Disney, IP, and “Returns to Marginal Affinity”
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Most people I've talked to DON'T believe the star wars series has gotten better from a story telling perspective, as this article proposes. I don't think most people believe live-action remakes of their classic cartoons is quality story-telling. I think they are just really good at reading market trends, have enough money in their coffers to acquire whatever is becoming the next big thing, advertise and push it into becoming a cultural phenomenon, then moving onto whatever is next once they've exhausted that IP.
Edit - and to be clear, I most likely have a very jaded view here. I don't like disney as a company, nor am I a fan of superhero movies, star wars, or a lot of what the company has been pushing for the last decade or so. I respect their ability to make a ton of money, but I don't like a majority of what they create anymore, nor how they treat a majority of their employees.
That's a really good summation of my views on Disney. It's obvious they know how to build consistently polished stories that will be consistently enjoyable to a wide audience. I respect that.
But it's not clear to me that's a goal worth pursuing, or that the artistic value of their movies has gone up because of that. It's good to have some media that's safe and predictable and that is primarily motivated by market trends. But when that's all a company is making, then behind that nice facade lies a deeply cynical way of looking at the world, where creative choices are calculated for broad appeal rather than for their inherent value.
I'm not going to say that's all Disney makes. Just that the percentage of films Disney is making that fall into that category is growing at a rapid clip.
It's a jaded view in the sense that I'm cynical about Disney, but it's really not me trying to crap on popular things. There are a lot of popular things that are really, really good. But I know when a movie actually feels special and honest to me, when I feel like the author genuinely had a good reason to make it, and made it because they loved it. And Disney movies don't feel that way to me. They're glossy, and pretty, and impressive, and they know the right things to say, but they're made of plastic instead of flesh.
They cartoons and shows my oldest 18 year old watched are totally differnt from the ones my 8 year and my 4 year old watch. They churn through things quickly and market things very slickly. For example, they produce something for 14 year olds, that most parents think is ok for 12-14 year old kids, but most of those kids aren't really that interested in. Then they drop the marketing into their 8-10 year old programs and boom, it's a hit for them.
These companies, especially Disney, are very insidious and clearly manipulating young minds. We should be disturbed, but I find very little buy in from other adults.
I don't understand why they were allowed to buy 20th Century Fox.
https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/comp...
Disney
Comcast
AT&T
Amazon
Apple
Netflix
CBS
Sony
Fox Corp
It’s a get big or get crushed world right now. Of the latter 4, I wonder who Microsoft/Google/Verizon/Facebook will buy.
As far as getting big or getting crushed - both Blumhouse and Tyler Perry Studios make movies that get wide releases with budgets between $5 and $10 million.
Apple I put on there because they can afford to burn so many dollars, it puts them in league with Comcast and ATT and Disney. The other media companies don't have a rent collecting cash cow to lean on.
There are plenty of streaming services looking for exclusive content. Barring that, you can sell your movie yourself over the internet or through any of the video on demand services.
You can even probably get Redbox to stock it.
Speaking of Tyler Perry, he started “distributing his content” decades ago by doing stage plays.
People complaining about big media keeping smaller players out is about like people complaining about not being profitable because of a dependence on Amazon Retail or Google ads. If your entire business model is based on being a sharecropper for big media/tech, you’re statistically going to be disappointed.
There are also small religious studios who are able to find an audience.
They are apparently also licensing the Nintendo reality-distortion field technology.
I think that Disney is doing to SW what they do to everything... they make it appeal to the maximum possible audience for the maximum possible profit. There's no deep desire to create amazing stories, there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. The stuff they make is "good". You'll still pay for it, and enjoy it, but you'll always end up feeling like they could've done better. It's all just formulaic mass-produced share-holder stuff now, but it does the job.
They used to be much more experimental as an animation studio but some of those projects didn't do as well. It'd be great if they could alternate between telling "safe" stories and passion projects like Fantasia or even films like Tron but I guess it's hard to pitch something risky when you can get a guaranteed hit by doing it by the numbers. The last movie I think they really took a chance with was Treasure Planet and that movie was pitched over and over for more than a decade before they agreed to make it.
Bluth leaving Disney was the best thing to happen to them.
For Star Wars, at least, that's a pretty solid step up. I paid for Episodes 1-3, but didn't particularly enjoy them. Episodes 7 & 8 at least left me feeling good about what I just watched, and I quite liked Rogue One (I didn't see it in the theater, though).
Side not, smuggler's run did the same thing. I triggered my inner child.
Rogue one was good, Episode 7 was okayish as a introduction to new arc and characters, Episode 8 was killed by playing it safe - it was such a wasted potential.
We don't talk about Solo. That move does not exist.
I get that, although I'll be honest—a bit part of what I liked about 8 Ep. 8 was that it killed off all of the dumb hanging threads from Ep. 7. Episodes 4-6 had huge surprises, but they mostly came out of nowhere, not with giant neon signs pointing at them "GEE DON'T YOU WONDER WHO REY'S PARENTS ARE IT'S A HUGE MYSTERY!". Episode 8 just threw all of that out the window and I loved it for that.
There are myriad ways to go forward in interesting directions(Kylo and Rey could go both dark jedi, gray jedi, swap sides(i think that it will come to that) or even go for a 3rd way, or even destroy the concept of jedi itself) yet they basically returned to status quo.
It also felt like it was heavily edited - like there were two drafts, and someone mashed them together.
You can see it in the details of their animated films, presumably where the workers were given a bit more artistic license.
Princes Mononoke is actually my favorite movie, I obviously agree that it's really excellent, but objectively I think Spider-Verse is just as good, even if it doesn't fit my preferences quite as much.
For TV series, Mob Psycho 100 is absolutely top tier, I'd put it against Cowboy Bebop easily. Loved Bebop, but I think MP100 is the better series overall, both for story and animation quality.
This is a combination of rose-tinted glasses, plus things accumulating social value over time. Eminem didn't rap about playing N64 games until long, long past the N64's heydey; it wasn't cool to mention that back in 1998. Pokemon is mainstream with adults now, but it was for real (young) nerds and dorks back when it started. Retro games are currently cool with those who scoffed at them when they were new. This phenomenon is especially prevalent with 'cult hits', like Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, which has a much more positive reputation now than it did at its own launch.
Bear in mind that over 20 years, a lot of what was groundbreaking in terms of animation quality has become mainstream, so it's not surprising that people wouldn't be as floored by Toy Story 4 as they were by Toy Story. Anime was a relatively new phenomenon for many in the West back then as well - Cowboy Bebop was one of the "gateway drugs" into anime for a lot of people.
I wouldn't assume that work of high quality is no longer being done - I've heard people talk about Your Name as if Makoto Shinkai were the next Hayao Miyazaki for instance - it just doesn't stand out in a crowd the way it once did, now that anime is no longer as niche and people have services like Crunchyroll.
They've still got animated features, some TV cartoons, some live action sitcoms, but also theme parks and resorts, a video game studio, a theatrical group, a cruise line, a radio station (and a line up of recording artists), cable channels, retail chains, a timeshare program, and a publishing company. Storytelling factors in some of those somewhere but Disney has moved way beyond it's storytelling roots.
I can't even say there's a strong central vision driving their films these days like when Walt was still alive and they were primarily an animation studio or even during their renaissance. When they are storytelling, their successes and failures seem to come down to who they hire or what companies/properties they pick up.
I will say that at least on the animation side they seem to stay out of the way of the creative types and give them the freedom to do what they need to. Disney has some terrible business practices, but they do manage to get their hands on some incredibly talented people who have done some really good work over the years.
Ouch. Good point. Even The Last Jedi trainwreck (RT 44% audience score, record $150M drop after first weekend) STILL made the top 20 all-time grossing films (ignoring inflation).
But nerdy stuff is cool, remakes are cool, rebels are cool...it's got fundamentally popular qualities. Put that into a good marketing engine, check the boxes and you've got a money maker.
- rushed the films out
- lacked singular vision to keep them consistent
- subverted audience expectations in a bad way, re Luke Skywalker
- retread too much of the same old ground leading to inability to generate momentum (ie. killing off characters in Rogue One).
0 - https://redef.com/original/star-wars-fatigue-is-a-myth-but-d...
The contrast to this is stark after having watched "Imagineering" on Disney+ the other night. It reminded me about why I was a rabid Disney fan growing up - the values that Walt insisted on and why these days I'm more "meh"; what they have evolved into the longer Walt hasn't been around to keep people grounded on what really matters.
It's pretty sad you can go from a company where employees invested their own money to keep construction of Disneyland going to the exploitative mess of a company that exists today :(
Disney has always been a juggernaut but sheesh it's enormous now.
They've pulled off a Google or Facebook level of domination over their market, it's incredible for a rather old industry.
What Disney understands is the brand management. Disney brands are valuable because they are familiar, consistent and safe choices. Disney is the stable food producer in the entertainment business.
Using Scorsese's non-cinema as a label for what Disney does not necessarily bad. First 3 star Wars Movies were cinema. People were surprised, exited and blown away. You can't replicate that again and again. Now Star Wars is just Star Wars. People want stable diet of Star Wars that is just like they remember it with minor variations. It's watered down, but very familiar. They keep all the 'best bits' people like. "I have bad feeling about this", "something something dark side".
I think it's somewhat absurd too, but part of the point being made in the conversation around this article is that Disney isn't taking risks or making decisions based on creative output -- they're very, very aggressively following market trends. Their first Star Wars release was one of their highest grossing films in something like a decade, but one bad showing from Solo and suddenly Disney is cutting back on yearly releases.
They want movies that are safe and predictable. They want to know before they even start production not just that the film will break even, but that it will make a LOT of money. Clearly based on their own statements, they don't feel that confident about a yearly Star Wars release.
They made two non trilogy movies. Rogue One was highly rated by both critics and the audience - Solo not so much.
Disney has different expectations. If anything, the fact that Disney can look past three high-grossing films and only see the one flop is strong evidence for what people are talking about here. Disney is risk averse, and they look at a 75% success rate as risky.
Until the last 100 years or so it’s been the case that a given culture’s stories — folklores, mythologies, and religions — were in the public domain. And while they were at times subject to tight control, e.g., non-vernacular liturgies, they were more typically “owned” by everyone.
I don’t mean this as a criticism of copyright. I support copyright and how it incentivizes cultural creation. But I wonder about whether there’s space for more stories we all own, that can be interpreted by everyone, and, most importantly, that create the same powerful feelings of attachment Disney is so good at creating.
Phantom of the Opera the musical has made $6 billion, blowing Avengers out of the water. Wicked the musical has grossed $3 billion, more than any movie ever made. Same for Mamma Mia!.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) made $600 million in the first 72-hours, far more than any movie ever. League of Legends makes $1.4 billion a year, again more than any movie ever made. Fortnite makes $2.4 billion.
In the UK, more people watched The X Factor than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The book Diary of a Wimpy Kid sold over a million copies in its latest installment.
Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.
> Phantom of the Opera the musical has made $6 billion, blowing Avengers out of the water. Wicked the musical has grossed $3 billion, more than any movie ever made. Same for Mamma Mia!.
> In the UK, more people watched The X Factor than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The book Diary of a Wimpy Kid sold over a million copies in its latest installment.
> Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.
The first metric you mention is not the right one for discussing cultural impact. You'd want to compare number of tickets sold for Phantom of the Opera to number of tickets sold for Avengers: Endgame.
Weirdly, you go on to make the correct comparison for The X Factor.
I'm not convinced that popular video games haven't made their way into the conversations about cultural significance.
Really? What cultural affinity is there for Avengers? For Force Awakens?
I would argue movies have built an establishment of critics around itself, the disclosure surrounding it does appear to be more sophisticated and intellectual. But that doesn't mean the it is shaping the audience's perception the same way.
The Avengers is a part of a comic franchise that is almost 50 years old, and Star Wars basically invented the science fiction movie blockbuster over 40 years ago. Both have been deeply influential on generations of people and on the way their respective genres have been portrayed in all media.
To question whether there is cultural affinity for either is to fundamentally misunderstand modern Western pop culture, because these properties are more influential to it than the Bible and Shakespeare.
Yes, Disney is dominating Hollywood like no one had done before.
But Hollywood itself is as irrelevant as it has never been. It no longer dominates the world's attention, and the audience's choices are more abundant than ever.
Which is why incumbents tend to welcome onerous regulations once they are big enough to deal with them. It locks the young upstarts from coming up behind them and potentially overtaking them.
Amazon wasn't for having to collect state sales tax until they figured it out. Facebook didn't start talking about regulation being a good thing until they were big enough to easily absorb the impact.
Whats even better - you get to blame the regulations as the gatekeeper, not your own sleazy behavior.
Copyright doesn't stop people from making movies about folk tales. The cost of making a movie and the generally low returns do.