The Circle of Strife

Why Mufasa is a Mistake

It looks like Sonic 3 might perform better at the box office than Mufasa, prompting the best Deadline thumbnail ever.

Which is more appealing? Tough choice.

Independent of the relative merits of the films (neither of which have I seen), there’s an issue of timing.

The Past is a Different Country

It’s been five years (and one plague) since the Lion King remake made $1.6 Billion dollars. Cinema-going habits have certainly changed. But more importantly, the original target audience has outgrown any interest in talking lions.

When I pitched a show to Nickelodeon a few years ago, I learned that they have a general rule of running kids shows for only three seasons. There were some exceptions,¹ but three years was the limit for everything from the initial run of Rugrats to the original Avatar. The reason is simple—children grow up.

Now, Disney is releasing Mufasa five years after the hit remake. Five years is a long time for a kid—imagine taking an 8 year old to a movie and a 13 year old to its sequel. Or a 12 year old and then a 17 year old. They’re just not interested in the same kinds of things.

Shrinking Families

This used to matter less, when families were larger. As I mentioned in a recent video essay, I was the youngest of five kids. When we went out for a family movie night, even if my older sisters had aged out of the target demo, I was just getting into it. Children’s entertainment could count on appealing to the same family for a a decade or more.

But now, families are shrinking. Here’s Business Insider talking about “The coming reign of the only child”—

Back in 1978, the National Council on Family Relations published a paper titled "The One-Child Family: A New Life-Style," as if it were introducing a strange countercultural phenomenon. At the time, about 11% of American families had just one kid. By 2015, that number had doubled, to 22%. Big families, meanwhile, have become as rare as only children once were. In the early 1980s, 28% of women had four or more kids. Thirty years later, it was just 10%. Families with one child may be the least-desired outcome when Americans envision their dream lives, but in reality they're the fastest-growing family configuration in the country.

And slightly older, but still illustrative, Pew Research data—

Family Size Among Mothers

So now, the Disney films meant to cash in on childhood nostalgia have a much narrower window of time to appeal to Gen X and Millennial parents. In The Timing is All Wrong for The Little Mermaid, I said:

The thing about these Disney Live Action remakes is, the originals were made for children, before the adolescent window. The average age for an American to have their first child is 27. so 25 to 30 years is just about perfect timing for nostalgia. It means your child watching the remake will be approximately the same age you were when you watched the original.

Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin were remade 26 and 27 years after their respective originals, almost exactly the perfect time. The Lion King was 25 years old when it was remade, which is probably close enough.

The Little Mermaid was remade 34 years later. which means if you saw the animated film when you were 9, your firstborn would likely be 16, and far less interested in a Disney fairy tale.

Compare Disney’s strategy with that of Paramount,² who made three Sonic movies in five years. Eventually, older kids will tire of his antics, and younger kids will be interested in something else.

At the end of this holiday season, I’m willing to bet the three Sonics will have made more money and cost less to produce than the two Lions King.

Again, none of the has anything to do with the artistic value of any of these films. I’m only talking about the business strategy.

Who knows? Maybe Mufasa has more going for it than nostalgia, and it’ll catch the public’s attention. And maybe Sonic 3 will win an Oscar. What do you think?

1. The biggest exception, of course, is SpongeBob SquarePants, which ran for fourteen seasons. That’s because it’s audience was just as much college stoners and hyperactive kids. 2000s kids would grow out of the silliness, then re-discover the adult humor when they came of age.

2. Not coincidentally, the parent company of Nickelodeon.