There are Disney hits, and there are Disney films that are flops…
If you’re completely new to box office, film history, and even The Walt Disney Company’s own history… This may come as a big shock to you.
A good number of the most iconic Disney animated features were flops upon their respective initial releases…
But what does “flop” mean, you may ask? To the inexperienced, “flop” (or alternately, “bomb”) means a bad movie, a mistake, a cinematic pitfall. Certainly, some of the big “flops” in Hollywood history may just prove that, from Heaven’s Gate to Cutthroat Island to The Adventures of Pluto Nash. If this is what you think “flop”/”bomb” means, did you know that some of the most-acclaimed films were initially flops when they first came out? I’m talking Citizen Kane, The Wizard of Oz, Blade Runner, and many more.
Plenty of good animated films were also box office flops…
So, what particular iconic, beloved, well-known Disney animated features flopped upon their initial releases? Oh… Let’s see, Pinocchio! What?! Pinocchio?! But that’s where Disney’s own damn anthem – ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ – comes from! Fantasia. What? But Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice! Bambi, too? But that’s one of the classics! Alice in Wonderland? No way! Sleeping Beauty? You have to be kidding me!
It may be hard to believe, but at one time, all of these movies were flops. And when I say flop, I of course mean “financial flop”, a film that didn’t break even in box office sales. A few of them were even critical failures. Fantasia was blasted by film and music critics alike, the latter felt that the film was a bastardization of great works of classical music. Bambi was “too realistic” to be a “cartoon”. Alice in Wonderland was despised by British critics due to how it adapted their beloved literary classics, a relatively unknown property in America back then, where it was greeted with indifference. Sleeping Beauty got a more mixed reception back when it first debuted. Pinocchio is actually the anomaly here. A box office flop, but a critical darling, though some critics opined that it was a step down from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Nowadays, these are all considered good and important films in the Disney animated tapestry. Their presence in and around the company is hard to deny… What caused these films to fail at the box office?
Well, it was a number of things. These are films produced in the span of nearly two decades, and of course, the world didn’t stay the same between February 1940 (Pinocchio‘s premiere) and January 1959 (Sleeping Beauty‘s debut).
Pinocchio was a generally well-received picture in the late winter of 1940, in fact it had actually outgrossed the majority of the other films released that same year… In the United States… World War II was raging across Europe, and the fascistic territories shut out all American films. This massive part of the continent was a major source of income for the Disney studios, as they had helped make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs a blockbuster some two years earlier. With that all cut off and revenues frozen in the UK and France, Pinocchio couldn’t make what it needed to break even. Fantasia wasn’t well-received by contrast. The New York Times’ critic likened Walt’s grand experiment to nazism (no really), music critics hated it, and its release was staggered. When it finally went into wide release in edited form, audiences just didn’t take well to it. Bambi was similarly impacted by the war.
Pinocchio and Bambi were theatrically re-released multiple times, the former’s first re-issue occurred in 1945 and the latter’s in 1947. The re-issues helped these two films break even and make their money back, while also giving audiences who missed out the first time a chance to see them, because there was no other place you could see a Disney animated feature in its entirety back then. No TV broadcasts, no video, no nothing. Fantasia? That had to wait. None of its re-issues until 1969 were successful, for Walt’s masterpiece was FAR ahead of its time. Walt believed in all three of these films, though. He knew right, and he knew in due time, they would be appreciated and widely seen. The re-releases of Pinocchio and Bambi throughout the 1940s and 1950s strengthened his argument, and even though Fantasia didn’t turn a profit during his lifetime, he still admitted to Ken Anderson shortly before passing away: “It’s what we should’ve been doing with the medium at the time.” Walt didn’t treat this trio of films like they were “mistakes”…
Alice in Wonderland, however, was a much different story. Reportedly a production where no one really saw eye to eye, Alice in Wonderland was released to confusion in the United States and to scorn across the Atlantic. The war was long over by 1951, but this picture flopped, and without outside circumstances to use as an explanation for the poor box office performance, Walt Disney took responsibility. He had often stated that Alice herself lacked heart, and that the film fell apart as a story because of that. Instead of standing by the film, like he had done with the equally unpopular Fantasia, Walt “admitted” that it was a film that needed some work. However, Walt Disney didn’t quite bury Alice in Wonderland. The second-ever episode of the Disneyland television series contained an edited version of the feature, which was broadcast in 1954, just three years after the movie’s initial release. Disneyland opened a year later and the Mad Tea Party attraction was one of the rides that was in operation on opening day, July 17th of 1955. The only thing the film did not get in Walt’s lifetime was a theatrical re-release… I think these particular extensions do show that Walt still believed in Alice in Wonderland, to a certain degree. It makes sense, as he had adapted the stories into the Alice Comedies and the Mickey Mouse short Thru The Mirror. Walt and the Lewis Carroll stories go back decades before the feature-length film was released.
Walt was also unhappy with how Sleeping Beauty had turned out, for similar reasons, but it’s unknown how he would’ve extended that picture’s life because he had died seven years after its release, and re-issues often came 5-10 years at a time. Animation had been whittled down by his brother Roy O. Disney and the business people, to the point where the medium was on life-support, he was heartbroken. It’s worth noting that Sleeping Beauty was followed up by One Hundred and One Dalmatians, a less ambitious feature that was hugely successful with both critics and audiences. He wasn’t quite fond of how that film turned out, either. 1961-era Walt must’ve been so beside himself when it came to animation, something tells me he would’ve changed his mind on what he didn’t like about Dalmatians (namely the look of it) and other money-making films that he had also downed (such as Peter Pan), had he lived longer. Sleeping Beauty was saved by re-releases in the 1970s and 1980s. Alice in Wonderland finally got a theatrical re-issue in 1974, successfully – and rather belatedly – banking off of the college-aged hippies and psychedelic crowd that made the 1969 re-issue of Fantasia a big success. Every other feature did great in re-issues throughout the decades. Bambi eventually became Disney’s second highest-earning feature behind Snow White, according to company statistics in the mid 1980s.
After the release of Sleeping Beauty, no Disney animated feature flopped at the box office until… 1985.
The release of the infamous The Black Cauldron.
We’re talking nearly two decades after Walt Disney passed away. The administration that ran the enterprise without their founder hadn’t experienced an animated box office loss in the years leading up to The Black Cauldron, in fact… They were gone before The Black Cauldron was finally released. It’s often written that Disney’s animated features weren’t successful between the release of The Jungle Book and the start of the Disney Renaissance, that is actually untrue. The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, The Rescuers, and The Fox and the Hound were respectable hits. In fact, The Rescuers and The Fox and the Hound once respectively held the title of “highest grossing animated feature.” That seems hard to believe, doesn’t it? They’re almost nonexistent these days.
The Black Cauldron simmered in development hell throughout the 1970s, and then was completed in time for a summer 1985 debut. In the months leading up to its release, Disney was almost acquired by a corporate raider who wanted to break the company into pieces and sell off all the individual assets. Walt Disney’s son-in-law Ron Miller was CEO during this tumultuous period, and after narrowly staving off this threat, he was ousted at the behest of nephew Roy E. Disney. Roy filled the CEO and President positions with two outsiders: Michael Eisner from Paramount, and Frank Wells from Warner Bros. respectively. Eisner’s Paramount cohort Jeffrey Katzenberg was brought in months later to the chairman position.
They had acquired a near-completed animated feature. Eisner and Katzenberg were not experienced in animation. Eisner and Katzenberg entertained the idea of shutting down Disney feature animation, and pooling any and all animation money into a TV animation division, which was quickly formed upon their arrival to the company. Katzenberg especially didn’t like The Black Cauldron, and took it upon himself to edit fully animated, fully inked and painted, fully SCORED sequences from the then-90 minute movie. Katzenberg felt the movie just wasn’t good, but he was shocked by the picture’s aim to be a more teen and adult-oriented dark fantasy movie. To him, Disney animated features were just for children, and he was puzzled as to why this particular movie would have sequences of harsh violence and spooky frights.
Katzenberg wasn’t the only person who wasn’t a fan of how The Black Cauldron was turning out. Roy E. Disney looked at it during post-production and wondered… Where was the story in this project? According to James P. Stewart’s DisneyWar, Roy was on a talk show during the movie’s opening week, and when he was asked what the movie was about… He didn’t even know! The Black Cauldron was released to mostly mixed critical reception, and failed to recoup its then-record $25 million production budget. Disney and various writers often exaggerate this film’s downfall at the box office, even in the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty. Claims of it costing $44 million are hogwash, the movie cost $25 million to make. In 1985, the only animated film to cost anywhere near as much as Black Cauldron was the studio’s previous film, The Fox and the Hound. That film cost $12 million to make. No way did they jump to $44 million in four years, especially when several animated features made in the following five years never cost anywhere near that amount. (I’m aware that DisneyWar states The Little Mermaid cost $40 million to make, but I doubt that. It probably cost closer to Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin‘s budgets, which were between $25-30m.)
Fuzzy math and biases aside, The Black Cauldron did in fact lose money, and reviews were less than stellar. In terms of critical reception, this wasn’t really a big deal. The Aristocats and Robin Hood were also not quite beloved and continued to be regarded as lower tier works, despite being box office hits. The Fox and the Hound had many positive reviews, but also many critical ones too. No, the problem was that The Black Cauldron didn’t fit a perceived Disney mold. Katzenberg had little love for it, Roy couldn’t make heads or tails of it, Eisner and Katzenberg were far more interested in Touchstone Pictures anyways, they seemingly had no need for little baby cartoons; the Touchstone movies were basically what they were previously doing at Paramount. Of course, Eisner and Katzenberg later become invested in animation, but The Black Cauldron slipped to the wayside. There was a very limited re-issue in 1990 with a less-menacing retitling (Taran and the Magic Cauldron) accompanied by a family-friendlier marketing campaign, but little came of it. Outside of some small parks-related things (The Gurgi’s Munchies and Crunchies eatery at Fantasyland in Walt Disney World) and international stuff (it was widely re-released in several European territories), the Eisner brigade mostly buried The Black Cauldron. To them, it was a misstep.
The animated features that Eisner and Katzenberg scored with created an acceptable mold. The Black Cauldron, to them, was incongruous with The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. They also seemed to feel that The Black Cauldron was incongruous with Walt’s films. Now, there is of course a little film that happened during the early years of the Disney Renaissance that happened to come up short at the box office. You see, the trajectory was Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. Three hits in a row, right? In-between the release of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast was… The Rescuers Down Under.
A rather belated sequel to the studio’s 1977 hit, The Rescuers Down Under was undone by Jeffrey Katzenberg’s decision to pull all of the marketing after a so-so opening weekend performance during the Thanksgiving stretch of 1990, consequently the film was eaten alive by holiday competition and disappeared without a trace. You see, the previous two features, Oliver & Company and The Little Mermaid, represented a significant upward climb at the box office. The former grossed a record-breaking $53 million, and the latter blew that record out of the water with a very impressive $84 million. The Rescuers Down Under collected $29 million domestically, which landed it in the pit with The Black Cauldron (which had grossed $21m) and The Great Mouse Detective ($25m, but against a small budget). Disney, however, didn’t completely bury this one. Unlike The Black Cauldron, The Rescuers Down Under was released on video in the following year, and was expectedly a sell-through hit like many other Disney animated features. Disney reported in fall 1992 that The Rescuers Down Under had sold around 5 million units, which translates – going off of the original $26.99 list price – to a roughly $134 million gross. Home video proved to be a great second life to a flop animated feature, and The Rescuers Down Under was no exception. Video also had saved features like Don Bluth’s All Dogs Go to Heaven and plenty more. The Black Cauldron didn’t enjoy this kind of second life just yet, because Disney didn’t have any interest in releasing it on video anytime soon, other films were waiting in line first. The Black Cauldron‘s first North American video release would not occur until… 1998, after years of fans begging the company to release it.
The Rescuers Down Under instead went down the route of something like The Great Mouse Detective, in that the company wasn’t exactly ashamed of it, but didn’t consider it to be all that important… Well, other than the fact that it was the first feature done *entirely* in the game-changing CAPS process, which replaced the use of cels, hand-inking, and hand-painting. Other than that, The Rescuers Down Under got two more releases on video formats and is generally ignored, even in their self-made histories of the Renaissance. A preview for Beauty and the Beast that appears on the spring 1991 VHS release of The Jungle Book details the legacy of Disney, mentions how Oliver & Company and The Little Mermaid “continued” that tradition, and then jumped straight ahead to Beauty and the Beast. It’s like The Rescuers Down Under didn’t even exist, and ironically, a preview for the film’s video release comes right AFTER that Beauty and the Beast sneak peek on the tape!
Disney didn’t see another box office flop for a while after the botched release of The Rescuers Down Under, a film that could’ve been a respectable hit in its own right had Katzenberg not obliterated all the marketing and promotional push that it needed to survive the holiday season. What was he thinking? Of course, by 1990, theatrical re-issues of Disney animated features were slowly becoming a thing of the past in an age where you could buy and own Disney animated features contained within black plastic cassette shells, and be able to watch them forever in your own home. (Well, at least until the tape wore out!) Video was now the next phase for a movie that flopped at the box office…
The early 2000s was a period of disappointments left and right. We all know the story at this point. Executives had way too much control over Walt Disney Feature Animation, and began to compromise the artists and creatives at the studio. Audiences voted with their wallets, they were more attracted to the competition. Pixar’s early run of films were often made without constant executive meddling, DreamWorks scored a huge hit with Shrek and a moderate success with The Prince of Egypt, and Blue Sky brought home bacon with Ice Age. Few of Disney Feature Animation’s films were successful during this rough period…
Today, these particular films do survive through their respective fanbases and through occasional pushes in the parks and elsewhere, and surprisingly on some of Disney’s own social media accounts.
Fantasia 2000, probably not intended to be a blockbuster in the first place and was really just Roy E. Disney’s pet project that Michael Eisner let him make, was the first Disney animated feature to lose money in nearly a decade. This was followed by the Secret Lab production Dinosaur, which tanked that same summer. (Fantasia 2000 premiered in December 1999, went into IMAX-only release on New Year’s Day, and then a brief general release in June 2000.) The Emperor’s New Groove was released with a title that turned many off and a poor marketing campaign to boot, opening with a measly $9 million… But something happened with this particular film…
It had serious legs. It climbed from a $9 million opening to an $89 million final domestic total. You know, this actually scored the biggest multiplier for a wide-release animated feature released AFTER 1999. Most animated films make a good 3 1/2x their respective opening weekend grosses, lucky ones make 4x that, and some select few make it past 5x… The Emperor’s New Groove made nearly 10x its opening weekend gross, and I think Disney realized that. Couple that with the strong critical reception, and Disney was in for a big shock. The troubled production that they dumped became a little sleeper hit. The Emperor’s New Groove sold very well on home video throughout 2001, and remained a favorite. Disney gave it a direct-to-video sequel and a TV series, and generally, the movie had something of a presence during the early-to-mid aughts. Now I know, the direct-to-video sequels are a sore spot and cheapened the Disney brand and hurt hand-drawn animation… But I kind of think that if Disney gave something a sequel back then, which still cost money and some talent to make, they must’ve thought the movie in question wasn’t all that much of a disaster. I mean, why make any kind of sequel to something that supposedly was so disastrous?
Of course, there was also Lilo & Stitch. Lilo & Stitch did pretty well at the box office in the summer of 2002 in addition to getting great reviews, but VHS and DVD was where it really took off. Stitch was a worldwide phenomenon circa 2003-2004, you just couldn’t escape him. A direct-to-video pilot for a TV series, said TV series, and 2 more direct-to-video sequels followed along with a plethora of merchandise, a fast-tracked theme park attraction, and many more. The big anomaly of this troubled era. Stitch himself was a mania, this kind of success was not dissimilar to The Lion King circa 1994-1995 and Frozen circa 2014-2015.
Other features made during this period weren’t as lucky as Lilo & Stitch, or even The Emperor’s New Groove. Atlantis: The Lost Empire underperformed and wasn’t well-received to boot, but the video release sold pretty well. Like The Emperor’s New Groove and a few other contemporary Disney animated features, it was given a great, comprehensive 2-disc DVD set. A TV series nearly happened, but the few episodes that were animated were stitched together to form a direct-to-video movie instead. Atlantis then quietly disappeared, and now seems rather nonexistent. Treasure Planet suffered an even worse fate in fall 2002. The $140 million-costing movie coughed up less than its own budget worldwide, with a terrible gross stateside. Reviews were okay, some pretty positive even, but Treasure Planet is mostly buried by the fact that it was this HUGE box office flop. The DVD release, again, sold well enough. A continuation of sorts was planned, but swiftly cancelled. Like Atlantis, Disney shows little love for it today and didn’t quite show any back then, either. Home on the Range also did terribly, and disappeared, pretty much for good.
Brother Bear is kind of an odd duck out here. Brother Bear cost somewhere around $45 million to make, and the feature made about 5x that cost. A success, right? Disney wrote this one off as a flop, even though this “flop” did great business on DVD and got a direct-to-video sequel. Again, why would Disney make a direct-to-video sequel to a flop? Especially 3 years later? Brother Bear actually did not flop at the box office, it was in fact a profitable little movie… But its gross was nowhere near the competition. $250 million+ worldwide looked paltry next to Pixar’s Finding Nemo, which opened the same year and made nearly $900 million worldwide. Combine that difference with the very negative critical reception, and Brother Bear was also thrown into the flop bin, and its so-so performance helped further the demise of the Orlando-based Disney Feature Animation unit, but that had a lot more to do with Disney’s slow killing of traditionally animated features than anything.
Their first two all-CG features are interesting to look at, too, in this context. Chicken Little barely doubled its budget, and was received very badly by critics. Beyond the theatrical release in fall 2005, Chicken Little quietly disappeared… But this was because by the time Chicken Little was in theaters, Michael Eisner had stepped down as CEO of the company, after years of turbulence within the enterprises, turbulence that was draining the Feature Animation wing. New CEO Bob Iger took over, and Chicken Little was yesterday’s news. By the middle of 2006, all of the executives who had reduced the legendary animation studio to this low were gone, and a more filmmaker-friendly model was reinstated. Pixar’s John Lasseter and Ed Catmull were now running the show.
Their first “release” was Meet The Robinsons. It was halfway done when they assumed power at Walt Disney Animation Studios, John had ordered a slight delay and retooling, but after recent findings (namely, a personal documentation of the film’s making by animator Nik Ranieri on his facebook page), the truth is that John wanted to rip the band-aid. To him, Meet The Robinsons was basically a Black Cauldron situation. A near-complete leftover from the previous administration that arguably needed work. He had some “salvaging” done, and the feature was released with very little fanfare. While it had attendance and alright critical reception, it was another Disney flop.
As a result, Meet The Robinsons is never really counted as a feature that helped Disney make their comeback as a successful animation studio. Bolt was given that distinction, a film that also started well before the new administration was formed, but Lasseter shut its previous iteration (American Dog, to be directed by Lilo & Stitch‘s Chris Sanders) down and had it restarted from the ground up as a completely different story. As such, Bolt is the first true Lasseter-era Disney Animation film. Bolt turned out to be an acclaimed film, and even got a Best Animated Feature nomination (a first for Disney Animation since Brother Bear), but its poor marketing lead to a low opening. The film relied on strong legs, and did okay for itself, but nothing too spectacular. The same applies to the next feature, which was The Princess and the Frog.
The only Disney animated feature to out-and-out flop under Lasseter’s tenure was the 2011 Winnie the Pooh, and that’s because Disney quietly released it amidst a summer battlefield, it only coughed up somewhere around $30 million against a budget that was around that size. However, the critically-acclaimed film is still counted as part of their current “revival”, and because it’s Winnie the Pooh, it isn’t completely out of sight.
Everything else made from 2010 onward? Hits.
So what became of the later Eisner-era flops? It seems as if John and Ed – who are no longer part of the company – treated those like “mistakes” as well, almost erasing them in a way. There has been a long-running rumor that John personally despised Lilo & Stitch, which surfaced around the time he fired Chris Sanders from American Dog. It remains to be seen how Disney Animation’s new leader Jennifer Lee perceives those particular pictures, too, though many areas of the company have as much to do with how remembered or forgotten those films are. These films have had very little presence in the recent years, only The Emperor’s New Groove and Lilo & Stitch are still chugging, the former just barely though. They all received Blu-ray releases earlier this decade and some merchandise, but little beyond that. Even the post-Renaissance movies that still did well – like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mulan, and even Tarzan – seem to have been laid to rest. While it’s important to acknowledge the behind-the-scenes circumstances that lead to those films falling short of greatness in the eyes of many, I don’t think it’s quite fair to look at those films as mistakes, or even things to forget…
There are many dime-a-dozen live-action movies that just come and go, and that even includes blockbusters. The amount of animated films that open a year is usually much less than the amount of live-action movies churned out. Many of the flawed Disney animated features from the post-Lion King/pre-Bolt stretch are still the work of many highly talented artists, animators, and technicians. Animation inherently requires just so much work and artistry that isn’t required of any garden-variety low budget live-action movie, especially hand-drawn animation that you can’t just easily tweak in a later stage of production. The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Tarzan are visually stunning, gorgeous films, and both of them – I feel – have bouts of very strong storytelling. Hercules and Mulan have their merits too, and there are things I quite like in Pocahontas as well. The Emperor’s New Groove is a classic through and through, an irreverent and stylish Disney treat. Fantasia 2000 may not be Fantasia, but it was a film that at least tried to replicate Walt’s earth-shattering masterpiece. Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet are visually distinct films, films that admirably attempted to show general audiences accustomed to the 90s Disney formula that a Disney animated feature could be a big sci-fi adventure or a dazzling space odyssey. Lilo & Stitch? Nothing to say that hasn’t been said. Brother Bear is visually breathtaking and makes interesting story choices, and the art direction in Home on the Range is sometimes pretty inspired, ditto Chicken Little. Meet The Robinsons is also one of the few CG Disney animated features with a very unique look, while a lot of the newer ones – even the likes of Big Hero 6 and such – kind of look too samey, plus Robinsons is very, very heartfelt.
None of these films should be cast into the pit, they should have a greater presence in my opinion.
Instead of “moving on” from these perceived misses, Disney should embrace all of their animated features, even the “warts”. There is a difference between learning lessons, and writing the whole work off as a failure. Disney looks to have learned why those features didn’t exactly soar with critics and/or at the box office, but dents and all, they’re still features that were made with a lot of passion and hard work. I’m not saying that they should submit every single one of them to the Criterion Collection (though I’d love to see something like Black Cauldron get a comprehensive edition) or even posit that they are all amazing milestones, but… A little more love would be nice. There’s always an audience that hasn’t seen or heard of these films yet, and you never know, you could score new fans out of them. After all, the early films that flopped initially eventually found their new fans as time went on…