Over the past decade, the company became an entertainment godzilla by buying up rights to everything you ever loved watching. Part one of this series looks at how Disney has turned all of Hollywood into a recycling machine. Part two looks at the abysmal failures of Disney’s latest offerings—and whether they spell the beginning of nostalgia fatigue.
Researched by: Nirmal Bhansali & Anannya Parekh
Editor’s note: When there isn’t a big headline making news, we often pick a Big Story on a topic that we think will be interesting to you. We’d be just as happy to take requests from you. Do write to us at talktous@splainer.in. We’d also love to hear what you think of our leads on these kinds of less-newsy stories on the great mystery of Alzheimer's disease, why we don’t have a male contraceptive pill, grand theft of Indian artefacts etc. Interesting? Or more like ‘bore mat kar, yaar’?
The great Disney expansion
The Mickey Mouse company has always been good at making strategic purchases, but its biggest moves kicked off in 2006:
- In 2006, it acquired the hottest animation studio Pixar for $7.4 billion—and soon after it released a series of massive hits—like ‘Monsters Inc.’, ‘Finding Nemo’, and ‘The Incredibles.’
- In 2009, when no one else seemed to be paying attention to superheroes, Disney mopped up the Marvel franchise for $4 billion. That’s the same year it flexed its streaming muscle by buying a stake in Hulu.
- Then came the Star Wars franchise and Indiana Jones franchise in 2012.
- The biggest buy, however, was Fox Entertainment for $71.3 billion—a deal finally sealed in 2019. Disney now had rights to Avatar sequels, Marvel’s X-Men and Fantastic Four—along with ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Deadpool’.
- Unsurprisingly, this is also the year the company launched Disney+—to leverage the now awesome power of its back catalogue.
Raking it in: In 2016, Disney alone had five of the top 10 grossing movies— including ‘Captain America: Civil War’, ‘The Jungle Book’, ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’, and ‘Finding Dory’, a sequel to ‘Finding Nemo.’ All of them were reboots, spinoffs or sequels. Buying Fox in 2019 sealed that domination. At the time, Washington Post noted:
The deal has far-reaching implications for how viewers consume content, especially the boost it provides to Disney’s forthcoming streaming services, given that Disney could amass 40% of the domestic box office once you add Fox’s current share. Fox and Disney combine for 10 of the top 20 titles on Box Office Mojo’s inflation-adjusted list of the top-grossing movies in history domestically, including “Star Wars” and “Avatar,” both of which are ongoing franchises.
Data point to note: As of 2021, 24 Marvel titles collectively grossed $21.9 billion for Disney—“making it bigger than Bond, more potent than Potter and massive compared to ‘The Fast And The Furious’.”
The Disney strategy: Owning nostalgia
By 2019, it was clear that Disney had a crystal-clear plan—to conquer Hollywood by owning childhood nostalgia. No other streaming platform could match Disney+—which owned intellectual property rights to almost every beloved TV show or movie:
This concentration of cultural capital has given Disney enormous influence. And whatever original content it has to offer, the real pitch for Disney Plus is that the service offers a streaming version of your childhood, whether your youth is defined by one of the companies Disney snapped up, or even 30 seasons of “The Simpsons.”
Owning grown ups: The company always had an iron-hold on children thanks to its movies and TV shows. But it now owned the attention of adults—by serving them ‘grown up’ versions of classics. Disney+ opening slew of 25 series included the Star Wars spinoff ‘The Mandalorian’ and multiple Marvel offerings such as ‘The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.’ What helped: the other big studios were caught napping—as with Marvel: “People didn’t fully understand and appreciate the franchise potential of the [superhero] genre like we did. We were able to buy it because the industry didn’t totally get it either.”
The big tweak: The Disney blueprint has always been the same: develop extremely successful TV and movie franchises—which can then be monetised even further with theme parks and pricey merchandising. But now the company started buying franchises instead of creating its own—and then Disney-fied them. What worked for fairytale princesses would work just as well for Star Wars—as the ubiquitous Yoda toys and light-sabres show.
The Star Wars movies may not have been as wildly successful as Marvel, but Disney has made it vastly profitable in other ways:
On the publishing side, novels and comics have been released to drum up excitement for upcoming films. On the more unabashed merchandise front, there’s shower heads, dog costumes, and barbecue utensils… Already in 2015, with the first Disney-Star Wars release, Disney was poised to make $5-$7 billion in merchandising revenue. That figure likely only grew over time.
And that’s not counting the money people pay for all those Star Wars experiences in its theme parks.
The Disney effect: recycle, recycle, recycle
The spectacular success of Disney has transformed entertainment in every way—be it kind of content or the status of the movie star.
The copycat effect: When Disney+ launched in 2019, Washington Post columnist Josh Spiegel warned of the dangers of cashing in on nostalgia:
This strategy is both cynical and largely successful…. If nostalgia turns into infinite piles of money, why would Disney ever make anything new? And by sending such a powerful signal about what it considers viable, Disney risks shrinking the ambitions of a generation of filmmakers, telling them that the only direction to look if they want to stay employed is toward the past.
And he wasn’t wrong. We are now awash in reboots and sequels as other studios try their best to replicate Disney’s success. See: Game of Thrones, Ghostbusters, Jurassic World, Harry Potter, Lord of The Rings etc.
The end of everything else: The insane numbers chalked up by the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe has opened the floodgates on superhero movies. Twentieth Century Fox revived X-Men, Sony rebooted Spider-Man, Warner Bros tried to mirror Disney with a DC Universe—reviving Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman. The unwavering focus on monetising IP rights, however, has killed other kinds of movies. As Vice notes, “Mid-budget thrillers, action films, dramas and romantic comedies… are a dying breed. Movies like ‘Die Hard’, ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, ‘Pretty Women’ or ‘Forrest Gump’ probably won’t get made today.
Point to note: It’s not all Disney’s fault. Audiences are now used to watching everything at home—in their pjs. It takes a Marvel-sized movie—with its promise of familiarity plus spectacle—to drag people to the theatres:
[T]he Marvel phenomenon has yanked Hollywood into a franchise-drunk new era, in which intellectual property, more than star power or directorial vision, drives what gets made, with studios scrambling to cobble together their own fictional universes… Audiences, especially since the pandemic, are seeing fewer films in the theatre and streaming more from home, forcing studios to lean on I.P.-driven tentpoles.
The end of the movie star: Almost every big-name actor is in a franchise flick or series—yet they are also overshadowed by their roles. As Jacobin magazine puts it:
Large action epics and superhero franchises routinely break box office records, but while their stars get massively rich, they seem to remain comparatively impotent. Today’s panoply of symmetrical muscle-bound actors who all quip in the same cool masculine tone may star in movies, but they’re not movie stars.
People are no longer loyal to actors—eagerly anticipating their next appearance—but to the roles they play:
At one point in recent history, if Tom Hanks or Will Smith starred in a film, it would be pretty unlikely to flop. Having a big name attached to a project wasn’t a failsafe way of ensuring a film’s success… but it was about as solid an indication as you could get that a film would do well. These days, that’s no longer the case. The movie star model is dead, and people have instead directed their loyalty to brands or franchises.
In fact, the biggest names in Hollywood—actors or directors—now have to land a superhero flick to “stay relevant”—and in some cases even keep their job:
You go to a Marvel movie to see Captain America, not Chris Evans. “It’s actually surprising to me how almost none of them have careers outside of the Marvel universe,” another agent said. “The movies don’t work. Look at all the ones Robert Downey, Jr., has tried to do. Look at Tom Holland. It’s been bomb after bomb after bomb.”
The bottomline: In part two, we look at whether this reuse/recycle paradigm is coming to an end. Does the recent spate of superhero flops indicate the beginning of nostalgia fatigue?
Reading list
We highly recommend the New Yorker’s deep dive on how Marvel swallowed up Hollywood. Jacobin magazine is very good on the end of the movie star. Vice explains why cinematic creativity is dying. Screen Rant explains why Disney loves making live-action versions of its classics. And Josh Spiegel in the Washington Post is excellent on the perils of nostalgia.
