MICKEY MOUSE IS IN THE HOUSE
Tim Robey suggests pandemic may end the Disney magic we all know and love.
For five generations, the Disney myth has held sway over childhoods. Sustaining its brand with unique custodial care, Disney has made the Mouse House an almighty mainstay of the entertainment industry.
What a difference a year makes. 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.
A corporate restructuring is afoot which aims to focus on straight-to-streaming initiatives at the expense of all else.
“I would not characterize it as a response to COVID-19,” Bob Chapek, the company's CEO, said of the news, arguing 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 — theme parks, cruise ships, Broadway shows and most fundamentally of all, theatrical releases in cinemas — has failed to restart to anything like preCOVID-19 levels.
Disneyland in California has been crippled after three months of testy disputes with Gavin Newsom, the Californian governor, about gaining permission to reopen. Amusement parks were consigned to phase 4 of his pandemic road map — bottom of the pack, essentially — which Disney warned left 80,000 jobs in Orange County on the line.
When parks finally got the green light to reopen, albeit at 25 per cent of customary capacity, it was too late for the 28,000 employees confirmed to be laid off after the crushing effects of a shuttered summer. The first Broadway musical to be felled by the virus was Disney's Frozen, which won't come back to the stage, after only two years of disappointing sales. In cinemas, the company has had the roughest ride of all the major studios. Their live-action remake of Mulan, which cost well over $200 million 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-19's first wave, managed $145 million, but that still makes it the lowest-grossing Pixar film by an enormous distance. 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 première exclusively on the Disney+ TV platform on Christmas Day.
In a year of staggeringly bad news, 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 capitalize on the predicted demand for lockdown viewing. Take-up was eager, topping 60 million subscribers by August, although it's still a long way off Netflix's 182 million.
“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 “monetizing 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 — Disney shares jumped six per cent on the day of the announcement.
But on another level, it's a huge retrenchment in their entertainment mission. 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 but went on to become the most successful animated feature of all time.
What gets left out in the new delivery system is cinema. It's the cinemas which took Snow White, and Dumbo, and The Lion King, twice, and four Toy Story films, around the world, and made all those characters famous. Without Woody and Buzz and Simba and Aladdin, there would be no theme parks, no toys, no Broadway musical spinoffs. Without cinemas, Disney wouldn't exist.
Perhaps this is why cinema owners around the world are receiving each successive announcement from the company as a dagger in the back. COVID-19 has hit the conglomerate hard, and it's 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-19 dwindles, and they will be felt most painfully by the cinemas themselves. When Soul made its move to Disney+ only, the International Union of Cinemas, representing exhibitors across Europe, predicted a death knell for many of its members. Without the biggest new releases to show, cinemas will perish in droves, and if and when Disney decides to put its films back out into the world, it will return to a decimated marketplace.
This all spells curtains for the Disney we grew up with. The Disney of all-enveloping sound and light in the womblike space of the cinema, and the Disney of the semi-miraculous theme parks.
Perhaps the wizardry of CGI was killing off the latter's enchantment anyway: Pixar's characters already look so real that shaking their hands feels less exciting.
But with the demise of this version of Disney, a dream within it dies — one coaxing our imaginations to roam out in the real world. The idea that the larger-than-life-ness of cartoon characters is something nearly as tangible as the everyday.
Gone now is the fantasy appeal that Disneyland taps into — as a cherished place to go, a special place. It's not meant to be a TV dinner on your sofa or an automated babysitting service. If Mickey's no longer telling kids to follow their dreams, but just to stay at home, he's guilty of cramping their horizons, and giving up.