I had the same reaction 20 years ago to Kingdom Hearts.
Disney is definitely at risk of becoming irrelevant with their stale IP.
Disney is definitely at risk of becoming irrelevant with their stale IP.
[0] "Simple and clean is the way it should be..."
This only applies to the first game, though. After that I have no idea what's going on.
There's a ton of people who apparently really liked Kingdom Hearts.
It's pretty elitist to consider some IP too sacred to remix.
I was amazed.
I only know enough about what “Aqua got ‘Norted” means to put an apostrophe in front of ‘Norted. (Xehanort possesses people or whatever.) I also literally never saw Aqua in any game I played before KH3, except maybe as an extra I didn’t notice.
Heh, not sure if pun intended but this made me giggle
IP don’t make the game. The game makes the game.
surprisingly one of the simpler questions to answer. The Keyblade is the key that can open (or close) any door. And that was the theme of the first Kingdom Hearts: doors. the big villians plan is to destroy all worlds by opening the door to the Dark World and flooding the existing Light dimension with hoards of monsters. you also spend a lot of time closing off the doors to the heart of the world to protect their cores (monsters destroy core = destroyed world).
In addition to bashing enemies and being a large narrative hook, it's a nifty explanation for why you are able to simply tap on a chest and open anything you want. Or break and enter into a bunch of buildings (although the game forgets constantly that it can do that).
If you're a teenager that may be much easier... or much harder, in cases such as yours.
Funny enough Disney also recently launched their own TCG: Lorcana. A whole new way to leverage that IP!
As if all the Disney Adults in the world are just going to snap out of it. As if all the children who love Disney stuff currently are going to grow out of it. In what world is this considered an informative and knowledgable take?
Even at its lowest point financially, Disney IP has never been irrelevant at any point.
KH3 also made me realize that they can start to target child and adult fans via recently popular titles (e.g. Frozen) and ~30 years ago popular titles (e.g. Toy Story), respectively.
It was supposed to kick off a Marvell-style universe of infinite blockbusters. It didn’t.
So again, "no hit movies" is easily disproven with 10s of time to look into it.
So in your example, it potentially lost money for Disney. The wikipedia article almost says as much [2]
"Although it underperformed at the box office ..."
[1] https://gizmodo.com/how-much-money-does-a-movie-need-to-make...
None of the recent Disney animated movies have been “direct to DVD” terrible but they haven’t been exceptionally better than everything else.
It used to be that everyone basically considered Disney (and upstart Pixar) to be at the top of the class, and even extremely successful movies like Despicable Me to be a tier or two below.
are we really gonna make up things that are easily disprovable?
Until you can answer one or both in a repeatable, predictable way, we can wave our hands and say "it makes money later!" or "it doesn't make money later!" and neither is provable.
One other aspect that we CAN prove: streaming kills DVD sales. That's a revenue stream that is gone and won't be coming back so we have yet another deficit to fill.
Until then, Box Office and merchandising are the ONLY numbers that we, analysts, and stockholders can point at where "You put in $X and got out $Y" for their movie business. And as of right now, that puts Disney's 2023 numbers deeply negative.
Which is why Disney+ is its own streaming service. Keeps all the eggs in the same basket.
That said, licensing to other streaming services often does work. You get revenue for the cost of a contract vs having the infrastructure costs and nebulous ROI. You get the added benefit of direct attribution because you can tell "we licensed [movie X] for $X for Y years".
However, trying to balance this critique with some fairness to their strategy, it is difficult to disambiguate "the strategy isn't working" from "the strategy is helping us float across some mediocre years until we chance upon the next Frozen". It's kind of like VC returns, where it's 10 "%" of their IP (Star Wars, Mickey, Frozen, Toy Story, Marvel, etc.) that drive 90% of their performance. 2023 was definitely a poor "vintage" for Disney IP.
That being said, Disney has rebounded from many spells of mediocrity, and their theme parks, merchandise, and old IP (now monetized through Disney+ as you say) have kept them afloat through those poor periods.
Most recently they've only been able to jump-start the IP engines through acquisition (Pixar 2006, Marvel in 2009). I'm not a Disney shareholder myself, but I agree that the IP tap seems to be running dry and that's very concerning. I don't think Epic Games has anywhere near the value ceiling that Marvel and Pixar did.
Not everything can be Frozen, but the pallet of Wish merchandise at Walmart is still there and now all marked down (except the Lego because they know that someone will buy it eventually for parts).
Elemental merchandising was completely non-existent and that was a mistake, people enjoyed that.
"The film grossed $2.07 billion worldwide, breaking various box office records and becoming the highest-grossing film in the United States and Canada, the highest-grossing film of 2015, and the third-highest-grossing film at the time of its release"
"It grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of 2017"
and part 3:
"grossed over $1.077 billion worldwide, making it the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2019 "
Cannot really be called flops either. And the Mandalorian is highly succesful as well. And probably some other movies, I don't know, I do not follow. My point is, that I share the criticism of how bad Star Wars became under Disney, I dropped out, after they seriously introduced yet another death star. But commercially they were highly succesful.
Force Awakens? Everyone who had ever seen Star Wars went to see it (extended family had a tradition of seeing Star Wars movies when they came out). Later ones didn’t have that, and we’ve never seen the last one.
Elemental obviously outperformed expectations but was no Toy Story. Wish is not doing well and looks unlikely to recover.
We’re long gone from the era of every single Disney (or Pixar) animated film being an absolute instant classic and powerhouse.
(Part of this may be the huge number of live action remakes - even if financially successful they seem entirely forgettable).
A business can do something that makes a ton of money and still tarnishes their brand and their relationship with their fans. So those fans thinking its a flop, even if it was a financial success isn't quite wrong.
Turning Red and Teenage Kraken have a superficially similar plot and the Pixar one is much “better made” in many ways, but neither is earth-shattering.
I think they should be compared to how well a literal rerelease of the original would do.
I think part of the evidence is just how absolutely long lived Frozen 1 has been. Nothing has been able to even come close to unseating that, not even its sequel (they were very smart to keep everything similar enough so that Frozen 2 merchandise can substitute for Frozen 1 in a kid’s eye).
It’s very indicative that people jump to movies that have been out for a decade or more, and probably can’t even name most of the more recent releases.
Disney has also produced some of the most recent highest grossing box office films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films. Again, this is relative. We've just had a pandemic followed by writers and actors guild strikes.
To be fair, I saw "Wish" with my family and we all enjoyed it, but it obviously didn't come close to "Frozen 2" numbers. They're not all hits. With animated film taking years to produce, those perhaps aren't the metric to use. It'll be another few years before the next major animated film by Disney is released.
The Marvel movies release more frequently and seem to print money. "Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3" came out last year and has done $845MM¹.
Keep an eye on the clearance aisles for a feel on how merchandising is going; wish is doing exceptionally bad.
The second part is the problem - if Pixar releases a movie that is good, more than recoups costs, and otherwise is a fine addition to Dreamworks lineup, it could still be considered a complete flop by most everyone.
E.g., "The Good Dinosaur" which (apparently) eventually made enough that it was "worthwhile" - didn't break any records and didn't really make money, so it's a flop (Onward even more so).
It's complicated even more by a movie being able to be a flop, cult classic, and widely loved at the same time.
Presumably not adjusted for inflation, but still impressive.
If I had a nickel for every time I've heard someone singing that one song from Encanto I'd be able to buy Disney.
I'm sick of them being allowed to increase their entertainment monopoly on children instead of being told to just create new original works. It's not like they have a shortage of talented people...
Outside of their reimaginings/reboots, I can't think of a single recent movie that isn't an original work.
And that doesn't include things like LucasFilm, Marvel and Pixar which are, obviously, original and still part of Disney.
The most recent movie Wish - is just callbacks to other Disney movies, so does it count as original IP?
And this excludes their reboots - but also excludes Pixar which has done some original albeit lacklustre stuff recently.
I wonder if anyone has worked out the actual dollar effect it is has had on Norwegian tourism.
Edit:
Apparently the pavillion was only partially funded by the Norwegian government. Your comment made me curious.
https://www.disneyfoodblog.com/2021/08/13/who-actually-owns-...
There have also been many, many original movies released in that time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Pictures...
The vast majority of recent Disney content is original.
You're thinking of Mulan, not The Little Mermaid.
I doubt that Disney would take this kindly or lightly.
That's the entire point of the post that you are responding to.
Disney sued nobody.
When you create a new work based off a public domain work, you own what you added to that work. If your adaptation happens to be extremely successful, that effectively recopyrights the character, because the version people care about is the one you own. If someone else wants to use the public domain character, they have to aggressively distance their use of that character from yours.
Disney spent decades re-imagining Europe's folk tales[0] through his lens. Their movies are the ones people think about when you mention Snow White, Cinderella, Pinocchio, etc. Notably, the visual designs are unique enough to get independent copyright protection. So independent uses of those characters don't look like themselves.
This, BTW, is why anyone who wants to renounce copyright over their creative work should opt for CC-BY-SA and not a public domain dedication. Share-alike clauses prevent this sort of gradual appropriation.
[0] as filtered/censored thru the Brothers Grimm
Well, I agree with that. But very likely not for the same reasons you do.
Stephen Sondheim had a pretty succesful musical based on Grimms tales.
But yeah, if you want people to care about your version, you have to bring something new to the table.