Full disclosure, I own a significant share of Disney, not significant in the sense from the perspective of the company, but significant from the perspective of my portfolio. Against the advice of my broker I own Disney and Microsoft as individual stocks while the rest is indexed.
I love Disney, we go once a year to a disney property and I love their animation and stories. While I am neither here nor there about Marvel and have not seen a single Marvel movie, I also live Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I have been on stage at the Indiana Jones special effects show thanks to my kids volunteering me.
I also consider myself to the politically left of center.
So when I say this, it is from a position of love and real financial commitment to Disney.
Disney needs to get the hell out of identity politics. They need to return to great story telling not look for ways/excuses to inject diversity at the expense of story. Tarzan did not need a gay ape. Treasure Planet did not need a Chineese character and Mulan did not need white characters or a hero who had no journey.
This last point I find very frustrating. For some reason, Disney has seemingly abandoned the hero's journey as a plot element for many of its newer releases. Failings are what makes characters relatable and I feel Disney has lost sight of that.
All this ti say, Disney just does not seem to tell good stories any more.
Disney is infamous as an entity that takes already-existing media and makes "new" copyright-protected "instances" of that pre-existing media.
Examples: Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella. The Disney version of 'Alice' is a very weird hodge-podge of both the 'Alice' books with extra stuff thrown in. Throw in a few mouse-footmen and the story is sufficiently different from the traditional Cinderella.
Being 'sufficiently different', these Disney derivatives are copyrightable as separate works, whereas a work faithful to the originals might not be.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 25.4 ms ] threadI love Disney, we go once a year to a disney property and I love their animation and stories. While I am neither here nor there about Marvel and have not seen a single Marvel movie, I also live Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I have been on stage at the Indiana Jones special effects show thanks to my kids volunteering me.
I also consider myself to the politically left of center.
So when I say this, it is from a position of love and real financial commitment to Disney.
Disney needs to get the hell out of identity politics. They need to return to great story telling not look for ways/excuses to inject diversity at the expense of story. Tarzan did not need a gay ape. Treasure Planet did not need a Chineese character and Mulan did not need white characters or a hero who had no journey.
This last point I find very frustrating. For some reason, Disney has seemingly abandoned the hero's journey as a plot element for many of its newer releases. Failings are what makes characters relatable and I feel Disney has lost sight of that.
All this ti say, Disney just does not seem to tell good stories any more.
Examples: Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella. The Disney version of 'Alice' is a very weird hodge-podge of both the 'Alice' books with extra stuff thrown in. Throw in a few mouse-footmen and the story is sufficiently different from the traditional Cinderella.
Being 'sufficiently different', these Disney derivatives are copyrightable as separate works, whereas a work faithful to the originals might not be.