team – to borrow a well-worn phrase – struck when the iron was red hot. CLANG! Star Wars exploded, and is now an empire of its own to this day. Unlike many of Disney’s movies of the ’70s, Star Wars was truly timeless, not just a moldy oldies hour. What did Disney have that year? The Rescuers may have been the highest earning animated feature to date and a significant cut above the animated films made after Walt’s passing, but Disney didn’t have a movie like Star Wars. What else did they really have? Another Herbie movie, and a live-action musical with a goofy cartoon dragon. These would’ve been fine if they were released alongside something spectacular, but this was pretty much what Disney had to offer.
The Black Hole was the answer to the blockbuster boom, as much as it was to Star Wars. Disney had other space and fantasy-themed projects in the works that didn’t make it past development, but you can tell that Disney was looking to “keep up”, and consequently, The Black Hole – with its PG rating and spacey spectacle – was a critical and commercial loss. By contrast to the Disney of today, the logical step was to try again rather than drop it altogether. Disney followed up The Black Hole with a diverse batch of PG-rated movies, the majority of them spearheaded by an ambitious Thomas Wilhite, who was recently upped from the promotional department to the top echelon of Walt Disney Productions. He had a strong idea of what Disney could be in the early 1980s, not making movies about monkeys and football-kicking mules and funny Volkswagen Beetles… But rather films like TRON, Tex, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Never Cry Wolf, and Trenchcoat.
Similar Disney films released during this time were The Watcher in the Woods (Disney’s first attempt at a full-on horror movie) and The Devil and Max Devlin (a comedy where Bill Cosby is the devil, all kinds of fitting now). Disney mostly hid their names on the posters for these movies, their trailers didn’t mention the name that sounded like “Diz Knee.” Even when they came out on home video, their respective cover artworks mostly dialed down the Disney name and image. All of them flopped theatrically. Wilhite was fired in 1983, but in his brief run, Disney was actually kind of ahead of the game here. TRON was a movie no other studio was likely going to make, a digital action-adventure that was quite ahead of its time! Tex wasn’t dissimilar to other teen dramas out there, but it was cool to see Disney dabble in different things like horror, action comedy, and just straight up dramas.
Ron Miller had remained at the company, becoming CEO that year… Only to be completely derailed a year later by corporate raiders looking to snatch the enterprise right out of his hands, and then he was ousted at the behest of a disillusioned Roy E. Disney. Before Ron was out of the picture, he still wanted to keep expanding Disney in whatever way he could. Ron Miller had a major hand in long-term projects like The Disney Channel and Walt Disney Home Video (he was a particular advocate of getting the elusive animated classics on videocassette and videodisc, something many of the old-timers protested), to say nothing of EPCOT Center, but his last mark was left in early 1984 when he founded Touchstone…
Releasing PG-rated, more adult-skewing movies under the Disney name was a dead end in the early 1980s. No self-respecting adult or teen or pre-teen wanted to be caught dead next to anything with the Disney name on it, by the early 1980s Disney and most of animation’s reputation was at rock-bottom, completely sunk. Only something like a Ralph Bakshi movie or a Heavy Metal-type picture would get some kind of acceptance, but for every one of those, there was an adult animated movie like The Plague Dogs or Rock ‘n’ Rule that suffered financially, too. It was all drowned out anyways by kidvid Saturday morning cartoons and toy commercials disguised as half-hour programs. Disney’s animated movies may have made money, but not blockbuster money. The Rescuers and The Fox and the Hound were each collecting around $50 million on average at the domestic box office, a far cry from Steven Spielberg’s E.T. and its gargantuan $300m+ gross.
Miller, much like his father-in-law, knew right. Touchstone worked wonders for the Ron Howard-directed romantic comedy Splash, which broke into the Top 10 highest-earning movies of the year, something a Disney release hadn’t done in a long, long while. It’s also no surprise that the new regime that took over in 1984, namely CEO Michael Eisner and chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, favored Touchstone over Disney Animation. Finally, Disney had made a successful stab at a market outside of the traditional family audience, and Eisner and Katzenberg were going to exploit that. From some accounts, they looked at animation as icky kiddie stuff, but reluctantly kept it alive because Roy E. Disney wasn’t having any anti-animation nonsense. Animation was the cornerstone of Disney, not this “Touchstone,” and rightfully that was the way it was going to be. Within a few years, Eisner and Katzenberg’s success with Touchstone would turn around and benefit the feature animation wing. We all know the rest, don’t we? Those two saw, thanks to Steven Spielberg and former Disney animator-turned-rival Don Bluth – who scored a big hit with An American Tail, that animation could make big money again. With that, Disney Animation was immediately jet-fueled with an ambitious production schedule, new people eager to take the studio to new places, and then some. According to John Sanford, a storyman at Disney in the 90s who later directed their Home on the Range, Jeffrey Katzenberg once remarked – surprisingly – to the staff “You’re not competing with other animated movies, you’re competing with the latest Tom Cruise movie. You’re competing with Top Gun.” The numbers didn’t lie… Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King were all Top 3 smashes in their respective release years… These were the biggest Disney animated features since the early 1960s…
So not only was the 90s a pretty good time for Disney Feature Animation financially, but also a fine time for the live-action end of things. Touchstone cranked out hits, but so did a newly-formed Hollywood Studios, and later, a deal with Miramax brought more hits. Disney animated movies weren’t making kiddie movie numbers anymore, they were making blockbuster totals, cracking the top 5 like in the good old days. Then Pixar was added to the mix, Disney-distributed animation was secure in some way or another. Big successes on the live-action end, however, were almost exclusively from Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures. Nothing really from Walt Disney Pictures themselves, outside of Tim Allen comedy The Santa Clause and a live-action remake of 101 Dalmatians, but the latter was based on a beloved Disney animated feature, the former starred a comedian who was in demand at the time and happened to resonate with the public. Outside of those two films, they hadn’t had a bona fide smash since 1989’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Walt Disney Pictures comfortably begin releasing PG movies on a regular basis starting in 1985 with The Journey of Natty Gann and Return to Oz, which makes one wonder if they were intended to be Touchstone films at first. With the invention of the PG-13 rating in 1984, it seemed like Touchstone would be the PG-13/R division, while Disney could still do PG films with that icky name attached. Didn’t matter, many of the post-1984 live-action releases didn’t make much at the box office, regardless of the ratings they got from the MPAA. Even something of good quality like Flight of the Navigator just couldn’t do it. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was a rare exception, and its sequel didn’t add up, resulting in a third movie to go straight-to-video. Things played out this way throughout the ’90s.
By the early aughts, Walt Disney Pictures was floundering, the weak link in the chain. Disney Feature Animation was circling the bottom, too, though again, Disney had Pixar making animated hits, filling Disney Animation’s role for a while. (Whole other story.) Disney saved their mainline live-action output with… A risk. A PG-13 (!) blockbuster extravaganza based on… One of their theme park rides: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.
Made when it was deemed all over Hollywood that pirate movies were “box office poison”, Curse of the Black Pearl defied expectations and was a huge hit, scoring a $300m+ domestic gross and twice as much worldwide. There was some considerable hubbub over Disney making a PG-13 movie back then that wasn’t filed under Touchstone or Hollywood Pictures, but it didn’t matter, it caught on like wildfire and soon, it was everywhere. Disney had a new franchise on their hands outside of their animated world. This made previous post-Miller live-action successes look like nothing, even the Touchstone and Hollywood Films pictures to some extent, both of which were showing signs of fading. Disney finally had their live-action answer to blockbuster franchises like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Transformers, and several others. Those other guys had wizards, hobbits, and robots… Disney had freakin’ pirates!
Problem was, Disney bit off more than they could chew. Following Pirates, they saw two more live-action smashes with National Treasure in 2004 (which oddly didn’t carry Disney’s name), and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, & the Wardrobe the following year. One was an original conspiracy thriller, the other was based on a beloved series of books. Pirates was followed by a sequel, but Disney had serious confidence in Captain Jack Sparrow & Co., so they had filmed both the second film and the third film back to back, and they came out less than a year apart from each other. While both were rewarded with big bucks at the box office (Dead Man’s Chest at one time held the record for biggest opening weekend of all time, $135 million looks like *nothing* now), their critical reception wasn’t good. It didn’t matter, they still made a gargantuan amount of money. All was safe for a little while. However, overspending on the Narnia sequel (2008’s Prince Caspian) bit them in the rear. Disney decided Narnia was a lost cause and – ironically – gave it to 20th Century Fox to continue. They made a third film, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and that was it. They stalled on a planned fourth installment, The Silver Chair. National Treasure got a hit sequel in 2007 – this time sporting the Disney name, but for whatever reason, Disney just sat on the third one for all these years. The live-action/animation hybrid Enchanted was a respectable hit, but its sequel (reportedly titled Disenchanted) is only talked about, no signs point to it going into production.
Then think, post-Prince Caspian, we entered a prolonged era of Walt Disney Pictures desperately trying to spawn new live-action franchises to have alongside Pirates of the Caribbean. Beginning in 2009 with the action animal comedy G-Force, it was just disappointments one after the other. At the end of the decade, chairman Dick Cook was ousted and was replaced by a relatively inexperienced Rich Ross from the TV end of the company. In with him came an all-new marketing team and all of them were also pretty inexperienced. CEO Bob Iger, three years into his tenure following Michael Eisner’s exit, put these people in charge because he felt that fresh, young blood was the answer to getting Disney… Again… Up to speed. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and TRON: Legacy were their first live-action releases.
None of them launched the franchises that they were intended to fuel, though TRON had the original on its side and the cult following it had accumulated since the early 1980s. Some things based on those two movies lasted a wee bit beyond TRON: Legacy‘s disappointing box office run and the property still represented in other things the company puts out, such as a roller coaster that’s in Shanghai Disneyland, a coaster that will be coming to Walt Disney World in a few years. TRON managed to get a short-lived animated series in 2012 and a few other things, but that was about it. That franchise sputtered, and it’s uncertain whether another movie – be it a proper sequel to TRON: Legacy or an all-out reboot – will be made. TRON is the anomaly here, but Prince of Persia (an action-packed swords-and-sandals video game adaptation) and Sorcerer’s Apprentice (a YA-like adventure based on ideas from the Paul Dukas poem that inspired the iconic Fantasia segment) outright bombed and no franchises came from them. That same year, a Tim Burton-directed adaptation of Alice in Wonderland collected $1 billion worldwide despite getting lukewarm critical reception. It was… Quite telling. Now amidst this transition, Disney quietly acquired a little company making comic books and comic book-based entertainments… Marvel. Marvel was currently in the midst of building a rare cinematic universe where all the characters from their individual movies would meet up, and in August 2009, they were still only two movies in with two distributors at their back. One movie – the super cool Iron Man – flew high, the other – The Incredible Hulk – flatlined… Soon enough, the distribution of future Marvel Cinematic Universe movies would be handed over the mouse.
In the mean time, similar issues persisted into the beginning of the decade. Rich Ross greenlit few movies during his remarkably short tenure as chairman, movies such as Prom (which I think everyone assumed was some Disney Channel original movie-level thing) and Oz the Great and Powerful. He and his marketing team were saddled with Cook leftovers like Mars Needs Moms and John Carter of Mars. Some of these movies (such as The Muppets in 2011) were mishandled, or out and out left to die. John Carter of Mars was an infamous and particularly frustrating case, John Carter of Mars was ideal for a new Disney action/sci-fi franchise, because it was based on the granddaddy of it all, a series of pulp space adventures of warriors and aliens and all kinds of blockbuster-ready stuff. Problem is, the general public never knew of John Carter’s origins. John Carter of Mars was foolishly retitled to John Carter, and its marketing campaign didn’t give audiences a clue what it was about or why they should care to see it. No word on the century-old source material and everything it inspired. It looked like a rip-off of Star Wars and Avatar, when in reality, John Carter and his Barsoom adventures came first. What a problem! It became one of Disney’s biggest box office losses, and out went Rich Ross, the head of the marketing team, and many other people.
Adding to this growing problem was a potentially big deal that Touchstone, still alive and breathing, struck with DreamWorks SKG in 2009. A deal that included 30 live-action movies and put into place in 2011. The mix was rather eclectic. You had successful dramas like The Help, forgettable YA fare like I Am Number Four, and… Steven Spielberg movies. Big happening! Spielberg making movies for the mouse, first time since producing Who Framed Roger Rabbit! He was now *directed* movies for the mouse. The deal brought out three pictures total and one Disney-released Spielberg film. Rich Ross and that former marketing head MT Carney reportedly angered Spielberg, along with other Disney upper ranks like John Lasseter and Jerry Bruckheimer. Ross was in over his head, and it didn’t end well. This, combined with the John Carter fiasco, sent them on their way. Disney sought a replacement in Alan Horn, a long-time veteran from Warner Bros. who was given the position in mid-2012.
Now, as all of this was happening… Two big things happened for Disney in 2012. One… The release of Marvel Studios’ The Avengers, an event roughly four years in the making combining superheroes – including new favorite, Iron Man – from separate movies into one team-up spectacle. You mean to tell me that Iron Man is joining forces with these other cool superheroes like Thor, Captain America, and the Hulk? Sign me up! This wasn’t six caped guys fighting baddies, we had a man in a high-tech armor suit, a Norse god, a star-spangled super soldier with a powerful shield, a guy who turns into a green monster, and two assassins all coming together to fight aliens. This wasn’t X-Men or Spider-Man, for sure. Ironically, there was a sense of wonder and escapism to it that perfectly put it in line with Disney… The Avengers was the first Marvel Studios movie to be distributed by Disney, and it broke records and grossed $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office. Again, that looks like nothing some seven years later, because of the fourth Avengers movie. Yes, the *fourth* Avengers movie. History made. On top of that, it was critically acclaimed. Conveniently, Disney solved one of their then-current dilemmas. Starting around 2008, Disney got very concerned about a particular age group: The 6-12 year old boy. This concern, silly it was, even affected the revived feature animation studio and other areas of the company. Marvel movies with superheroes and explosions? No problem. The problem was further solved in October of 2012, when Disney announced their acquisition of Lucasfilm Ltd. Star Wars was now under the Disney tree, with production on a sequel trilogy and spin-offs to commence immediately… Disney had their second and third blockbuster franchises to go alongside their own Pirates of the Caribbean, one of which was former competition to them for decades. Also timely, because by then, Pirates was on its fourth installment and that did so-so numbers stateside, it relied on worldwide grosses to break even.
Back to Disney higher ups, though. New chairman Alan Horn removed whatever trace there was of not only Ross’ tenure, but of Dick Cook’s as well. Various projects were shuttered, such as a halfway completed stop-motion film from Henry Selick (The Shadow King) and potential live-action projects like Matched. Ross leftovers like Oz the Great and Powerful and The Lone Ranger either didn’t start franchises or just outright bombed. One particular leftover, a live-action take on Sleeping Beauty told from the villainous Maleficent’s point of view, made it out alive and was a big box office hit… Regardless of, again, negative reviews. Its belated sequel is opening later this year. Everything else went down, down, down: Muppets Most Wanted, more Touchstone-DreamWorks movies like Need for Speed and The Hundred-Foot Journey, sports dramas came and went, etc. 2015 followed with similar results, the live-action Cinderella rehash was a hit while the sci-fi adventure Tomorrowland bombed hard, along with the rest of the live-action movies released that year. Only Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (his third film for Disney and part of the Touchstone-DreamWorks deal) did well enough, but it wasn’t enough to make Disney heads change their minds.
By 2015, the tables were completely turned. Disney Animation was soaring at the box office, while Disney Live-Action was losing altitude, the exact opposite of where both divisions were in 2005. More remakes came and soared at the box office, while more original ideas crashed and burned. The Jungle Book (an all-CG film with one live actor) and Beauty and the Beast lit up the box office, while Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of The BFG, true story drama The Finest Hours, and Touchstone’s drama The Light Between Oceans thudded. Ironically, Pixar, the animation outlet Disney relied on in the early aughts, released their first ever box office loser in 2015 (The Good Dinosaur), and another in 2017 (Cars 3). The only non-remake/rehash Walt Disney Pictures movie to really score in the 2015-2017 stretch was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales… Still a sequel, though, and it had to rely on overseas grosses to break even.
We’re at the end of this decade and Walt Disney Pictures has been boiled down to two categories: Out-and-out live-action/CG remakes of the animated classics, and the occasional big budget film that’s either attempting to start a franchise (Tomorrowland, next year’s Artemis Fowl) or I don’t know what (A Wrinkle in Time, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms). Touchstone is but dead, their last release being 2016’s The Light Between Oceans. The 30-picture deal with DreamWorks SKG that was put into place in 2009 ended a few years back and not even half of the planned 30 films were even made. Hollywood Pictures disappeared long before that, in 2007, and Miramax’s ties with Disney were long gone.
Disney was now without their arms for the kinds of movies they didn’t specialize in. No more Miramax, no more Hollywood Pictures. They didn’t know what to do with their own adult-oriented movie label.
When Disney acquired Marvel Entertainment – including their Iron Man-making Marvel Studios – in August 2009, it was the beginning of what I feel is their method of solving their problem: How do we, Disney, make “other” movies that we don’t specialize in? Pirates is our only live-action blockbuster franchise, how do we make more?
No problem. We have Marvel for that. It paid off in spades. Avengers: Endgame might just dethrone Avatar and become the highest earning film of all time, the 22nd feature in a franchise of serialized movies that has dedicated fans and audiences turning up opening weekend. Even a lower-end opener like one of the Ant-Man movies still makes big coin for them.
More action and blockbuster-y stuff? No problem. We have Lucasfilm. Star Wars! Possibly an Indiana Jones sequel! Anything other than that? Probably not. Lucasfilm’s recent non-franchise movies didn’t make a mark. Star Wars has done great business for them outside of the poorly-timed Solo, and while there may be a considerable divide in the already rickety fanbase, the numbers of the other three films (all of which respectively grossed over $1 billion worldwide) don’t lie. The rest is all set. The attempt to make it a Marvel Cinematic Universe-type movie series didn’t really work out, so now Disney is making sure that the next few Star Wars movies will collect lots of coin, by spacing them out. Three new movies in the franchise are set for 2022, 2024, and 2026 respectively, rather than one new one debuting every calendar year. Very smart!
Now… What about movies outside of family-friendly movies and four-quadrant PG-13 blockbuster spectacles? No problem, we now have all of 21st Century Fox including 20th Century Fox films, Fox TV shows, Fox Searchlight Pictures. Adult-oriented movies, indie Oscar season movies, hit shows, even some blockbuster franchises like Avatar and Alien and Planet of the Apes and a ton of Marvel characters we previously didn’t have the movie rights to. No need for Touchstone or Hollywood or any John Carter of Mars type movies anymore, it seems. Disney filled all the holes, they now simply own all the movies they were trying to make themselves. The acquisition of 21st Century Fox this past March is the culmination of Disney’s establishment of their power as an entertainment conglomerate. “Disney” entertainment is just a mere cog in this now.
It’s so surreal to see a Disney slate not only include Marvel and Star Wars movies, but also things like Avatar sequels, a Kingsman movie, Blue Sky animated features, Bob’s Burgers: The Movie, very un-Disney-like live-action comedies and dramas, Fox Searchlight indie circuit films, and many more. Now, how different is that from the 90s until now? When Disney’s strategy included films like Pretty Woman, Pulp Fiction, and many others like it? It feels different because Disney makes it known, more so than ever, that Fox is part of the family. Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures were their arms for branching out, Miramax and others just happened to help. Now? Disney has two massive franchises and a whole freakin’ studio in place of all that…
The Walt Disney Company hasn’t lived up to Walt Disney, but rather the Hollywood game that Walt Disney once strode ahead of… They’re certainly ahead of Hollywood in terms of the franchising and big money-making departments, not so much in the way Walt was ahead of his Hollywood peers…
