Sympathy For The Mouse House
Certainly, 2020 slapped corporate Disney with an unimaginably firm financial backhander. Disney's diversified business structure of 'experiential entertainment' or 'entertaining experiences' – or however they brand-identify themselves to sound fancy – got hit hard at almost every imaginable revenue source. Theme parks closed, cruise ships docked, big-budget theatrical releases were shelved, and TV and film productions shuttered.
Even the steady revenue-raker and sports-ratings darling ESPN was suddenly shut out of live content and had to scramble to fill its time slots with some classic sports telecasts and awkward Zoom calls with athlete shut-ins. The coronavirus' economic fallout likely slowed merchandise sales as over-priced knick knacks with mouse ears are a bit further down on struggling households' lists of needs. Brick and mortar Disney Stores were already on the way out, so Covid just fast-tracked the recent decision to shut sixty-or-so of those locations across North America.
Without question, Mickey & Minnie had a rough year. So it was understandable for the occasional business news story to pop up questioning whether Disney was too big to fail, or suggesting where Disney should fall in line for a bailout, or sympathising about the tragic timing of taking on so much debt to purchase Fox's library. The corporate and financial realities of the situation are far more dynamic than all of this, of course, but there is no debate that 2020 hurt Disney big time.
At the end of 2019, Disney reported a 6% revenue increase over 2018's fiscal year in its theme park operations. Granted, revenue isn't profit, but this seems to be a positive financial thermometer reading in a main tributary of the business. Meanwhile, over on the movie-side of the conglomerate, their mega-brand Star Wars and Marvel properties peaked anticipation, audience engagement, and ticket sales with staggering box-office returns. These were record-setting box office earnings! Also, if there were such a thing as progressing narratives over at Pixar, Disney Animation Studios and the division of live-action remakes, they too seemed to hit their box office and brand-recognition zeniths. Pixar's flagship Toy Story saw a fourth (albeit artistically needless) entry; Disney Animation produced a debatably unnecessary Frozen 2; and the live-action (or better put, photo-realistic HD) remake team redid the crown jewel of 90s cartoons – The Lion King. These weren't unprecedented juggernauts like Avengers: Endgame, but close. They were massive hits, all of them.
Furthermore, Disney's Fox deal was completed. John McClane, Deadpool, and Bart Simpson officially put on their mouse-ears. Ironically, the debt restructuring needed to purchase Fox properties led to loan repayment hardships that waning Covid-era revenues wouldn't offset as easily. Lastly, in 2019, the long-awaited Disney+ streaming service launched with quite a bit of fanfare, consumer awareness, and what appears to be significant market penetration, both in North America and later on in Europe.
There’s no question that the prohibition on gatherings last year hit the entertainment business and its workers hard. The pandemic mercilessly impacted thousands of Disney staffers. Similarly, plenty of ordinary folks holding Disney stock likely had their retirement portfolios take sizable hits. There was a human side, of course, to the economic misery at the Magic Kingdom in 2020. However, as for Disney Corporate and their decision-making machinery, it is hard to find sympathy for a company who presents as a creative, artistic force in the community but whose goals are consistently to maximise profits rather than to be content with healthy returns while being a good corporate citizen. For example, this is still the company whose theme parks go well beyond charging for amusement; they are dizzying, inescapable, over-priced commercial meccas where invisible marketing hooks reach deep inside kids' psyches to mold false, temporary love for grossly overpriced cartoon joy and plastic merchandise.
Disney is inescapably the face of greed. They have been doing this forever. Why else send back their physical media to some fictional vault if not for the purpose of manufacturing phony supply-demand metrics and later hope to resell it again as a different edition or on a different medium? Nobody needs Disney commercials telling them that owning the movie is special. It's not like their films were only available via Sotheby's auctions. How many people has Disney turned into collectors because the movies were going into the vault? Average folks collected movies, but they were usually unremarkable fluff like The Fox and the Hound. It's silly, but this pride that people had in their VHS collections long after DVD and BluRay emerged was the direct result of Disney's well-tuned marketing – their control over perception and brand loyalty. No one does brand building better than Disney. Their marketing teams know what they're doing, and it's the backbone of their prestige pricing ploys, too. Unfortunately, it doesn't help them produce good films or develop good storytelling projects.
The problems that cinephiles will forever have with corporate creativity in project development is that their voices will never be heard over the clamouring of stockholders. Never. Disney goes through cycles of innovation in all aspects of their business, yet it's all to extract as much profit as possible. However, periodically, innovation trickles down into good product. Or given their size, sometimes they may see good product and buy it. When they deliver that special project, though, rather than letting it live a full life in the minds and hearts of its fans, it's whisked off to head office where it is poked, prodded, and analysed. Conversations and plans emerge on how to exploit, replicate, template, and package the creation into several other projects, whether they be sequels, spin-offs, or copycats with the same recipe. For example, the success of the live-action Alice in Wonderland led to a stream of increasingly soulless cash-grabs recycling the concept of de-animating animated films. This is similar with the Marvel properties. What starts off with a bit of credibility and energy (largely due to Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr.) and freshness turns into a drinking game of one-upmanship. How much more digital craziness can one stomach with this franchise before it becomes nauseating? Same thing: Pirates of the Caribbean. What started as a risky pirate adventure turned into a heartless cash-cow. What could have been a decent, memorable one-off has turned into a pathetic 'property' with an infuriating downward trajectory.
It's interesting where current trends are leading. The entertainment industry has become ever-more a system of giants. Maybe Disney v. Warner Bros should become the titan match-up to be turned into a blockbuster movie rather than the ape-lizard grudge match in recently seen in cinemas. What's unfolding at the studios’ business-model level is fascinating, even if it holds less and less hope for an infusion of creative storytelling. Content providers are becoming their own streaming services. Content is the name of the game. The box-office trends of the past decade – largely, big brand name property-exploitation – have matured. Super-heroes, Fasts, Furiouses, cinematic universes, and CGI animation; they're all at the end of their respective product cycles, and it's too early for re-imaginings. For example, Pixar's first wave of features were revolutionary. However, now the struggle is to be evolutionary. Soul may be amazing, but the polish is coming off the Pixar lamp as they have been piling up misfires with greater regularity while competitors' animation quality has arguably caught up. Where does Disney go with these brands? The stream-i-verse is the next big thing, but the race for content is not too exciting when it involves merely elaborating on current brands. Any of Disney+'s proprietary content may be hit and miss, but they seem destined to remain familiar. Safe, no risk, little innovation outside of familiar brands.
In the 1970s, Spielberg's visions breathed life into the industry. In the 1980s, special effects schlock and raucous comedy did the same. In the 1990s Pixar, Spielberg (again), and Cameron brought their voices and visuals to the mainstream. Even Tarantino breathed new creative and financial life into the indie-side of the industry. It's interesting and frustrating to see industry leaders like Disney failing to take a seat at the head table to push creative storytelling forward. It's great to have your franchises, but stretching out a property from a film to a cinematic universe or into a mini-series is not the same wager as taking a chance on the first Pirates of the Caribbean or The Sixth Sense. Disney has certainly mastered its templates, so there will be always be creature comfort in their efforts. That isn't without value, but the corporate arrogance that continues charging exorbitant prices for its merchandise and that steadily puts ho-hum uninspired familiar efforts on Disney+ premium sure is tiring.
Despite a huge appetite for content in the developing streaming landscape, Disney is not showing creative storytelling leadership when they could be. Mandalorian and Wandavision may have their fans and may be good, but they’re hardly inspired new content. There’s no parallel programming for fresh new filmmakers. Under the current model, new filmmakers’ voices don’t have much creative leeway. They’re brought in to work within or beneath committees of showrunners to develop appendages of known profitable properties. Nomadland appears to be the exception as opposed to the rule. The newly crowned Oscar Best Picture gives Disney+ a bit of artsy prestige for the moment, but its Fox Searchlight banner only looks to be developing five or six productions per year, as opposed to the eight to ten that it produced prior to the 2019 acquisition of Fox.
This is an unprecedented era with studios becoming distributors (and in Netflix's case, distributors becoming studios), and the landscape is shifting. Even though Disney is way ahead of Warner Bros and Paramount, it’s impossible to see a meaningful commitment to long-term creative efforts except in an ongoing exploitation of properties: Perry the Platypus and John McClane crossovers – that type of thing (although an Alien in the Hundred Acre Wood project has some appeal).
Disney has been a significant creativity influencer in the past. Maybe the pandemic can force them back into that type of role. One side effect of all the studios' big budget films being shelved this year has been an unprecedented year for small films having their moments in the light. Once Hollywood stepped out of the way, all sorts of little guys got to shine. Just look at this year's Oscar picks. Overall, it may not have been a super year for film, but with studios like Disney licking their wounds and putting projects on back-burners, a lot of smaller storytellers got their day in the sun (if not the box office) without having to fight Disney's marketing machinery for attention. If Disney took a few moments in 2020 to reflect on the market rather than tremble, panic, and crisis-manage its debt-to-revenue ratios, they may have noticed character depth and community representation emerging from the year's best-of lists. Rather than doing marketing studies on how to gouge a few more bucks with Disney+ Premium, the brass should have gone shopping at recent film festivals like Netflix did. It sucks to lose a lot of money, yes. However, it's a storm Disney can weather. Though it stinks for film viewers, too, to see Disney cry hard times while on the one hand failing to offer much storytelling innovation and on the other still trying to upsell them.