Disney at 100: a castle built on magical thinking

Recently, I took my eight-year-old nephew to his first Disney movie. The venue was a London preview of Elemental, the new animation from subsidiary Pixar. In a crowded cinema, the screen filled with the famous logo of the parent company: a vast fairytale castle lit now by magnificent fireworks. De facto anthem “When You Wish Upon a Star” boomed in Dolby Atmos. The words 100 Years of Wonder, marking this year’s corporate centenary, shone in liquid silver. For just a moment, the magic worked. My nephew, a science-minded child from a home without the Disney+ streaming service, said, unprompted: “Wow.”

By that evening, the film was officially a disaster. Released in the US the same weekend, it would deliver the worst American box-office opening in Pixar history: $29.5mn against a budget of $200mn. (My nephew? Non-committal.) It was just the latest bad news in a rolling doom-cloud over Disney headquarters in Burbank, California. Anniversary celebrations are planned until late 2023. But the cheers may be drowned out by gloomy noises off.

Despite the return last November of veteran CEO Bob Iger, box office is down; the share price erratic; Disney+ subscriber numbers have fallen for two quarters running. And all the while, a canonic American brand is cast as the enemy within by Republican governor of Florida and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis.

The sense of an industry titan in crisis makes for seductive drama. But the truth is more prosaic than that — Disney has long been accident-prone — and stranger too, as befits a company made rich monetising children’s emotions.

As with any movie, a lot depends on where you come in. My nephew’s experience of Elemental was prefaced by a brief film montage about Disney’s first century. Images of Fantasia and a young Walt Disney at his sketchbook mingled with Marvel movies, James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water and Harrison Ford as Han Solo. For an eight-year-old, or anyone unversed in entertainment business takeovers, a clear line of descent would lead from the hand that drew Mickey Mouse to the minds behind Star Wars.

Historically, that’s a little broad-brush. In fact, Star Wars and Avatar only went to Disney in 2019, with the acquisition of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox. As well as the pen of Uncle Walt, a true celebration might also show Iger signing the contracts that, even before Fox, gave Disney vast tracts of intellectual property. Pixar was bought in 2006; Marvel Entertainment in 2009; Lucasfilm in 2012. (Disney’s big release this weekend, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, comes from that last buyout.) These were brilliant, far-sighted deals. They deserve a scene in the movie.

But histories produced by the subject themselves can often feel like fairy tales. Imperial conquests might well be played down to better convey calm continuity. And self-mythology is deeply Disney. Whatever you make of DeSantis and his culture war, his complaints that the company regards itself as an independent state are not plucked from thin air. For all Walt Disney’s patriotism, there was always something secessionist in his magic kingdom.

I mean: a castle? Sheer pageantry is some of it. (Let’s leave aside the weird overtones of having been inspired by the Bavarian castle Neuschwanstein, depot for Nazi-looted artwork during the second world war.) But the symbolism of the logo hints too at what castles were designed for: a literal means of keeping out all that displeased the powers inside. That much was foundational for Disney. And often what was unwelcome was reality. The era in which the company broke big was the late 1920s extending into the 1930s: the years of the Wall Street crash, Al Capone and the rise of fascism. Disney responded with cartoons and children’s stories whose happiness was non-negotiable.

Yes, Bambi’s mother would eventually die. But the fervent escapism at its heart helps explain why Disney still only feels adjacent to the wider story of the movies. For all the golden moments its animators have conjured, there is a reason Disney has never won a Best Picture Oscar under its own banner. For many film lovers, the name forever speaks of things that have not been good for cinema: infantilisation, branded tat.

And Iger’s spending spree since 2006 has only heightened the sense that the company’s stock response to crises of creativity is simply to buy someone else’s. But the image of apex predator can also be deceptive. If the ground under Disney in 2023 seems shaky, so it was in the past. Even in the company’s salad days, Pinocchio and Bambi underperformed financially; Fantasia almost led to bankruptcy. In the real Disney story, box-office bombs are less anomaly and more recurring theme.

After Walt Disney’s death in 1966, the company drifted into a long irrelevance. Revival only came with new-broom CEO Michael Eisner. In a graphic break with the past, the fairytale logo now took precedence above the founder’s signature. It debuted on 1985 live-action adventure Return to Oz: a flop. “When You Wish Upon a Star” was added for the next release, dark fantasy The Black Cauldron. The $44mn budget made it the most expensive animation then ever produced. In the wake of its woeful commercial performance, Eisner exiled the entire animation department from Burbank to a warehouse five miles away.

Eventually, though, a string of hits dubbed the “Disney renaissance” began with The Little Mermaid (1989). Like Iger’s acquisitions, it is hard to argue with the sleek, clever movies Eisner oversaw (The Lion King, Aladdin and so on), or their profits. But the wizardry was pragmatic. On screen, a hefty spoonful of sugar was added back into fairy tales grown gnarled in films such as The Black Cauldron. Behind the scenes, with digital animation cutting overheads, headline titles were joined by untold sequels quietly going straight to video.

And an old lever was cranked hard. In 1932, with Disney almost buckled by the Depression, the company had been saved by salesman Herman Kamen, licensing the image of Mickey Mouse on to napkins, watches and wallpaper. Sixty years later, Eisner again squeezed every drop of juice from products in newly opened Disney Stores.

The films were origin stories for the merchandise. And the business model led to the definitive moment in Disney history. It came with another pen stroke: the 1991 decision to list the company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Disney was instantly enshrined as leader of the entertainment industry. Yet that same year, it didn’t have a single film in the American box-office top 10. Its most successful movie in 1991, Beauty and the Beast, wasn’t even the year’s most popular family film, beaten at cinemas by Home Alone and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze.

But that was no break with Disney tradition. Unlike other Hollywood moguls, Walt Disney had limited time for movie theatres. The jumbo train set of Disneyland monopolised his attention. Television too was quickly embraced. And the arm’s-length relationship with cinema continued via Eisner on to his successor, Iger. In the 2010s, with Marvel deputised to the multiplex, the parent brand kept leaning into smaller screens in private homes. Frozen was soon the bestselling Blu-ray in US history.

Follow the breadcrumb trail and you see how Disney came to stake so much on Disney+. Industry royalty spooked by upstart Netflix, a Hollywood studio for whom cinema was just another platform. With the Fox acquisition, 2019 must have felt the perfect moment for the endgame: the triumphant launch of a leviathan content library built for home consumption. The world’s favourite stories hoarded in one place; Pixar, Marvel and the rest making more. The castle was complete.

But history is filled with monarchs who misread the room. After a bountiful Covid, 6.5mn subscribers have recently left Disney+. And much of the thinking behind the rush to streaming now feels magical itself. Once other Pixar movies were sent straight to the service, why would families see Elemental in cinemas? Just how many series could Marvel inspire, given that its films were already sputtering creatively? And would Apple and Amazon be outmuscled as easily as Rupert Murdoch?

Thus far, the response has been predictable: 7,000 staff fired since Iger’s return last year. Heading into Burbank, he will have also passed the protests of the ongoing Hollywood writers’ strike. That too is historically on-brand: Walt Disney’s employment practices famously led to a bitter 1941 animators’ strike.

Troubled industrial relations put a layer of irony on the company’s other current headache: the attacks on it as a leftist cell by Ron DeSantis. In fact, his whole vision of Disney management tainting a once innocent company with politics might be the wrong way round. Back in the 1940s, the company founder was a zealous rightwinger whose worldview helped shape its films. The inclusivity of modern Disney is, by contrast, blandly mainstream: the everyday stuff of a corporation seeking to maximise reach.

In 2023, that much can mean war. The recent live-action remake of The Little Mermaid starring the black actress Halle Bailey drew grim online comment. It did well with US audiences, though, at a time when Disney movies often don’t.

But the film’s creative context raises another question for Iger. It was made in yet another round of remakes of existing company property: Peter Pan & Wendy, Pinocchio and so on. For Disney, the past 100 years might suggest you can always save the day with the same old fairy tales. But after so many close calls with failure, a lack of new ideas now seems quite the gamble. History repeats a lot, it’s true. Every now and then, though, someone else gets to have a happy ending.

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