The Disneyfication of the Movies
Have you seen “Avengers: Infinity War”? Or “Solo: A Star Wars Story”? You’ve probably by now seen “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”. And if you haven’t seen any of those, you’ve at least heard people talking about them—specifically asking others not to spoil Infinity War. Have you seen or heard about “Eighth Grade?” No? How about “Sorry to Bother You,” “Tully,” “First Reformed,” or “BlacKkKlansman?” OK, you might’ve heard of the last one. Chances are, though, you haven’t seen it. The reason I can guess you’ve probably seen the former group of films and not the latter is because “Infinity War” earned $250 million its opening weekend in North America. “BlacKkKlansman”? $10 million. And that, as IndieWire reported, was “performing ahead of predictions.”
There are two differences between these two groups of films: first, the former are major blockbusters, designed to appeal to a mass audience, while the latter are all films with smaller target audiences. Second, the former are owned by the Walt Disney Company, while the latter are not. With their deep cache of popular characters, their strategic acquisition of 21st Century Fox, and the unveiling of a new streaming service, Disney will tighten their grasp on the box office, leading to a movie theater full of sequels, reboots, and spin-offs. Disney doesn’t care about creating good, original, creative movies. Only movies we’ve already seen before that will make them richer.
Disney is already the most profitable studio in Hollywood. They started out with breakthroughs in animation in the 1930s to the 1940s and continued producing high-quality animation, from such shows as Snow White and Robin Hood. They had a trademark of kid-friendly content with talking animals, and an emotional appeal to adults. That emotional appeal has grown over the years because of nostalgia for classic Disney films, which a lot of people grow up on.
Despite its early dominance in the field of animation, Disney’s box office domination did not begin until recently. Over the last decade or so, Disney expanded outside of their traditional animation arena. To accomplish this, they acquired Lucasfilm, which owned such Indiana Jones and Star Wars, as well as Marvel studios, whose movies are based off comic books which already have a large fan base, and Pixar, the prestige animation company, Disney set out to conquer the box office. So far it has paid off.
Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012. The first three Star Wars films released by Disney (“The Force Awakens”, “Rogue One”, and “The Last Jedi”) have made $4.2 billion as of January 1, according to Box Office Mojo. Disney bought Pixar in 2006, and has since released such critically praised films as “Wall-E” in 2008, “Up” in 2009, and “Toy Story 3” in 2010. Toy Story 3 is the second all-time highest grossing animated film, behind Disney’s own “Frozen”. Clearly Disney was on a roll. Yet that was not enough.
Entertainment these days isn’t as lucrative as it once was. CinemaBlend reports that in 1930, 65 percent of the American population went to the theater weekly. That number is now a mere three percent. Whereas studios used to release dozens of films a year and take risks with edgy films, nowadays, the big studios typically release only 5 or 6 “tentpole” films each year. These are your Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc. films. These are usually all franchises. The studios need these films to pay off big so they release films their audiences have heard of to make sure the films have a built-in fanbase. They sink money into them and hope they do well. So studios are releasing fewer movies, and people are going to the theater less. The only way to become top dog is to expand outside of the theaters and outside of the U.S. This brings us to June 27, which is when the Department of Justice approved Disney’s deal to buy 21st Century Fox for $71 billion in cash and stock. Fox not only owns a number commercially viable properties like the X-Men, Alien, Die Hard, and the Predator series, but they also have other avenues of profit. Disney will get FX Productions and FX Networks, home of popular TV shows “Atlanta,” “American Crime Story,” and “American Horror Story.” Disney will also get 20th Century Fox Television, responsible for “The Simpsons” and “Empire.” Disney also gets a controlling share in Hulu, as well as Fox’s international TV companies. Finally, Disney gets more franchises to turn into more theme park rides and ultimately more money. Analysts predict that after the merger has been completed, Disney, with the new acquisitions from Fox, will own about 40 percent of the worldwide box office. However, this substantial control of the movies has been seen before. In the Golden Age of Hollywood, from the 1930s to about 1948 the “Big Five” movie studios: Paramount Pictures, RKO Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., and 20th Century Fox, owned a monopoly on the movies. They owned the actors and directors, owned the production companies, often owned the companies that processed the films, and they even owned the theatres where the movies were shown.
Unfortunately for the studios, their almost mafia-like scheming stopped in 1948 when the Supreme Court ruled against Paramount Pictures in U.S. vs. Paramount, resulting in the relinquishing of control of the movie theaters themselves. Other studios and people could now make more movies and hopefully distribute them. Right around the same time, television was introduced to the American home. By 1960, almost 90% of American households owned a television set. Movie theater attendance went down, and from then until about 2005, studios tried various methods to make money, mostly involving physical media, for example, DVD and LaserDisc. For a time, this strategy was mostly successful.
In 2005, YouTube launched, leading to a wave of brand new streaming services that allowed viewers to watch TV and Movies in the comfort of their own homes. Some of the pioneers were Hulu, Vudu, and, of course Netflix. Up until the last few years, this worked for everyone (except the studios). Netflix and others acted as platforms, using content from the studios, much like movie theaters.
The ever-adapting Hollywood, however, has other plans. As Netflix and Amazon Prime are now producing their own movies, the studios need streaming platforms of their own. Disney is now creating its own streaming platform where all of their animated, Marvel, and Star Wars content will be found. This content will be exclusive to the Disney service, which is said to launch sometime next spring. This means that if anyone wants to watch a Marvel or Star Wars movie outside of the theater or renting on Amazon, they’ll have to subscribe to the new service.
This doesn’t sound like a terrible deal, especially for fans of Star Wars and Marvel. The problem is that now studios are holding a monopoly again. People no longer go to the theater as often as they once did—it has been replaced by streaming services. And since Disney owns the movies and their distribution venues, they own what you watch, when you watch it, and where you watch it.
Warner Bros. has also announced a streaming service for all of its DC Comics films and TV shows, premiering around the same time as Disney’s. With so many streaming services out there already, and more to come, you’ll have to subscribe to countless streaming services to get all of the content you want. Disney’s plan to control our entertainment is working. Look, I like Marvel and Star Wars, too. I watch all of those movies, usually when they come out in theaters. I’m not saying they’re bad movies, or that people shouldn’t watch them. But we have to remember that Disney is first and foremost a business. They want your money. So they design their films to have mass appeal, and that sometimes means sacrificing art for entertainment. Disney is always plays it safe, making its movies formulaically and ensuring 100 percent audience satisfaction. For this reason, their movies end up feeling bland and almost identical to each other. There have been 19 Marvel movies so far in their cinematic universe, and most of them feel the same. In 2017, Disney released two reboots and five sequels.
The best movies are the ones that are different, and those movies are not found at Disney. The best way to combat Disney domination is to vote with your wallet. I know going to movies in the theater is expensive, but most of us go to at least five or six movies a year, and they’re usually Disney movies. I am not saying not to go to those. Maybe for every one, or even two blockbusters you see, go to an artsy film. There are plenty of great movies out there that are better than Marvel. Just give it a chance. Sure, they don’t have as much action, as many stars, or as many special effects, but they have more emotional power to move us than typical Marvel fare. At the beginning of this article, I gave a list of these types of movies that have come out recently, that I would absolutely recommend. I can guarantee that there is something out there for everyone, whatever you’re interested in. Just give some low-budget movie a chance, and maybe, just maybe, Disney and other studios will see that great films can make money, too, and maybe they might take a few more risks. •