The Age of Hyper-fans, Part 5: The Little Mermaid, A Comeback of the Comeback: Why Disney is an Asset Manager, too
Nothing evokes community like board games, which are referred to in French as “Jeux de Société”, meaning games you play in “Society” (with other people). But then appeared the enhanced version of board games: Role Playing Games (RPGs).
There were RPGs before video games (Dungeons & Dragons being the most famous), but the acceleration of graphics and gameplay fast-forwarded the adoption of RPGs beyond their initial niches.
RPGs are the perfect universe extension for hyper-fans — they insert the player themselves into a universe they know. Old-fashioned Harry Potter games were traditional spell-casting dexterity games; but none rival the success of the franchise’s latest instalment, Hogwarts Legacy, which sold a staggering 12m copies in its first two weeks, earning its developers $850m. RPGs are the fastest growing game segment, and the genre is projected to reach c.$100bn in sales by 2027.
One person understood RPGs before the internet, and indeed even before the current era of mass entertainment. One of the greatest creative geniuses of all time, Mr. Walt Disney, intuited the power of transporting viewers or readers into universes.
His most absurd and revolutionary creation, Disneyland, is a real-life RPG. In Disney’s design, everything in Disneyland must be perfect — even the Haunted House. The immersion experience must be complete. (Of course, Mr. Disney’s idea of a perfect world was biased towards certain categories of the American population).
The Walt Disney Company also pioneered the physical manifestations of their universes — merchandising! Each year, Disney Inc. rakes in billions from dolls, plush toys, light sabres, and Lion-King blankets (this writer is the proud owner of one).
Disney started off as a media company — it made films and owned the rights to them. Then, interestingly, it tried the “expansion of universes” strategy, by churning out embarrassing sequels to its blockbusters — Cinderella 2 and 3, Mulan 2, Pocahontas 2, to name only a few. They didn’t work out — probably because these stories were not the right universes to capitalise on; because kids grow up and there was too much gap between films; and because they were poorly directed and written. Disney did not invest in making quality content because by then, they saw themselves as a distribution company. And indeed, they were making billions from mainstream TV and Disney Channel.
Disney’s genius move was to remember that it was a content company — by acquiring (1) content (LucasFilm, the company that owns Star Wars, and Marvel), and (2) people who can make content: Pixar.
Then, it went back to its core business — owning content! This is evident in Disney’s revenues from “Licensing and Publishing”, which includes revenues from the extended universes it owns.
Big media is not creation; it is copyright-holding. And Disney is over its difficult years: it makes movie remakes, not even sequels (see: The Little Mermaid in 2023). They were all profitable.
This is not a Disney-only phenomenon. Outside of Europe, the Pokémon Company, based in Japan, makes $1.6bn per year from Pokémon games, books, anime and related content, with a record year in 2022.
Even Barbie, a toy, gets her own story in the 2023 film Barbie — a spectacular evolution of merchandising that even Mr. Walt Disney did not foresee.
No one even bothers to put a number after films’ names anymore. After all, who can count how many times Thor appeared in a Marvel film?
The answer is: it does not matter, because the amount of content that Disney would need to churn out to satisfy fans is infinite.
They want more. And indeed, they are not waiting for Disney to provide: the website fanfiction.net, a platform where fans write their own stories using existing characters and universes, counts 52,000 fanfictions happening in the Avengers’ universe (imagine how many times Tony Stark must die).
A truly sobering and exciting truth is that the mass recording and distribution of audio and video content has not even been around for a century. Bob Dylan, hailed as the Shakespeare of the Twentieth century, wrote 500 songs performed by 2,000 artists. These songs will be covered, re-recorded, and will remain accessible in their original versions for how long as data centres exist. Shakespeare wrote 37 plays — and we are not even sure Shakespeare was a single person. Whether content is remembered does not matter — it is forever recorded, ready for re-discovery, re-creation, re-factoring.
And that is for the mass democratisation of video and audio technologies dating back to the 1950s — the internet hasn’t even been around for thirty years. Besides, this re-discovery process stands to benefit from new channels and media: games will turn to books and films, but also to webtoons (online comics), forum discussions, drawings, etc.
Content, content, content: it comes and goes and accumulates. It is still King.
Disney, and media companies, are very aware of that. As a proper asset manager, they hold on to their strongest asset: the copyright — and this is the topic of Part 6.
[1] The Walt Disney Company’s consumer products and interactive media segment licenses Disney’s characters, trade names, and visual/literary properties to developers, publishers, retailers and manufacturers all around the world. The segment also develops and publishes books and games, distributes merchandise and includes website management.
