Waving goodbye to Disney as we know it
The Mouse House’s move to streaming new releases marks the end of its unique fantasy appeal, argues Tim Robey
For five generations, the Disney myth has held sway over childhoods. The panoply of Disney’s characters has offered an appeal so primal that kids across the world would beg to take long-haul flights to meet them for real. Sustaining its brand with unique custodial care, Disney has given families days out they’ll never forget, and made the Mouse House an almighty mainstay of the entertainment industry.
What a difference a year makes. Disney has just issued a directive that the Magic Kingdom is pulling up the drawbridge. The company’s whole business model has been forced inside by the pandemic, and the result is not just a belt-tightening move but a major cultural shift.
Per an announcement this week that has sent tremors through the media world, a corporate restructuring is afoot which aims to focus on straight-to-streaming initiatives at the expense of all else.
“I would not characterise it as a response to Covid,” Bob Chapek, the company’s CEO, said of the news, arguing that the pandemic has merely “accelerated the rate” of an expected transition. But the scale of Disney’s current woes leaves you wondering. Except for home streaming, every customer-facing branch of its empire – from theme parks to cruise ships, to Broadway shows, and most fundamentally tally of all, theatrical releases in cinemas s – has failed to restart to anything like ike pre-covid levels.
Disneyland and in California has been crippled, after three months of testy disputes with Gavin Newsom, the Californian n governor, about gaining permission rmission to reopen. Amusement musement parks were e consigned to phase four our of his pandemic road map – bottom of f the pack, essentially ntially – which Disney sney warned left ft 80,000 jobs in Orange ange County on the line.
When parks arks finally got the green een light to reopen just t last week, albeit at 25 5 per cent of customary y capacity, it was too late for r the 28,000 employees s confirmed to be laid off after er the crushing effects of a shuttered summer. It’s t’s hard to imagine the he parks overcoming ng this seismic shock to return eturn to their former glory. ory.
The first t Broadway musical to be felled by the virus was Disney’s Frozen, which won’t n’t come back to the stage, after only two years of disappointing sappointing sales. In cinemas, s, the company has had the roughest est ride of all the major studios. Their live-action remake of Mulan, which cost well over $200 million n
(£155m) to produce, has been a high-profile casualty at the box office, grossing a mere $67 million worldwide, bellyflopping in China, and skipping America’s cinemas outright. Pixar’s (delightful) Onward, confined to a March release which caught it in the path of Covid’s first wave, managed $145 million, but
that still makes it the lowest-grossing Pixar film by an enormous distance (compare, say, the $855 million for Inside Out). Future releases are delayed until next year and as for Pixar’s Soul, originally scheduled for June this year, it has just made the most telling and drastic move of them all – away from a theatrical release entirely, to premiere exclusively on the Disney+ TV platform on Christmas Day.
In a year of staggeringly bad news across the map, the only bright spot for Disney has been Disney+. Their long-planned home-streaming service launched in March, a few weeks earlier than scheduled in some territories, to capitalise on the predicted demand for lockdown viewing. Take- Take-up up was eager, topping 60 million subscribers by August, although it is still a long way off Netflix’s
182 million. Evidently, a great deal of numbercrunching – some numbers that we know, and all the secret figures we don’t – has gone into the planned restructuring. “Given the incredible success of Disney+” are, tellingly enough, the opening words of Chapek’s official statement, which talks about “making the content consumers want most, delivered in the way they prefer to consume it” and also “monetising that content in the most optimal way across all platforms”.
In the brutal economic environment of 2020, the gist of this might scan as simply sound business sense, a view reflected on Wall Street, which saw Disney shares jump six per cent on the day of the announcement.
But on another level, it’s a huge retrenchment in the entertainment mission Disney has always represented. In three years’ time, the company will celebrate its centenary – it was on Oct 16 1923 that Walt and Roy Disney pooled their resources into the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Hollywood. They had a long road to travel before producing their first feature animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which was dubbed a disastrous folly during production and went 400 per cent over budget. When it went on to become the highest-grossing film of 1938, the company’s future was assured – adjusted for inflation, it’s still the most successful animated feature of all time. What gets left out in the new delivery system – in all these living-room deals Disney are striking as we speak – is cinema. cinema It’s the cinemas which took Snow White, W and then Dumbo, and The Lion King, Ki twice, and four Toy Stories, around the world, and made all those charact characters world-famous. Without Woody and Buzz and Simba and Aladdin Aladdin, there would be no theme parks, n no toys, no Broadway musical spin-off spin-offs. Without cinemas, Disney simply w wouldn’t exist.
Perha Perhaps this is why cinema owners around t the world are receiving each successiv successive announcement from the company as a dagger in the back. Undenia Undeniably, Covid-19 has hit the conglom conglomerate hard, and it’s impossib impossible to detach this new strategy from the repercussions of a dead, profitless summer.
But the sped-up shift to streaming will have its own repercussions long after Covid Covi dwindles, and they will be felt most p painfully by the cinemas themselve themselves. When Soul made its move to Disney+ only, the International Union of C Cinemas, representing exhibitors across Europe, predicted a death kne knell for many of its members. Without th the biggest new releases to show, cinemas cine will perish in their droves, and an if and when Disney decide to put their thei films back out into the world, they the will return to a decimated marketplace. marketpla
This all spells curtains for the Disney we grew up with. The Disney of all-enveloping all-enve sound and light in the womblike womb space of the cinema, and the Disney Di of the semi-miraculous theme parks. par
Perhaps the wizardry of CGI was killing off the latter’s enchantment anyway: P Pixar’s characters already look so rea real that shaking their hands feels less e exciting.
But with the demise of this version of Disney, a dream within it dies – one coaxing our ou imaginations to roam out in the real world. The idea that the larger-than-life-ness larger-tha of cartoon characters is something nearly as tangible as the everyday.
Gone now no is the fantasy appeal that Disneyland Disneylan taps into – as a cherished place to go go, a special place. It’s not meant to be b a TV dinner on your sofa or an automated auto babysitting service. If Mickey’s n no longer telling kids to follow their the dreams, but just to stay at home, he’s guilty of cramping their horizons, and giving up.
Disney is not meant to be a TV dinner on the sofa or an automated babysitting service