Good piece, I also find myself hellishly confused by the overlap between Hulu and Disney+.
I think there is a huge, hidden engines driving a lot of these developments though, which is:
Risk Management.
The upper strata, C-Suite in particular, at most studios, and especially at Disney, is no longer populated by executives that worked their way up either through studio development or through filmmaking physical production. Studios are now mostly run by an entirely separate class of business school trained executives who want to run their studios as traditional corporate businesses.
And movie studios just…don’t work that way. The way they generate revenue is different. The way they deploy capital is different. Their obligations to shareholders are different.
The biggest driver of the issue is that film — any art — is predicated on risk. Creative risk. But traditional business theory wants to eliminate risk. The only way to even try to do that in film is to keep making things that are or are connected to “proven quantities” — aka IP stuff. Which isn’t inherently bad — some IP films are great — but there’s only so long you can do it before you’ve glutted the market. And you also always have to keep doing bigger and better and more star studded versions to pull people back in — so costs spiral out of control.
It also reads on paper to executives as “safer,” to basically make things by committee, sanding off all the rough edges of a singular creative vision in favor of “best practices.” But not only is that approach timid — and leads to the wishy-washiness around cultural issues — it’s also extremely inefficient. Disney could make a lot of their projects for a cool hundred million or so cheaper if they just trusted their directors to cook for them, but they fiddle with everything in post production for so long that the costs go out of control. And then the thing naturally ends up being bad and flopping, and the only way to patch that huge financial hole…is to double down on another IP “sure bet”. So, what you need most of all in this situation…is to hold all the IP you can, because that’s your only safety net.
And thus you have all the acquisitions that have both furthered Disney’s financial issues, diluted its brand, and become a major headache for them because they’re realizing you really can’t please anyone with this nostalgia stuff for long.
The irony is, protecting your brand is usually a safe play. So they're playing it safe where they should be taking risks, AND taking risks where they ought to play it safe. Just bad decisions all around.
Yeah, I think it rises out of a disconnect between what you and I think of as "Protecting a brand" and what they think that means. Because (at least I think based on your piece) that the way we think of "protecting a brand" involves just as much, if not more, deciding what a brand is NOT, as deciding what it IS.
Like you point out, all the big studios/streamers are stuck on this vision of being "The Everything Platform," and so they're only interested in add, add, add -- rather than making difficult and -- crucially -- fundamentally instinct and feel driven decisions to prune deadwood and reject possibly profitable opportunities for the sake of a narrower and better-defined brand identity.
I think this contradicts the theory in the OP that the issue is 'risk management'. Was not having a plan for the Star Wars sequels risk management? When the Disney live action remakes were pretty much just that, by-the-numbers remakes, they printed money. Now that they let them go off in very different directions, they are both worse as movies and make no money. That doesn't sound like bean-counting risk management to me.
"traditional business theory wants to eliminate risk" is exactly it. Get a committee of non-creative people together and task them to produce something, and you're guaranteed to come out with a safe, boring product, AS THEY SEE IT. And being uncreative, what they think of as "safe" will be "whatever's worked before."
Absolute, top tier comment! What's continued to hurt is that 1) they made a colossal mistake in trusting JJ Abrams to over see the new Star Wars films and NOT make sure he had anything even close to an idea of a plan about what would happen in the 3 films, 2) The MCU has had a terrible time putting out quality product since Endgame, especially on the TV side - far too much, yet most seems both too long AND missing at least 2-3 episodes, 3)The Marvel films have had little to no connective tissue, not even the hints of something happening, which is their own fault, because of what they built with Thanos. 4) The App UI is shitty - it is too much, in your face, and is trying to be all things to all people all the time. It's not as bad as MAX (THE WORST) or Apple (also not good by a big stretch), but just sucks, because there's just too much stuff.
Ultimately both your, and @Matt Price's theses are correct. Disney has severely diluted their brand because they've attached the DISNEY name to too much, what they've taken chances on has too often been poorly planned, and a lot of what they've played it "safe" on has ALSO been poorly planned/managed. All of it means Disney is just another studio doing too much, in charge of too many things, begging for someone to come along and break it up in a few years and make it for again.
My teens have mentioned this to me all on their own and they’re a bit disgusted by it when surfing D+ with their little siblings. It’s a major turn-off. What’s disappointing, I realized as I read your article, is how much of this could have been prevented if Disney took the moral of so many of its own stories.
“Be yourself” may lend itself to woke messaging, but it’s hardly new, reaching back at least as far as Shakespeare. Why do they yield to peer pressure?
“Because when everyone’s super, no one will be.” Syndrome’s line in The Incredibles popped into my head near the end of the article. Why does Disney want to be everything?
Last but not least, my mind went to Ratatouille, whose diminutive chef — I mean the pencil-mustached human, not the rodent — was pimping out his old friend’s name to hock cheap garbage for a quick buck.
There's no way to jump to and from footnotes, so I would have to scroll all the way down and then back up to a point somewhere in the middle of the piece. It's easier to just read them at the end and try to remember their context.
So, footnotes work on the website and (I'm told) on the iOS app. It's only us Android users who are left out, which is frustrating. Substack needs to fix that.
Superb article, very enjoyable. The “is this Disney???” Effect came to me back in the late 80’s with Touchstone, when I lived in LA and it was surprising to see what was under the umbrella, but not connected to the name.
Wasn’t part of the Disney brand not just family friendly but inane? “Bernie the Love Bug”, “That Darn Cat”, “George of the Jungle”.
The other thing which is striking is that while they have quite a few Princess movies (14?), they don’t have a single memorable named “Prince” movie (Lion King: call the movie Simba). In fact the only three movies I can recall focused on a named male Hero are Tarzan, Hercules, and Aladdin.
I might say Aladdin has become a Disney name, but neither Tarzan nor Hercules is. Far from it. I can hardly imagine Tarzan or Hercules wandering around Disneyland unless it was Gay Days.
Warm handsome funny dads are gone (Fred MacMurray), males are almost entirely secondary or hapless (The Incredibles, Honey Shrunk the Kids).
It shows a pretty huge dad gap in the market, not filled by “The Rock” - males not visibly on steroids (even Little Mermaid’s Triton and The Incredibles - roided) who have heroic relationships.
Perhaps that’s part of the brand failure. It’s really just preteen and teen girl films now, nothing more, with an Aladdin every 20 years or so.
I worked at 20th Century Fox, and was the creative lead for the studio on the Aliens: Descent VR experience your last photo is from.
It's been interesting to see how the acquisition has played out, and has in some ways bungled both brands. I have a lot of fondness for the IP Disney acquired from 20th, but it's been frustrating as a fan to see it take a back seat to other properties Disney seems to think will sell more Disney+ subscriptions.
Totally unrelated, but your "Calvinball" shirt is super cool. I had to explain Calvinball to my wife yesterday because she didn't believe it was a thing, and it's really funny that I'm seeing the term again today after not having thought about that term in years. Thanks for writing!
Some people reprimand me, because Bill Watterson never licensed C&H, but I argue that shirt would be allowed under fair use (parody) whether he sold branded shirts or not.
Among my people (Nerds) Disney has become known as the place good IP goes to die. I don’t think it’s the wokeness as much as the sloppiness that drives people away.
The last two Disney properties I really enjoyed were She-Hulk, Attorney and Andor, both very much their own weird things that didn’t feel like they’d come from the generic Disney productions.
It's not too late to save it, but a string of 4 great movies won't fix it the way that run in the '90s did, like you mentioned. We're no longer living in a monoculture, and precisely due to the fact that they've diluted their brand so much through acquisitions, remakes, and positioning within their platforms, it's getting harder and harder to discern what "new" Disney content actually looks like.
I think it's a colossal fuck up, and when we will look back on this era of time, much of what you've pointed out here will still ring true.
It is utterly bizarre to see Nightbitch splashed across the top of Disney+. The integration should have been handled much, much differently.
I think the answer is fairly simple: Disney+ did an extraordinary launch back in 2019, amassing 25M US subscribers in its first month or so but after that, it just went basically flat. It's easy to understand: Disney is the only brand that you know straight away if it's for you or not. Families and Disney fans subscribed straight away and Disney thought they could maintain that growth but they probably realized fairly soon that, because of its unique place in the culture, you don't attract 10 times more subs if you release 10 times more Disney or Pixar or Star Wars programs. People with 0 interest in the Disney family-safe brand would never be subbed and that's a big part of the US/world market. So they did the only thing they could to maintain a semblance of growth: stray away from the Disney brand that is in the end the biggest niche there is in streaming. First by adding a bundle with Hulu and ESPN then by integrate directly the programs inside Disney+ in the hope of having people beyond the Disney brand try and sample some of the Disney programs. The Disney brand has always been hailed as the biggest brand in the world but it's a golden cage, especially in streaming when you need your Total Adressable Market to be as big as possible.
“So why does the Disney+ landing page have the xenomorph looming over Mickey Mouse’s Funhouse?”
Posting screenshots of the title screens for Aliens and other “non-Disney” type content is a little deceptive. If you have a profile set to TV-14, Aliens, Nightbitch, and other TV-MA content does not even show up in the search. While Alien may be on the same page as Mickey on an adult account, setting parental restrictions prevents that from occurring with a child account.
The parental controls are opt-in, so these screenshots show up on the service by default. Despite having little children I never bothered turning on the parental controls bc I never imagined Disney would put this stuff on their front page. I’m not enraged about it—if I were, I’d just turn on parental controls—but it is odd that this is the default presentation they’re putting in front of their customers.
Maybe the odd mix is the result of no other country having Hulu, so we all got the full Fox catalogue on Disney+ from the get go. Disney saw that we didn't object and figured it wasn't worth the effort of separating just for the US.
Great article. In international markets, where Hulu does not exist, Disney has been combining FX/more mature content with its traditional Disney family content on the streaming service for much longer (since the launch of Disney+). I imagine they think they have a more sophisticated brand hierarchy, where the “Disney+” brand stands for something different, and broader, than the “Disney” brand itself. The challenge of course is that they both contain the same word, and so in many consumers’ minds can be understandably conflated.
Good piece, I also find myself hellishly confused by the overlap between Hulu and Disney+.
I think there is a huge, hidden engines driving a lot of these developments though, which is:
Risk Management.
The upper strata, C-Suite in particular, at most studios, and especially at Disney, is no longer populated by executives that worked their way up either through studio development or through filmmaking physical production. Studios are now mostly run by an entirely separate class of business school trained executives who want to run their studios as traditional corporate businesses.
And movie studios just…don’t work that way. The way they generate revenue is different. The way they deploy capital is different. Their obligations to shareholders are different.
The biggest driver of the issue is that film — any art — is predicated on risk. Creative risk. But traditional business theory wants to eliminate risk. The only way to even try to do that in film is to keep making things that are or are connected to “proven quantities” — aka IP stuff. Which isn’t inherently bad — some IP films are great — but there’s only so long you can do it before you’ve glutted the market. And you also always have to keep doing bigger and better and more star studded versions to pull people back in — so costs spiral out of control.
It also reads on paper to executives as “safer,” to basically make things by committee, sanding off all the rough edges of a singular creative vision in favor of “best practices.” But not only is that approach timid — and leads to the wishy-washiness around cultural issues — it’s also extremely inefficient. Disney could make a lot of their projects for a cool hundred million or so cheaper if they just trusted their directors to cook for them, but they fiddle with everything in post production for so long that the costs go out of control. And then the thing naturally ends up being bad and flopping, and the only way to patch that huge financial hole…is to double down on another IP “sure bet”. So, what you need most of all in this situation…is to hold all the IP you can, because that’s your only safety net.
And thus you have all the acquisitions that have both furthered Disney’s financial issues, diluted its brand, and become a major headache for them because they’re realizing you really can’t please anyone with this nostalgia stuff for long.
The irony is, protecting your brand is usually a safe play. So they're playing it safe where they should be taking risks, AND taking risks where they ought to play it safe. Just bad decisions all around.
Yeah, I think it rises out of a disconnect between what you and I think of as "Protecting a brand" and what they think that means. Because (at least I think based on your piece) that the way we think of "protecting a brand" involves just as much, if not more, deciding what a brand is NOT, as deciding what it IS.
Like you point out, all the big studios/streamers are stuck on this vision of being "The Everything Platform," and so they're only interested in add, add, add -- rather than making difficult and -- crucially -- fundamentally instinct and feel driven decisions to prune deadwood and reject possibly profitable opportunities for the sake of a narrower and better-defined brand identity.
I think this contradicts the theory in the OP that the issue is 'risk management'. Was not having a plan for the Star Wars sequels risk management? When the Disney live action remakes were pretty much just that, by-the-numbers remakes, they printed money. Now that they let them go off in very different directions, they are both worse as movies and make no money. That doesn't sound like bean-counting risk management to me.
Very well said.
"traditional business theory wants to eliminate risk" is exactly it. Get a committee of non-creative people together and task them to produce something, and you're guaranteed to come out with a safe, boring product, AS THEY SEE IT. And being uncreative, what they think of as "safe" will be "whatever's worked before."
Absolute, top tier comment! What's continued to hurt is that 1) they made a colossal mistake in trusting JJ Abrams to over see the new Star Wars films and NOT make sure he had anything even close to an idea of a plan about what would happen in the 3 films, 2) The MCU has had a terrible time putting out quality product since Endgame, especially on the TV side - far too much, yet most seems both too long AND missing at least 2-3 episodes, 3)The Marvel films have had little to no connective tissue, not even the hints of something happening, which is their own fault, because of what they built with Thanos. 4) The App UI is shitty - it is too much, in your face, and is trying to be all things to all people all the time. It's not as bad as MAX (THE WORST) or Apple (also not good by a big stretch), but just sucks, because there's just too much stuff.
Ultimately both your, and @Matt Price's theses are correct. Disney has severely diluted their brand because they've attached the DISNEY name to too much, what they've taken chances on has too often been poorly planned, and a lot of what they've played it "safe" on has ALSO been poorly planned/managed. All of it means Disney is just another studio doing too much, in charge of too many things, begging for someone to come along and break it up in a few years and make it for again.
Re l err r ty k k e
Great article, very insightful. Thanks.
My teens have mentioned this to me all on their own and they’re a bit disgusted by it when surfing D+ with their little siblings. It’s a major turn-off. What’s disappointing, I realized as I read your article, is how much of this could have been prevented if Disney took the moral of so many of its own stories.
“Be yourself” may lend itself to woke messaging, but it’s hardly new, reaching back at least as far as Shakespeare. Why do they yield to peer pressure?
“Because when everyone’s super, no one will be.” Syndrome’s line in The Incredibles popped into my head near the end of the article. Why does Disney want to be everything?
Last but not least, my mind went to Ratatouille, whose diminutive chef — I mean the pencil-mustached human, not the rodent — was pimping out his old friend’s name to hock cheap garbage for a quick buck.
Perhaps Disney needs to watch more Disney.
Dang, that’s a decent argument. I appreciated that comment.
I think they should have stuck with Touchstone. Totally agree with you that Disney is killing its own brand- sad.
There's no way to jump to and from footnotes, so I would have to scroll all the way down and then back up to a point somewhere in the middle of the piece. It's easier to just read them at the end and try to remember their context.
So, footnotes work on the website and (I'm told) on the iOS app. It's only us Android users who are left out, which is frustrating. Substack needs to fix that.
Literally Just a Lady: Cover the children’s eyes
Nightmare-inducing Xenomorph that they wouldn’t even really show us in the first movie: hire her for their next birthday party
Superb article, very enjoyable. The “is this Disney???” Effect came to me back in the late 80’s with Touchstone, when I lived in LA and it was surprising to see what was under the umbrella, but not connected to the name.
Wasn’t part of the Disney brand not just family friendly but inane? “Bernie the Love Bug”, “That Darn Cat”, “George of the Jungle”.
The other thing which is striking is that while they have quite a few Princess movies (14?), they don’t have a single memorable named “Prince” movie (Lion King: call the movie Simba). In fact the only three movies I can recall focused on a named male Hero are Tarzan, Hercules, and Aladdin.
I might say Aladdin has become a Disney name, but neither Tarzan nor Hercules is. Far from it. I can hardly imagine Tarzan or Hercules wandering around Disneyland unless it was Gay Days.
Warm handsome funny dads are gone (Fred MacMurray), males are almost entirely secondary or hapless (The Incredibles, Honey Shrunk the Kids).
It shows a pretty huge dad gap in the market, not filled by “The Rock” - males not visibly on steroids (even Little Mermaid’s Triton and The Incredibles - roided) who have heroic relationships.
Perhaps that’s part of the brand failure. It’s really just preteen and teen girl films now, nothing more, with an Aladdin every 20 years or so.
Great read!
Interesting article.
I worked at 20th Century Fox, and was the creative lead for the studio on the Aliens: Descent VR experience your last photo is from.
It's been interesting to see how the acquisition has played out, and has in some ways bungled both brands. I have a lot of fondness for the IP Disney acquired from 20th, but it's been frustrating as a fan to see it take a back seat to other properties Disney seems to think will sell more Disney+ subscriptions.
Oh, wow, I loved that game! Probably the best VR thingie I've ever done. Very scary!
One of the first Disney+ ads was latex clad butt of American Horror Story, not to forget the Pamela Anderson biopic a year or so later.
Totally unrelated, but your "Calvinball" shirt is super cool. I had to explain Calvinball to my wife yesterday because she didn't believe it was a thing, and it's really funny that I'm seeing the term again today after not having thought about that term in years. Thanks for writing!
Some people reprimand me, because Bill Watterson never licensed C&H, but I argue that shirt would be allowed under fair use (parody) whether he sold branded shirts or not.
I guess I didn't even think about that. Interesting!
Among my people (Nerds) Disney has become known as the place good IP goes to die. I don’t think it’s the wokeness as much as the sloppiness that drives people away.
The last two Disney properties I really enjoyed were She-Hulk, Attorney and Andor, both very much their own weird things that didn’t feel like they’d come from the generic Disney productions.
It's not too late to save it, but a string of 4 great movies won't fix it the way that run in the '90s did, like you mentioned. We're no longer living in a monoculture, and precisely due to the fact that they've diluted their brand so much through acquisitions, remakes, and positioning within their platforms, it's getting harder and harder to discern what "new" Disney content actually looks like.
I think it's a colossal fuck up, and when we will look back on this era of time, much of what you've pointed out here will still ring true.
It is utterly bizarre to see Nightbitch splashed across the top of Disney+. The integration should have been handled much, much differently.
I think the answer is fairly simple: Disney+ did an extraordinary launch back in 2019, amassing 25M US subscribers in its first month or so but after that, it just went basically flat. It's easy to understand: Disney is the only brand that you know straight away if it's for you or not. Families and Disney fans subscribed straight away and Disney thought they could maintain that growth but they probably realized fairly soon that, because of its unique place in the culture, you don't attract 10 times more subs if you release 10 times more Disney or Pixar or Star Wars programs. People with 0 interest in the Disney family-safe brand would never be subbed and that's a big part of the US/world market. So they did the only thing they could to maintain a semblance of growth: stray away from the Disney brand that is in the end the biggest niche there is in streaming. First by adding a bundle with Hulu and ESPN then by integrate directly the programs inside Disney+ in the hope of having people beyond the Disney brand try and sample some of the Disney programs. The Disney brand has always been hailed as the biggest brand in the world but it's a golden cage, especially in streaming when you need your Total Adressable Market to be as big as possible.
“So why does the Disney+ landing page have the xenomorph looming over Mickey Mouse’s Funhouse?”
Posting screenshots of the title screens for Aliens and other “non-Disney” type content is a little deceptive. If you have a profile set to TV-14, Aliens, Nightbitch, and other TV-MA content does not even show up in the search. While Alien may be on the same page as Mickey on an adult account, setting parental restrictions prevents that from occurring with a child account.
The parental controls are opt-in, so these screenshots show up on the service by default. Despite having little children I never bothered turning on the parental controls bc I never imagined Disney would put this stuff on their front page. I’m not enraged about it—if I were, I’d just turn on parental controls—but it is odd that this is the default presentation they’re putting in front of their customers.
Maybe the odd mix is the result of no other country having Hulu, so we all got the full Fox catalogue on Disney+ from the get go. Disney saw that we didn't object and figured it wasn't worth the effort of separating just for the US.
Great article. In international markets, where Hulu does not exist, Disney has been combining FX/more mature content with its traditional Disney family content on the streaming service for much longer (since the launch of Disney+). I imagine they think they have a more sophisticated brand hierarchy, where the “Disney+” brand stands for something different, and broader, than the “Disney” brand itself. The challenge of course is that they both contain the same word, and so in many consumers’ minds can be understandably conflated.