I disagree with this article that this is all about their ability to "tell stories", as much as management that's really good at identifying which company to acquire next so they can squeeze every last cent from consumers for whichever IP they are pushing at the time.
Most people I've talked to DON'T believe the star wars series has gotten better from a story telling perspective, as this article proposes. I don't think most people believe live-action remakes of their classic cartoons is quality story-telling. I think they are just really good at reading market trends, have enough money in their coffers to acquire whatever is becoming the next big thing, advertise and push it into becoming a cultural phenomenon, then moving onto whatever is next once they've exhausted that IP.
Edit - and to be clear, I most likely have a very jaded view here. I don't like disney as a company, nor am I a fan of superhero movies, star wars, or a lot of what the company has been pushing for the last decade or so. I respect their ability to make a ton of money, but I don't like a majority of what they create anymore, nor how they treat a majority of their employees.
> I respect their ability to make a ton of money, but I don't like a majority of what they create anymore, nor how they treat a majority of their employees.
That's a really good summation of my views on Disney. It's obvious they know how to build consistently polished stories that will be consistently enjoyable to a wide audience. I respect that.
But it's not clear to me that's a goal worth pursuing, or that the artistic value of their movies has gone up because of that. It's good to have some media that's safe and predictable and that is primarily motivated by market trends. But when that's all a company is making, then behind that nice facade lies a deeply cynical way of looking at the world, where creative choices are calculated for broad appeal rather than for their inherent value.
I'm not going to say that's all Disney makes. Just that the percentage of films Disney is making that fall into that category is growing at a rapid clip.
It's a jaded view in the sense that I'm cynical about Disney, but it's really not me trying to crap on popular things. There are a lot of popular things that are really, really good. But I know when a movie actually feels special and honest to me, when I feel like the author genuinely had a good reason to make it, and made it because they loved it. And Disney movies don't feel that way to me. They're glossy, and pretty, and impressive, and they know the right things to say, but they're made of plastic instead of flesh.
How can you even say that? I’m dumbfounded. Only in this era of complete erosion of antitrust could this statement be made. Standard Oil would have been awed by this cornering of the market.
Well, seeing that you actually put Apple in that list shows a skewed perspective.
As far as getting big or getting crushed - both Blumhouse and Tyler Perry Studios make movies that get wide releases with budgets between $5 and $10 million.
Yes, there will probably be roles for small companies serving smaller demographics, but I meant to point out the weakening position of standalone media companies. The power is in the hands of the owners of the infrastructure, except for Disney who I think has an exceptional ownership of desirable content.
Apple I put on there because they can afford to burn so many dollars, it puts them in league with Comcast and ATT and Disney. The other media companies don't have a rent collecting cash cow to lean on.
The media companies don’t “own” the infrastructure. Anyone who can get the money can buy the equipment, hire the people and make a movie. Tyler Perry Studios and Blumhouse or proof. You don’t even need to put your movie in theaters.
There are plenty of streaming services looking for exclusive content. Barring that, you can sell your movie yourself over the internet or through any of the video on demand services.
You can even probably get Redbox to stock it.
Speaking of Tyler Perry, he started “distributing his content” decades ago by doing stage plays.
People complaining about big media keeping smaller players out is about like people complaining about not being profitable because of a dependence on Amazon Retail or Google ads. If your entire business model is based on being a sharecropper for big media/tech, you’re statistically going to be disappointed.
There are also small religious studios who are able to find an audience.
I wasn’t clear, but I was writing from the perspective of an investor. No one is stopping anyone from making content, but for purposes of investing, I’m claiming that what used to be many media companies available to invest in, are down to a few, and they will need help from a different business line to stay afloat.
They own an astounding chunk of the popular culture. They dominate the list of top-grossing films. There have been times over the past couple years when I couldn't see a movie in my local megaplex that Disney didn't own.
They are apparently also licensing the Nintendo reality-distortion field technology.
I've noticed both Disney and Nick do this. Whatever they produce will always do ok because of their marketing muscle. They target children who are not jaded yet and parents either tolerate it or don't notice.
I suspect most don't notice until their more experienced parents and by that time most parents are done with small children. I have 6 kids so this has become more noticeable to me.
They cartoons and shows my oldest 18 year old watched are totally differnt from the ones my 8 year and my 4 year old watch. They churn through things quickly and market things very slickly.
For example, they produce something for 14 year olds, that most parents think is ok for 12-14 year old kids, but most of those kids aren't really that interested in. Then they drop the marketing into their 8-10 year old programs and boom, it's a hit for them.
These companies, especially Disney, are very insidious and clearly manipulating young minds. We should be disturbed, but I find very little buy in from other adults.
I'm a SW fan, have been my entire life. Not one of the fans that go super-deep into lore and nit-picking every aspect of every movie and debating it all (although I do respect that level of fan too, and think they create some interesting discussions/content), but I've watched every movie a few times, read a heap of the books, play all the games, collect the Lego, etc etc.
I think that Disney is doing to SW what they do to everything... they make it appeal to the maximum possible audience for the maximum possible profit. There's no deep desire to create amazing stories, there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. The stuff they make is "good". You'll still pay for it, and enjoy it, but you'll always end up feeling like they could've done better. It's all just formulaic mass-produced share-holder stuff now, but it does the job.
> there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment.
They used to be much more experimental as an animation studio but some of those projects didn't do as well. It'd be great if they could alternate between telling "safe" stories and passion projects like Fantasia or even films like Tron but I guess it's hard to pitch something risky when you can get a guaranteed hit by doing it by the numbers. The last movie I think they really took a chance with was Treasure Planet and that movie was pitched over and over for more than a decade before they agreed to make it.
> I think that Disney is doing to SW what they do to everything... they make it appeal to the maximum possible audience for the maximum possible profit. There's no deep desire to create amazing stories, there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. The stuff they make is "good". You'll still pay for it, and enjoy it, but you'll always end up feeling like they could've done better.
For Star Wars, at least, that's a pretty solid step up. I paid for Episodes 1-3, but didn't particularly enjoy them. Episodes 7 & 8 at least left me feeling good about what I just watched, and I quite liked Rogue One (I didn't see it in the theater, though).
Rogue one was good, Episode 7 was okayish as a introduction to new arc and characters, Episode 8 was killed by playing it safe - it was such a wasted potential.
We don't talk about Solo. That move does not exist.
> Episode 8 was killed by playing it safe - it was such a wasted potential.
I get that, although I'll be honest—a bit part of what I liked about 8 Ep. 8 was that it killed off all of the dumb hanging threads from Ep. 7. Episodes 4-6 had huge surprises, but they mostly came out of nowhere, not with giant neon signs pointing at them "GEE DON'T YOU WONDER WHO REY'S PARENTS ARE IT'S A HUGE MYSTERY!". Episode 8 just threw all of that out the window and I loved it for that.
The scene i think is the most wasted was the death of Snoke.
There are myriad ways to go forward in interesting directions(Kylo and Rey could go both dark jedi, gray jedi, swap sides(i think that it will come to that) or even go for a 3rd way, or even destroy the concept of jedi itself) yet they basically returned to status quo.
It also felt like it was heavily edited - like there were two drafts, and someone mashed them together.
I think it's fair to say that Disney is large enough that it's not only hard to quantify what impact the company itself has on the storytelling that gets done, but it's also hard say how much of the company is doing storytelling at all anymore.
They've still got animated features, some TV cartoons, some live action sitcoms, but also theme parks and resorts, a video game studio, a theatrical group, a cruise line, a radio station (and a line up of recording artists), cable channels, retail chains, a timeshare program, and a publishing company. Storytelling factors in some of those somewhere but Disney has moved way beyond it's storytelling roots.
I can't even say there's a strong central vision driving their films these days like when Walt was still alive and they were primarily an animation studio or even during their renaissance. When they are storytelling, their successes and failures seem to come down to who they hire or what companies/properties they pick up.
I will say that at least on the animation side they seem to stay out of the way of the creative types and give them the freedom to do what they need to. Disney has some terrible business practices, but they do manage to get their hands on some incredibly talented people who have done some really good work over the years.
Ouch. Good point. Even The Last Jedi trainwreck (RT 44% audience score, record $150M drop after first weekend) STILL made the top 20 all-time grossing films (ignoring inflation).
But nerdy stuff is cool, remakes are cool, rebels are cool...it's got fundamentally popular qualities. Put that into a good marketing engine, check the boxes and you've got a money maker.
20 years from now, there'll be people pointing to now as the Disney golden age, saying, "I don't like all the isekai genemod content they're making these days. I just don't get the appeal of giant catgirls learning to live in an alternate dimension. Disney was better when it was all superheroes and Star Wars."
Not sure about that. I remember that in the late '90s - early 2000s people were really hyped up about the animation movies of that era, and rightly so, we're talking about the early Pixar movies, Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" and "Spirited Away", Satoshi Kon's "Paranoia Agent" and "Perfect Blue" or about "Cowboy Bebop", people knew that they were contemporary with really, really great animation movies/series. Almost 20 years have passed since then and nothing similar is being done anymore, at least not in the mainstream.
>Almost 20 years have passed since then and nothing similar is being done anymore, at least not in the mainstream.
Bear in mind that over 20 years, a lot of what was groundbreaking in terms of animation quality has become mainstream, so it's not surprising that people wouldn't be as floored by Toy Story 4 as they were by Toy Story. Anime was a relatively new phenomenon for many in the West back then as well - Cowboy Bebop was one of the "gateway drugs" into anime for a lot of people.
I wouldn't assume that work of high quality is no longer being done - I've heard people talk about Your Name as if Makoto Shinkai were the next Hayao Miyazaki for instance - it just doesn't stand out in a crowd the way it once did, now that anime is no longer as niche and people have services like Crunchyroll.
People absolutely talk about great more recent animated movies, like Your Name, Into the Spider-Verse, and Kubo and the Two Strings.
Princes Mononoke is actually my favorite movie, I obviously agree that it's really excellent, but objectively I think Spider-Verse is just as good, even if it doesn't fit my preferences quite as much.
For TV series, Mob Psycho 100 is absolutely top tier, I'd put it against Cowboy Bebop easily. Loved Bebop, but I think MP100 is the better series overall, both for story and animation quality.
This is a combination of rose-tinted glasses, plus things accumulating social value over time. Eminem didn't rap about playing N64 games until long, long past the N64's heydey; it wasn't cool to mention that back in 1998. Pokemon is mainstream with adults now, but it was for real (young) nerds and dorks back when it started. Retro games are currently cool with those who scoffed at them when they were new. This phenomenon is especially prevalent with 'cult hits', like Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, which has a much more positive reputation now than it did at its own launch.
Well, if “most people you talk to” think it isn’t good and all of the new Star Wars movies (except for Solo) have done well, have you thought that your anecdotal survey of people you know may not be relevant?
I think you missed a key section in the article where he talks about how miss-steps with a franchise can build, and that Disney made many miss-steps with Star Wars. He wrote a whole article about it [0], which he claims they:
- rushed the films out
- lacked singular vision to keep them consistent
- subverted audience expectations in a bad way, re Luke Skywalker
- retread too much of the same old ground leading to inability to generate momentum (ie. killing off characters in Rogue One).
> I don't like a majority of what they create anymore, nor how they treat a majority of their employees.
The contrast to this is stark after having watched "Imagineering" on Disney+ the other night. It reminded me about why I was a rabid Disney fan growing up - the values that Walt insisted on and why these days I'm more "meh"; what they have evolved into the longer Walt hasn't been around to keep people grounded on what really matters.
It's pretty sad you can go from a company where employees invested their own money to keep construction of Disneyland going to the exploitative mess of a company that exists today :(
Author fails to establish a solid correlation (let alone causal relationship) between "storytelling" and affinity. Furthermore, author fails to prove that Disney is better at storytelling than its competitors. He could have first defined "storytelling" and then provided data-driven proof that Disney focuses more on it than its competitors. This is simple enough to do by running such a definition on content (he could use conformity to a three act structure and run it on all movie scripts in the past 20 years, for example). Otherwise we are left with the tautology that Disney content performs better than others because people like it more ("affinity").
I have so much respect for Disney and Bob Iger in particular. But something feels lacking about a single company controlling all the best-loved stories in a culture. It’s like a monopoly on sentiment.
Until the last 100 years or so it’s been the case that a given culture’s stories — folklores, mythologies, and religions — were in the public domain. And while they were at times subject to tight control, e.g., non-vernacular liturgies, they were more typically “owned” by everyone.
I don’t mean this as a criticism of copyright. I support copyright and how it incentivizes cultural creation. But I wonder about whether there’s space for more stories we all own, that can be interpreted by everyone, and, most importantly, that create the same powerful feelings of attachment Disney is so good at creating.
There are multiple movies of all the stories that the Disney classic animated films are based on. Most of them are not made by Disney... Indeed, at least 3 of them are produced or distributed by Netflix.
Copyright doesn't stop people from making movies about folk tales. The cost of making a movie and the generally low returns do.
The stories that Disney owns are just a drop in the bucket compared to the whole rest of the world. I mean, no matter what you watch, read, play or listen to, there's only so many hours in the day for any of it. I remember the Aladdin and Lion King movies of my youth fondly, but no more fondly than say, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Smash Bros., Astro Boy, Final Fantasy, Lord of the Rings, Pac-Man, Pokémon, His Dark Materials, Animorphs, or the Harry Potter books. Last I checked, Disney doesn't own any of that and those were just the first handful of examples I pulled out of my hat. I think our media habits are even more fragmented nowadays than they were in my youth, and that's in part because YouTube, Steam, Twitch, Netflix, and the million and one other streaming services we have today didn't exist in the 90s. I think Cable TV was the new hotness, and that was choice compared to mere broadcast television.
What's more movies get privileged in a weird way over other things. Avengers: Endgame brought in $2.7 billion and is the highest grossing film of all time. Only 5 films ever have broken $2 billion.
Phantom of the Opera the musical has made $6 billion, blowing Avengers out of the water. Wicked the musical has grossed $3 billion, more than any movie ever made. Same for Mamma Mia!.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) made $600 million in the first 72-hours, far more than any movie ever. League of Legends makes $1.4 billion a year, again more than any movie ever made. Fortnite makes $2.4 billion.
In the UK, more people watched The X Factor than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The book Diary of a Wimpy Kid sold over a million copies in its latest installment.
Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.
> Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.
Really? What cultural affinity is there for Avengers? For Force Awakens?
I would argue movies have built an establishment of critics around itself, the disclosure surrounding it does appear to be more sophisticated and intellectual. But that doesn't mean the it is shaping the audience's perception the same way.
>Really? What cultural affinity is there for Avengers? For Force Awakens?
The Avengers is a part of a comic franchise that is almost 50 years old, and Star Wars basically invented the science fiction movie blockbuster over 40 years ago. Both have been deeply influential on generations of people and on the way their respective genres have been portrayed in all media.
To question whether there is cultural affinity for either is to fundamentally misunderstand modern Western pop culture, because these properties are more influential to it than the Bible and Shakespeare.
> Avengers: Endgame brought in $2.7 billion and is the highest grossing film of all time. Only 5 films ever have broken $2 billion.
> Phantom of the Opera the musical has made $6 billion, blowing Avengers out of the water. Wicked the musical has grossed $3 billion, more than any movie ever made. Same for Mamma Mia!.
> In the UK, more people watched The X Factor than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The book Diary of a Wimpy Kid sold over a million copies in its latest installment.
> Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.
The first metric you mention is not the right one for discussing cultural impact. You'd want to compare number of tickets sold for Phantom of the Opera to number of tickets sold for Avengers: Endgame.
Weirdly, you go on to make the correct comparison for The X Factor.
I'm not convinced that popular video games haven't made their way into the conversations about cultural significance.
Bob Iger is magical but I am not worrying about Disney's monopoly per say.
Yes, Disney is dominating Hollywood like no one had done before.
But Hollywood itself is as irrelevant as it has never been. It no longer dominates the world's attention, and the audience's choices are more abundant than ever.
The irony is Disney built it's success on re-telling classic tales from the public domain then turned and became the biggest proponent for copyright, denying those after them the same playing field they had.
Which is why incumbents tend to welcome onerous regulations once they are big enough to deal with them. It locks the young upstarts from coming up behind them and potentially overtaking them.
Amazon wasn't for having to collect state sales tax until they figured it out. Facebook didn't start talking about regulation being a good thing until they were big enough to easily absorb the impact.
Whats even better - you get to blame the regulations as the gatekeeper, not your own sleazy behavior.
This article seems like a long and pseudo-technical way of saying that Disney makes a lot of money because they make products that a lot of people like.
I don't think it's about storytelling at all. Star Wars under Disney or Marvel are not examples of good storytelling.
What Disney understands is the brand management. Disney brands are valuable because they are familiar, consistent and safe choices. Disney is the stable food producer in the entertainment business.
Using Scorsese's non-cinema as a label for what Disney does not necessarily bad. First 3 star Wars Movies were cinema. People were surprised, exited and blown away. You can't replicate that again and again. Now Star Wars is just Star Wars. People want stable diet of Star Wars that is just like they remember it with minor variations. It's watered down, but very familiar. They keep all the 'best bits' people like. "I have bad feeling about this", "something something dark side".
But the article points out that Disney doing that is exactly why Star Wars performance has been lackluster. They're now taking a step back because apparently the public doesn't want a steady drip of Star Wars same-old-same-old
I think it's somewhat absurd too, but part of the point being made in the conversation around this article is that Disney isn't taking risks or making decisions based on creative output -- they're very, very aggressively following market trends. Their first Star Wars release was one of their highest grossing films in something like a decade, but one bad showing from Solo and suddenly Disney is cutting back on yearly releases.
They want movies that are safe and predictable. They want to know before they even start production not just that the film will break even, but that it will make a LOT of money. Clearly based on their own statements, they don't feel that confident about a yearly Star Wars release.
Don't argue with me, argue with the Disney executives who decided to pull the brakes on their yearly release schedule.
Disney has different expectations. If anything, the fact that Disney can look past three high-grossing films and only see the one flop is strong evidence for what people are talking about here. Disney is risk averse, and they look at a 75% success rate as risky.
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[ 32.8 ms ] story [ 1272 ms ] threadDisney has always been a juggernaut but sheesh it's enormous now.
They've pulled off a Google or Facebook level of domination over their market, it's incredible for a rather old industry.
Most people I've talked to DON'T believe the star wars series has gotten better from a story telling perspective, as this article proposes. I don't think most people believe live-action remakes of their classic cartoons is quality story-telling. I think they are just really good at reading market trends, have enough money in their coffers to acquire whatever is becoming the next big thing, advertise and push it into becoming a cultural phenomenon, then moving onto whatever is next once they've exhausted that IP.
Edit - and to be clear, I most likely have a very jaded view here. I don't like disney as a company, nor am I a fan of superhero movies, star wars, or a lot of what the company has been pushing for the last decade or so. I respect their ability to make a ton of money, but I don't like a majority of what they create anymore, nor how they treat a majority of their employees.
That's a really good summation of my views on Disney. It's obvious they know how to build consistently polished stories that will be consistently enjoyable to a wide audience. I respect that.
But it's not clear to me that's a goal worth pursuing, or that the artistic value of their movies has gone up because of that. It's good to have some media that's safe and predictable and that is primarily motivated by market trends. But when that's all a company is making, then behind that nice facade lies a deeply cynical way of looking at the world, where creative choices are calculated for broad appeal rather than for their inherent value.
I'm not going to say that's all Disney makes. Just that the percentage of films Disney is making that fall into that category is growing at a rapid clip.
It's a jaded view in the sense that I'm cynical about Disney, but it's really not me trying to crap on popular things. There are a lot of popular things that are really, really good. But I know when a movie actually feels special and honest to me, when I feel like the author genuinely had a good reason to make it, and made it because they loved it. And Disney movies don't feel that way to me. They're glossy, and pretty, and impressive, and they know the right things to say, but they're made of plastic instead of flesh.
I don't understand why they were allowed to buy 20th Century Fox.
https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/comp...
Disney
Comcast
AT&T
Amazon
Apple
Netflix
CBS
Sony
Fox Corp
It’s a get big or get crushed world right now. Of the latter 4, I wonder who Microsoft/Google/Verizon/Facebook will buy.
As far as getting big or getting crushed - both Blumhouse and Tyler Perry Studios make movies that get wide releases with budgets between $5 and $10 million.
Apple I put on there because they can afford to burn so many dollars, it puts them in league with Comcast and ATT and Disney. The other media companies don't have a rent collecting cash cow to lean on.
There are plenty of streaming services looking for exclusive content. Barring that, you can sell your movie yourself over the internet or through any of the video on demand services.
You can even probably get Redbox to stock it.
Speaking of Tyler Perry, he started “distributing his content” decades ago by doing stage plays.
People complaining about big media keeping smaller players out is about like people complaining about not being profitable because of a dependence on Amazon Retail or Google ads. If your entire business model is based on being a sharecropper for big media/tech, you’re statistically going to be disappointed.
There are also small religious studios who are able to find an audience.
They are apparently also licensing the Nintendo reality-distortion field technology.
Just the words I was looking for.
They cartoons and shows my oldest 18 year old watched are totally differnt from the ones my 8 year and my 4 year old watch. They churn through things quickly and market things very slickly. For example, they produce something for 14 year olds, that most parents think is ok for 12-14 year old kids, but most of those kids aren't really that interested in. Then they drop the marketing into their 8-10 year old programs and boom, it's a hit for them.
These companies, especially Disney, are very insidious and clearly manipulating young minds. We should be disturbed, but I find very little buy in from other adults.
I think that Disney is doing to SW what they do to everything... they make it appeal to the maximum possible audience for the maximum possible profit. There's no deep desire to create amazing stories, there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. The stuff they make is "good". You'll still pay for it, and enjoy it, but you'll always end up feeling like they could've done better. It's all just formulaic mass-produced share-holder stuff now, but it does the job.
They used to be much more experimental as an animation studio but some of those projects didn't do as well. It'd be great if they could alternate between telling "safe" stories and passion projects like Fantasia or even films like Tron but I guess it's hard to pitch something risky when you can get a guaranteed hit by doing it by the numbers. The last movie I think they really took a chance with was Treasure Planet and that movie was pitched over and over for more than a decade before they agreed to make it.
Bluth leaving Disney was the best thing to happen to them.
For Star Wars, at least, that's a pretty solid step up. I paid for Episodes 1-3, but didn't particularly enjoy them. Episodes 7 & 8 at least left me feeling good about what I just watched, and I quite liked Rogue One (I didn't see it in the theater, though).
Side not, smuggler's run did the same thing. I triggered my inner child.
Rogue one was good, Episode 7 was okayish as a introduction to new arc and characters, Episode 8 was killed by playing it safe - it was such a wasted potential.
We don't talk about Solo. That move does not exist.
I get that, although I'll be honest—a bit part of what I liked about 8 Ep. 8 was that it killed off all of the dumb hanging threads from Ep. 7. Episodes 4-6 had huge surprises, but they mostly came out of nowhere, not with giant neon signs pointing at them "GEE DON'T YOU WONDER WHO REY'S PARENTS ARE IT'S A HUGE MYSTERY!". Episode 8 just threw all of that out the window and I loved it for that.
You can see it in the details of their animated films, presumably where the workers were given a bit more artistic license.
There are myriad ways to go forward in interesting directions(Kylo and Rey could go both dark jedi, gray jedi, swap sides(i think that it will come to that) or even go for a 3rd way, or even destroy the concept of jedi itself) yet they basically returned to status quo.
It also felt like it was heavily edited - like there were two drafts, and someone mashed them together.
They've still got animated features, some TV cartoons, some live action sitcoms, but also theme parks and resorts, a video game studio, a theatrical group, a cruise line, a radio station (and a line up of recording artists), cable channels, retail chains, a timeshare program, and a publishing company. Storytelling factors in some of those somewhere but Disney has moved way beyond it's storytelling roots.
I can't even say there's a strong central vision driving their films these days like when Walt was still alive and they were primarily an animation studio or even during their renaissance. When they are storytelling, their successes and failures seem to come down to who they hire or what companies/properties they pick up.
I will say that at least on the animation side they seem to stay out of the way of the creative types and give them the freedom to do what they need to. Disney has some terrible business practices, but they do manage to get their hands on some incredibly talented people who have done some really good work over the years.
Ouch. Good point. Even The Last Jedi trainwreck (RT 44% audience score, record $150M drop after first weekend) STILL made the top 20 all-time grossing films (ignoring inflation).
But nerdy stuff is cool, remakes are cool, rebels are cool...it's got fundamentally popular qualities. Put that into a good marketing engine, check the boxes and you've got a money maker.
Bear in mind that over 20 years, a lot of what was groundbreaking in terms of animation quality has become mainstream, so it's not surprising that people wouldn't be as floored by Toy Story 4 as they were by Toy Story. Anime was a relatively new phenomenon for many in the West back then as well - Cowboy Bebop was one of the "gateway drugs" into anime for a lot of people.
I wouldn't assume that work of high quality is no longer being done - I've heard people talk about Your Name as if Makoto Shinkai were the next Hayao Miyazaki for instance - it just doesn't stand out in a crowd the way it once did, now that anime is no longer as niche and people have services like Crunchyroll.
Princes Mononoke is actually my favorite movie, I obviously agree that it's really excellent, but objectively I think Spider-Verse is just as good, even if it doesn't fit my preferences quite as much.
For TV series, Mob Psycho 100 is absolutely top tier, I'd put it against Cowboy Bebop easily. Loved Bebop, but I think MP100 is the better series overall, both for story and animation quality.
This is a combination of rose-tinted glasses, plus things accumulating social value over time. Eminem didn't rap about playing N64 games until long, long past the N64's heydey; it wasn't cool to mention that back in 1998. Pokemon is mainstream with adults now, but it was for real (young) nerds and dorks back when it started. Retro games are currently cool with those who scoffed at them when they were new. This phenomenon is especially prevalent with 'cult hits', like Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, which has a much more positive reputation now than it did at its own launch.
- rushed the films out
- lacked singular vision to keep them consistent
- subverted audience expectations in a bad way, re Luke Skywalker
- retread too much of the same old ground leading to inability to generate momentum (ie. killing off characters in Rogue One).
0 - https://redef.com/original/star-wars-fatigue-is-a-myth-but-d...
The contrast to this is stark after having watched "Imagineering" on Disney+ the other night. It reminded me about why I was a rabid Disney fan growing up - the values that Walt insisted on and why these days I'm more "meh"; what they have evolved into the longer Walt hasn't been around to keep people grounded on what really matters.
It's pretty sad you can go from a company where employees invested their own money to keep construction of Disneyland going to the exploitative mess of a company that exists today :(
Until the last 100 years or so it’s been the case that a given culture’s stories — folklores, mythologies, and religions — were in the public domain. And while they were at times subject to tight control, e.g., non-vernacular liturgies, they were more typically “owned” by everyone.
I don’t mean this as a criticism of copyright. I support copyright and how it incentivizes cultural creation. But I wonder about whether there’s space for more stories we all own, that can be interpreted by everyone, and, most importantly, that create the same powerful feelings of attachment Disney is so good at creating.
Copyright doesn't stop people from making movies about folk tales. The cost of making a movie and the generally low returns do.
Phantom of the Opera the musical has made $6 billion, blowing Avengers out of the water. Wicked the musical has grossed $3 billion, more than any movie ever made. Same for Mamma Mia!.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) made $600 million in the first 72-hours, far more than any movie ever. League of Legends makes $1.4 billion a year, again more than any movie ever made. Fortnite makes $2.4 billion.
In the UK, more people watched The X Factor than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The book Diary of a Wimpy Kid sold over a million copies in its latest installment.
Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.
Really? What cultural affinity is there for Avengers? For Force Awakens?
I would argue movies have built an establishment of critics around itself, the disclosure surrounding it does appear to be more sophisticated and intellectual. But that doesn't mean the it is shaping the audience's perception the same way.
The Avengers is a part of a comic franchise that is almost 50 years old, and Star Wars basically invented the science fiction movie blockbuster over 40 years ago. Both have been deeply influential on generations of people and on the way their respective genres have been portrayed in all media.
To question whether there is cultural affinity for either is to fundamentally misunderstand modern Western pop culture, because these properties are more influential to it than the Bible and Shakespeare.
> Phantom of the Opera the musical has made $6 billion, blowing Avengers out of the water. Wicked the musical has grossed $3 billion, more than any movie ever made. Same for Mamma Mia!.
> In the UK, more people watched The X Factor than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The book Diary of a Wimpy Kid sold over a million copies in its latest installment.
> Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.
The first metric you mention is not the right one for discussing cultural impact. You'd want to compare number of tickets sold for Phantom of the Opera to number of tickets sold for Avengers: Endgame.
Weirdly, you go on to make the correct comparison for The X Factor.
I'm not convinced that popular video games haven't made their way into the conversations about cultural significance.
Yes, Disney is dominating Hollywood like no one had done before.
But Hollywood itself is as irrelevant as it has never been. It no longer dominates the world's attention, and the audience's choices are more abundant than ever.
Which is why incumbents tend to welcome onerous regulations once they are big enough to deal with them. It locks the young upstarts from coming up behind them and potentially overtaking them.
Amazon wasn't for having to collect state sales tax until they figured it out. Facebook didn't start talking about regulation being a good thing until they were big enough to easily absorb the impact.
Whats even better - you get to blame the regulations as the gatekeeper, not your own sleazy behavior.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
What Disney understands is the brand management. Disney brands are valuable because they are familiar, consistent and safe choices. Disney is the stable food producer in the entertainment business.
Using Scorsese's non-cinema as a label for what Disney does not necessarily bad. First 3 star Wars Movies were cinema. People were surprised, exited and blown away. You can't replicate that again and again. Now Star Wars is just Star Wars. People want stable diet of Star Wars that is just like they remember it with minor variations. It's watered down, but very familiar. They keep all the 'best bits' people like. "I have bad feeling about this", "something something dark side".
I think it's somewhat absurd too, but part of the point being made in the conversation around this article is that Disney isn't taking risks or making decisions based on creative output -- they're very, very aggressively following market trends. Their first Star Wars release was one of their highest grossing films in something like a decade, but one bad showing from Solo and suddenly Disney is cutting back on yearly releases.
They want movies that are safe and predictable. They want to know before they even start production not just that the film will break even, but that it will make a LOT of money. Clearly based on their own statements, they don't feel that confident about a yearly Star Wars release.
They made two non trilogy movies. Rogue One was highly rated by both critics and the audience - Solo not so much.
Disney has different expectations. If anything, the fact that Disney can look past three high-grossing films and only see the one flop is strong evidence for what people are talking about here. Disney is risk averse, and they look at a 75% success rate as risky.