DISNEYFICATION: WILL DISNEY RULE THE ENTIRE MOVIES INDUSTRY?
How many of your favorite shows or franchises are now conquered by Disney? From being Hollywood’s most profitable company, Disney just got bigger and unstoppable. After Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars the mouse has now acquired 21st Century Fox and dominating the entertainment industry : For better or worse?
The development of mighty Disney Empire
It has been 94 years since “Disney” was founded and since then the house of mouse has been slowly building their empire in the entertainment sector. The late 19th century and the early 20th century has had a busy timeline in terms of Disney’s mergers and acquisitions, with no further plans to slow down. By acquiring few of the major and most of our favorite franchises like American Broadcasting Companies, Pixar Animation Studios, Marvel Entertainment and Lucasfilm, Disney stepped onto officially acquiring 21st Century Fox on March 20, 2019.
Disney has gone far beyond its objective of satisfying the needs of its stakeholders and building a brand that leads in the family entertainment industry. The kind of moves and takeovers by “Disney” has been creating a lot of concern on how these large scale acquisitions will impact on the media industry as a whole.
An article by HN Entertainment highlights many people being concerned of Disney’s frightening monopoly, consumer’s ability to make choices or how their preferred shows will turn after moving into another production company. Thus, it is necessary to look back at The Walt Disney Company’s history and its growth to understand the effect it had created, which might help us predict what it would look like if the company continues on the same root of market domination.
- In 1923, the Disney Brothers Studio began by creating animated characters and films. This studio was the foundation of the Disney Company and was established by Walter and Roy Disney.
- Steamboat Willie which was an animated film released in November 1928, introduced the world to Mickey and Minnie Mouse soon followed by Pluto, Goofy, Donald Duck, and rest of the Disney created cartoon gang which essentially established Disney’s image.
- In 1937, the Disney Company stepped into creating the first full length animated film ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ which became the only animated film to top the list of 100 greatest American Films of all time. Soon later, in 1940, first stock was issued followed by opening of Disneyland, the first Disney theme park in July, 1955.
Disney’s image has been built by the cartoon, Micky and Minnie Mouse created in 1928 that kept growing bigger and bigger and gave majority of Disney’s branding, making Disney the most powerful in entertainment and economy sector. There are many debates which leads towards one question is till what extent, if any, this will affect the consumers and the industry. Though Disney’s future is unpredictable as the company is running in the race of focusing on the good product. Fan reviews, scores, box office sales are few ways which help to measure the good and bad in the entertainment industry. These ways have measured and made it hard to argue further as many studios and franchises have changed and got worst after Disney’s acquisition.
After Disney’s rapid expansion it is now hard to look for a different style once all of the Western media is running under one company which is basically a part and process of ‘Disneyfication’. This so called process seems to dominate the world of entertainment by reducing artistic quality. In an interview with Dr. Liam Burke who has been working around writing books on superheroes and has received Dean’s Award for emerging researcher shared his views on Disneyficaton. Liam believes, “Disneyfication will have a large scale impact on what movies, TV shows we consume”. Liam further continued on how people are concerned as, “when Disney buys a company like Lucasfilm responsible for Star Wars, Marvel responsible for many superheroes, where now everything will be made Disneyfied”.
An example of Disney sacrificing art for entertainment is the Disney-Fox merger which will impact Marvel. Disney acquiring Marvel and now Fox has caused negative consequences for example, as per the article written by Kayleigh Donaldson explained the bad effects of the Disney-fox deal which will lower the Disney releases in 2019 as to avoid clashes and compete with themselves. Dr. Burke further shares his views on the impacts of Disney on the entertainment industry which can be viewed in the video below.
A Fever of Superhero and Comics-based Movies
One of the most considerable concerns of Disneyfication’s impacts on the movie industry is the increasing trend of homogenized motif in comic-based films. The success of Marvel’s superhero movies invested by Disney have shaped the audience’s preference, urging production houses to predict what their audiences want to see and fulfill that need by making relentlessly similar films. This led to the low quality of films due to the poorly executed production and scriptwriting.
One prominent example would be Warner Bros’s Suicide Squad which was released in August 2016. It all started from the unexpected failure of “Batman versus Superman: Dawn of Justice” (BvS), a blockbuster that was previously on screen in March. While Disney’s comics-based film: The Guardian of the Galaxy has gained popularity with its fun and colorful tone in characters and catchy song choices, Warner’s BvS has received mass criticism on the darkness tone of the film which rapidly grew anxiety of Warner’s executives that Suicide Squad might follow the same path. Warner, therefore, tried to enforce more comedy and edgy tones which were promised in the pop music-heavy and upbeat trailer of the film by bringing Trailer Park, the company that had made the teaser, into the production process. Director David Ayer finally produced a mixed cut between his original dark vision and additional happier and brighter scenes, which resulted in a fairly nonsensical story.
In terms of profitability, Suicide Squad was still among the major box office successes in 2016, grossing 325 million USD in the US market. But it failed to impress the audience which is evident by the low score on multiple review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes. All in all, Suicide Squad was a bad movie which is even admitted by its own director David Ayer.
“Wish I had a time machine. I’d make Joker a main villain and engineer a more grounded story” — said David Ayer.
Universal is another big studio which was trying to replicate formula of Disney Marvel’s Avengers success by developing its own cinematic universe with spin-off versions of classic movie monsters such as Frankenstein or The Wolfman. The first film of this project, The Mummy, which was released in 2017 with the promise of bringing to the audience a new perception towards its classic monsters received a huge wave of negative responses. The effort of approaching new millenniums by a contemporary plot mixed between horror, action and fantasy has resulted in an awkward movie with weak and disjointed story and consequently a low gross domestically with $80 million.
Overall, the popularity of Disney Marvel’ films has tempted other studios to figure out the way to gain the same success by following Disney’s method. While this trend has benefited the movie industry with impressive grosses, the increasing creation of weak production movies has damaged the quality of movie industry as the whole in the audience’s perspective.
The “average-ness” of plot that affect creative decision
The Disney’s huge success in producing sequel and adaptation movies created another effect in Hollywood: instead of making edgier films which cannot guarantee box office ticket sale, the studios now are trying to mitigate that risk by producing fewer and safer movies. They mainly rely on sequels, reboots, and spin-off which, as a result, will be bland, uninspired and unoriginal. For critics, it could be said that they are the average products of Hollywood’s movies factory which can no longer consistently value artistic creativity over profits. It was evident by the fact that the largest box office sale of the last decade has been movies which were based on fantasy and superhero franchises including Marvel Cinematic Universe: Captain Marvel Captain America, Iron Man and Avengers, or DC Extended Universe: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman. None of them were the original ideas which were able to deliver rich creative stories. They simply offered nothing more than the sensory stimulation and excitement of characters wearing hero customs, action sequences and sound effects.
This circumstance also amplifies the difficulties of small-sized studios in being able to produce lucrative art movies without adaptation of comics-based or superhero phenomenon. While movies industry has shifted from a monopoly to a more competitive industry where entertainment companies need to keep figuring out how to give the audiences exactly what they want, no investors want to put their money in making prestige films that help them to gain nothing more than those academic awards.
Disney itself, somehow, found it hard to stand out of the “umbrella” of superhero content that it already created upon the industry. That umbrella binds creativity to profitability and competiveness, which put the Mickey Mouse-Marvel sequel in an endless race with its primary competitor — DC of Warner Bros. In order to remain its position in the superhero market, Disney seemed to have no choice but to keep making those films, like it did with the Captain America: Civil Wars (the battle between Iron Man and Captain America) which was, partly, inspired by the release of Batman versus Superman by Warner Bros.
After all, in the short run, smaller studios, who are not named Disney, could be losing out from the entire movie ecosystem when the majority of cinemas, screens and viewers only fancy those Marvel, Lucasfilm or Pixar blockbusters despite of the “averageness” in story plot of those movies. The reason might be very simple.
The audiences nowadays spend money on seeing what they recognize — actors, stories, superheroes fighting villains. The marketplace then rewards each new superhero movie with a reflexive paroxysm of spending. It’s an entertainment factory in which the audience is both consumer and product. Its purpose is not just to please consumers but to condition and create them.
With the recent success of “Captain Marvel” grossing $US1 billion worldwide and “Black Panther” being nominated for the Oscar 2019’s best pictures, it is so obvious that superheroes are dominating the movies industry in which whenever Marvel or Warner Bros leak out a piece of news about their incoming films, it will drag in a huge amount of discussion all over the place. And after 11 years with 21 movies released, the Marvel Cinematic Universe which will mark its turning point in the new-released film “Avengers: Endgame” has experience enormous success in movies franchise market with over $US18 billion.
Critics might say those are just average product of a commercialized industry, but it turns out that a lot of audiences are just fine with the “fineness”, and Disney-Marvel still remain as the biggest movies studio in the world.
“Yes, Disney model does bring the certain amount of uniformity. I think there would be a lot of anxiety… when 6 big conglomerates now become 5 conglomerates. But we have to wait and see how that’s place out” — said Dr Liam Burke.
