Kicking and Streaming: Malaise in the House of Mouse
Disney is inventing new ways to lose the game while holding all the cards.
On this sophomore edition of Kicking and Streaming I invite you to spare a thought for the Walt Disney Company, the undisputed, untouchable kings of culture in the 2010s. Check your watch and you'll notice we don't live there anymore.
For almost a decade and a half, inevitable success floated like pixie dust off Tinkerbell herself around everything Mickey Mouse had his paws on. The Disney box-office juggernaut crushed its competition at a rate rivaled by only the legions of Rome and the Alabama Crimson Tide football team. Marvel Studios was the obvious ace-in-the-hole but the rotation was strong throughout. Pixar continued its service as a loyal vassal, bringing out the always-valuable youth demographic with consistently solid and heartfelt animated features. Their continued success was a genuine boon to Disney as its in-house animation arm spent the mid-00s going through one of their slump periods. Once the animated features started drawing crowds again and Star Wars was added to the mix it was difficult to imagine who or what could slow the Disney locomotive down, let alone stop it. True, Star Wars proved troublesome. Last Jedi divided fans and Solo under-performed at the box office, but the smart money figured they’d have that particular ship righted soon enough.
The announcement that The Dreaded Mouse would be entering the streaming arena in the dying days of the 2010s was seen as a paradigm shift for the whole popular entertainment ecosystem. Surely they’d dispose of their competitors in the streaming space with the same brutal efficiency that had bullied lesser movie studios out of multiplexes worldwide.
What a difference five years and a global pandemic make. COVID made a lot of us more miserable and worse at connecting with our fellow man but it’s hard to tell when exactly this rot set in properly. One odd thing about living in Unprecedented Times™ is that the distance between A and B often disappears in a kind of historical highway hypnosis. The COVID-19 pandemic took something like two years, but now it feels like they passed on fast forward. The mood of the early-mid 2020s has been marked by dislocation from the world we left behind in the late 2010s. The effect has been subtle, but impossible to ignore if you’re sufficiently tuned in. There’s no time more foreign to the modern person than the one they’ve just left behind, and as the masters of modernity (at least in the entertainment sphere) Disney have suddenly found themselves out of sync with an audience they once had tied around their little finger.
All in All It’s Just Another Brick in the Wall
So what about Disney+? Well, what about it? It’s fine. It’s around. For people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like. What I can’t work out is why the hell it exists to begin with. Recall Disney’s prior partnership with Netflix to feature Marvel Studios content, a partnership that spawned sleeper hits like Daredevil and Jessica Jones. Maintaining and possibly expanding that relationship could have kept Disney projects in millions more homes than D+ currently reaches. But of course Netflix is its own company with its own problems, as previously discussed. Something closer to home could allow for more control, not to mention a greater revenue share. How about Hulu then? Disney owns 67% of the popular streaming platform, with Comcast hanging onto the remainder. Hulu possesses an impressive reach and a catalog that could only get more appealing with the addition of Disney properties. It’s doubly confusing to consider that a large portion of both Hulu and Disney+ subscriptions come via a bundled deal which also includes ESPN+.
In this era of contraction across the tech sector it seems a merger of some kind between Disney’s various streaming subsidiaries would be both logical and inevitable. The simple fact of the matter is that the platform as it stands is not only a loss leader but also pretty much redundant. Disney+ was marketed as a product that would change the streaming world but has instead found itself subsumed by it. Assimilated until it’s just another brick in the wall of corporate icons on our smart TV’s. Its failure to get off the launch pad has illustrated the general malaise that has fallen over the House of Mouse since those last golden years in the 2010s, when it seemed like they were gonna buy the whole world and nobody would mind.
Glory Days (They’ll Pass You By!)
Of course, if there’s any corporate fiefdom that could be said to have a monopoly on “magic,” it’s the Walt Disney Company. A wildly successful sales, marketing, and land-development firm that’s been portraying a creative company on TV for almost a century. That’s always been the rub with The Mouse. They’re not creatives, not really. They’re liquidators. They extract liquid capital from non-liquid assets. A decent portion of the time the non-liquid asset is you, and the capital is yours (for now). Whether the extraction comes by means of a decade-long saga of feature films you see yearly at twelve dollars a ticket or a food cart in a dirty parking lot in Orlando selling churros for eight bucks a pop doesn’t really matter. It all ends up in the same balance sheet at the end of the day. It’s a grand sleight-of-hand act to leave the consumer dazzled and charmed to the point where cost does not enter the equation. After all, how cold and heartless would you have to be to put a price on magic?
If this is a college of wizards there must be a Grand Magus and Disney was blessed with a very good, very successful one (same thing, really). Bob Iger’s first reign atop the House of Mouse is hard to portray as anything but a rollicking success. It was Iger’s leadership and vision that dispelled Disney’s prior doldrums brought on by the closing years of his mentor Michael Eisner’s tenure. Iger spearheaded the Lucasfilm acquisition and brought the Star Wars brand under the big tent. He indulged delusions that superhero blockbusters adapted from their Marvel Comics subsidiary could be united by a “shared universe.” Soon they stopped being delusional and started being wildly profitable. Under his administration, Disney’s animation arm returned to prominence with projects like Frozen and Moana. He oversaw Disney’s entry into the mainland Chinese market, both with media and merchandise but also with the critically acclaimed (though politically fraught) Disneyland Shanghai. The business of theme parks is far from my personal strike zone but Disney’s Shanghai project may represent an even greater legacy keystone for Iger than any box office success. Eisner’s tenure was notably marred by missteps with the company’s iconic theme parks. This included the (supposedly) excellent but unwanted (by the French, at least) EuroDisney (now Disneyland Paris) and getting BTFO’d by the talking heads from Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary while attempting to build a park called (I am not kidding) “Disney’s America” near the Manassas battlefield in Virginia.
All of this is to say that Iger had a run that most would kill for. People would have said that about Eisner too, before Disney’s 90s renaissance ran out of steam. You get the sense Iger learned from his predecessor that there were dangers in hanging around too long. Don’t wanna end up like Bob Knight, or Douglas MacArthur. Which is to say; bitter, stubborn, and behind the times. Too beloved on the strength of the good old days for anyone to admit you lost your fastball a long time ago. There’s something noble in going out on top, and that’s just what Bob Iger resolved to do. In 2019 he announced his intention to retire from his post at the conclusion of his (at the time) current contract. In February 2020 it was announced that Bob Chapek would be promoted from Chairman of Parks and Resorts to succeed Iger. If you consult your preferred search engine, you’ll notice Bob Chapek is no longer CEO of the Walt Disney Company. You may also notice he was replaced by Bob Iger. The Chapek Era, such as it was, lasted a scant two years.
Chapek certainly deserved to go. He inherited a money printer and barely even managed to get the copier working. There’s no indictment more straightforward. One of his signature projects (the mind-bogglingly asinine Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser hotel) has already gone belly-up just nineteen months after opening. He was buffoonish and charmless in that way businessmen get when their new executive lifestyle is more stressful than they bargained for. But it’s not like the stress was unjustified. If you were around in February of 2020 you might remember that Certain Factors™ of a biological/epidemiological nature were coming into play at around that time. Perhaps that’s why so few of us had any sympathy for the guy. COVID was causing a lot of us stress, and most of us were not getting paid like the new CEO of the Walt Disney Company.
Anyone Can Tilt
There’s a fairly simple interpretation of these events that I suggest you avoid. That is; “a good executive nominated a bad executive to replace him. The administration of that bad executive was so bad that the good executive had to return in order to clean up the mess.” That’s a vast oversimplification in any case but in this specific situation it verges on delusion. Chapek was unlike both Iger and Eisner in that he did not take command in a time of crisis, when sweeping changes were needed to address deep problems. He was just the new administrator of the whole vast money-making machine. The company was on such a vast winning streak that a genuine crisis was almost unthinkable. Whether Chapek was incompetent or merely unlucky is up for debate but complacency had begun to grip the company as a whole. Complacency that, I would argue, set in in large part due to the successes of Iger and his underbosses.
In any case, we were all likely best off saving our sympathy for something or someone a bit more deserving. COVID might have tied his metaphorical shoe-laces together at the starting line but the general consensus after two years is that Chapek could have run a much better race. COVID didn’t kill him, the response to it did. The bets placed to keep the company’s coffers stuffed did not pay off and for that his head had to roll. Disney+ found itself in the unenviable position of being the keystone of a strategy that was never going to work. With movie theaters closed, Disney was forced to start releasing new feature films directly onto its nascent streaming platform. This was briefly comical, as they tried to charge the end user $20 a pop to watch the Mulan remake (remember that? I don’t!)
Are you familiar with the concept of “tilt?” In gambling circles this refers to the illogical, almost manic practice of chasing losses, usually after a period of sustained success. A man sits at a blackjack table and wins $200. He tells himself he’ll leave after he reaches $250 in profit. But suddenly his luck runs out. Can’t buy a winning hand for love nor money. But the gambler in question has already decided he’s going to win that $250. So he stays seated. Bets more and more trying to get to $250. Before long his profits have disappeared.
Whether Bob Iger, personally, has tilted I can’t say. I don’t know the man (hit my line Bob, let’s talk business). But Disney’s luck has certainly turned, and unfortunately there’s no way to leave the figurative casino in this analogy.
Who Avenges the Avengers?
Nobody bats 1.000 of course and Disney did have a few notable misfires in the midst of its boom years (remember John Carter? I don’t!) But notably none of these were attached to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The MCU is, by basically any metric I can dig up, the most profitable entertainment franchise in human history. Of all his notably good moves, Iger’s decision to appoint suspected replicant Kevin Feige as the head honcho of Marvel Studios has to rank somewhere near the top. I frankly have to tip my cap to him. Superhero franchises are notoriously boom and bust endeavors. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy face-planted at hurdle number three because the suits at the studio wanted to sell Venom action figures and James Franco wanted to leave and do James Franco things. Warner Bros thought they could make Batman movies forever in the 90s until Joel Schumacher incited a nerd gay panic by suggesting the guy who hangs out with a younger same-sex partner while wearing full-body skintight leather could potentially be a bit homoerotic. The MCU’s sustained connection with both loyal fans and casual moviegoers of all ages from 2008 all the way through the 2010s is nothing short of a marketing miracle.
But now, it seems the bloom is at last off the rose. Since the pandemic the MCU has struggled to regain its mojo. The bottom hasn’t fallen out in the big dramatic catastrophe that normally ends a project this ambitious but the problems are beginning to accumulate. This spring’s tentpole offering, Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania notably underperformed. A disappointment multiplied by new MCU big bad actor Jonathan Majors’ ugly domestic abuse allegations shortly thereafter. True, the third and final Guardians of the Galaxy movie made up the deficit, but with a significant portion of the cast hanging up their tights it’s getting hard to ignore how many big name actors (and the characters that they embody) have left the franchise in recent years. This is to say nothing of Guardians’ director James Gunn’s departure to join the enemy, as he’ll be masterminding DC comics’ film adaptations for Warner Bros. True Believers will remember that this isn’t Gunn’s first departure from the Disney machine. His weird Twitter-induced firing was a rare sign that Marvel Studios wasn’t running as smoothly as it may have seemed. In hindsight it may have been a canary in the coal mine.
Disney+ was meant to represent a new opportunity for the MCU. Its earlier forays into television were a marquee presence in the early days of Netflix’s “original content” mania. Those shows would leave Netflix for the new in-house platform, where they’d soon be joined by new projects. These new endeavors could experiment with storytelling modes beyond the usual bombast and wink/nod humor of their feature films. If there was a genuinely fatal error made by Bob Chapek this was it. The MCU’s x-factor was how easy it was to follow. You needed to see one movie a year, maybe two if you really wanted the nitty-gritty. Taking a mass-market attraction out of the public square and placing it in a walled garden with a monthly subscription fee kneecapped its ability to keep the audience engaged. The big initial swing, WandaVision, set the precedent of Disney+ programming generating a lot of good press but precious little cultural cache. Where Daredevil and Jessica Jones were favored topics of conversation around workplace water coolers and at school lunch tables, Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk have been restricted to a more niche audience. Accusations of shoddy VFX work and tiresome online discourse don’t make them any more appealing to the casual TV consumer. I’ve been done with the MCU since Avengers: Endgame (12 years is long enough, let someone else have a turn) so I can’t speak to this firsthand but I had more than one friend come to me confused that WandaVision was apparently required viewing to understand the latest Doctor Strange movie.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the MCU is now having to contend with something they’ve never dealt with before: outright rejection by the fans. The finale to the recent Secret Invasion miniseries is currently the lowest-rated individual MCU product ever on Rotten Tomatoes (7%). Whether this is a minor blip like the Gunn affair or something more serious remains to be seen but as a comic book guy I’m a little confused. Did people even like Secret Invasion when they did it in the comics? That’s the really interesting thing to me. The MCU’s recent trajectory is more and more beginning to mirror the comics they’re adapted from. Impossible to get into as a new fan, strangled by accumulated lore, and set in a world that has long ago ceased to be believable or worth investing in. I was reliably informed that this kind of universe-wide mismanagement simply would never happen due to some infallible competence possessed by Feige and the other Marvel Studios bigwigs. Did they misplace it somewhere? At what point does the faith placed in the stewardship of successful executives just become clapping for Tinkerbell?
Subsidiary Lightning-Round (Or: Attack of the $4 Billion Lemon)
Marvel’s position as the crown jewel meant any sign of weakness on their part was always going to draw the most scrutiny, but they’re far from the only tentacle of the broader corporate shoggoth, and they’re also not the only one going through an awkward period. Let’s round ‘em up in brief:
Pixar
Depending on who you ask, Pixar may have been dead and buried as early as 2006 (the anti-Cars agenda truly is an inspiration to haters worldwide). If this was indeed the case then someone forgot to inform Pixar. Their output stayed remarkably consistent. Though in recent years a pattern is beginning to emerge. First a new and original vision wins plaudits and award nominations. Then a more minor work makes money but ultimately fails to leave any lasting impact beyond a few stalwart fans. Finally; a more obvious cash grab, usually in the form of a sequel to a previous success, sets people wondering if this is really the end for Pixar? If the godfathers of 3-D animation have at last mortgaged their soul to the infernal Mouse? Then a new and original vision arrives to win plaudits and award nominations and we’d all wonder what we were worried about in the first place. I mean c’mon, it’s Pixar! We’re currently in the “down” period of this cycle. Luca and Turning Red both connected with audiences, but Lightyear (the requisite cynical cash grab) exploded on the launchpad. This summer’s offering; Elemental, did disappointing but not disastrous numbers. Though when we consider the relative weakness of the summer blockbuster schedule there may be cause for greater concern. Obviously I’m perpetuating the cycle by even bringing this up but the downturn has come at a truly inconvenient time. The resurgence (inevitable as it may be) will be a welcome sight for fans and stockholders alike.
Disney Parks and Resorts
The conclusion of the pandemic should have meant a return to business as usual for the Disney family of parks and resorts but persistent nagging issues have hamstrung the division. This was another bad move by Chapek. The Star Wars Galaxy’s End and Avengers Campus expansions both received mixed reviews at best, with the Star Wars expansion hamstrung by dividing attractions between the park and the brand-gulag that was the Galactic Starcruiser hotel. But the more public theme park crisis has been a prolonged pissing match concerning their Floridian holdings with state Gov. Ron DeSantis. DeSantis is a noted boob, and so Disney’s legal team has thus far been pretty easily able to thwart his headline-seeking power-play (billable hours stay undefeated). But this does nothing to improve their reputation as ruthless operators in the land development business. The magic kingdom may be secure, but it seems fair to say that all the billable hours may be harshing the vibe somewhat. Law degrees seem to make you immune to magic.
Lucasfilm
George Lucas absolutely fleeced Disney when he sold them Star Wars. I will die on this hill. He passed the curse onto them and fled into the night, shrieking “free at last!” Their management of the franchise since the Lucasfilm acquisition is all the proof I ever need that this is in no way a creative company. They have no idea what the hell they’re meant to do with this thing and it cost them $4 billion. The initial plan was to use Star Wars to dominate the fall/winter box office the way Marvel has ruled the spring and summer. Things got off to a flying start with Force Awakens (a film that is a mile wide and an inch deep) and Rogue One (a fan film, but a well made one). But the cracks developed rapidly thereafter. Last Jedi did well but also tore open a portal to hell and condemned us all to debate its quality forever in increasingly ponderous video essays. It also made a generation of guys hate Laura Dern and I consider that a far greater sin. Once Solo flopped the writing was on the wall. The bouquet of future feature length projects in development found themselves cut down one after another as Rise of Skywalker brought their new trilogy to a whimpering, grumbling conclusion. Disney+ has actually been far more fertile ground for Star Wars projects. The Mandalorian likely ranks as the platform’s biggest hit so far. D+ finally allowed Dave Filoni to finish his fan-favorite Clone Wars animated series on his own terms. Andor took advantage of Rogue One’s successes and drew yet more critical acclaim. But the outlook is by no means completely rosy. Mandalorian appears to have run out of gas after three seasons. Book of Boba Fett fell back into that all-too-common Star Wars trap of re-hashing rather than re-inventing. Dave Filoni is a gifted writer who does seem to have both a genuine affection for Star Wars and a desire to do some new things with it but he’s arguably become too prominent. His ideas and characters are strewn throughout D+ Star Wars projects in a way that’s increasingly come to resemble pandering.
20th Century Fox
I literally had to be reminded at the 11th hour that Disney bought 20th Century Studios. One could be forgiven, looking at recent 20th Century releases and their associated box office returns, for assuming Disney also needs to be reminded that they own 20th Century Fox (rim shot). The really galling thing about the Fox acquisition is that it can’t even maintain the illusion of independence that Lucasfilm is granted. Disney purchased Fox so they could get their hands on the rights to X-Men and fold Marvel’s Mightiest Mutants into the MCU. It’s not even a standalone! One of the big five studios has been reduced to an expansion pack! It’s the worst-kept secret in the industry that Fox’s Searchlight imprint (at the very least) has been marked for death for some time. Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar-nominated Nightmare Alley was sent out to die the same week as a Spider-Man movie. They’re out-competing themselves! They bought someone else’s face so they could cut the nose off it in spite!
In Which I Remind Everyone (Myself Included) That This Essay Was Meant to be About a Streaming Platform
It’s apparent (to me at least) that Disney+ is a very expensive afterthought. Perhaps that’s down to COVID, perhaps this was inevitable. Ultimately it seems to exist for no reason more complex than “well everyone else is starting a streaming service, we’d better do that too.” Doing things in house has long been the Disney method. It’s characteristic for Disney to be monolithic, rolling around like The Blob, enveloping all in its path. But it’s deeply uncharacteristic (at least in recent times) for them to chase trends rather than innovate them. In so doing they’ve wound up overextended. The streaming world may have seemed as simple as another revenue stream for a company that’s never met a money-making venture it didn’t like, but in reality its become a space for good money to be thrown after bad. (Remember the (now de-listed) Willow TV series on Disney+? I don't!)
If there’s anything to be learned in all of this, it may have to do with the company’s vaunted roster of intellectual property. A common refrain in the streaming age has been that IP is king. But surely that doesn’t follow, given the evidence we see here. If IP is really the main mover in modern entertainment than surely Disney+ should be performing better, right? One of the first things you learn in a college level class on logic is that it’s entirely possible for an argument constructed from nothing but true premises to add up to a false conclusion. IP is indeed important. Its returns are indeed more reliable. But they don’t guarantee sustainable success. It's still necessary to put forth the effort to maximize the IP’s value. With so many projects across so many industries requiring so much time and investment, it seems almost impossible that any of these treasured IP are performing to their highest potential.
In the pre-pandemic days, talk of any imminent Disney decline was laughable. Their existing stash of cultural capital was so vast that even suggesting they could blow the lead they’d built up marked you as a bitter hater. This is, of course, a remarkably arrogant mindset. But Disney is far from the only successful outfit to fall into the trap of assuming their shit doesn’t stink. Success breeds success but only if the process that led to it is sound. A few weeks of overtime and a little luck can turn a good project great or a bad project decent but it can’t do it one hundred percent of the time. When organizations start talking about some special “magic” they have access to, you should get worried.