I wanted to write up a post on the Disney investor meeting announcements that happened roughly a week ago. They made a giant list of announcements for films and television shows from all of their divisions, with a special emphasis on content for Disney+, which is definitely picking up steam. But while some of the announcements made me happy, like a new musical called "Encanto" set in "magical realist" Colombia from WDAS, and a fun-looking new PIXAR movie called "Going Red" helmed by "Bao" director Domee Shi, they were utterly lost in a flood of reboots, spinoffs, sequels, and reimaginings.
Frankly, I was utterly aghast sitting through some of the presentations at the sheer number of nostalgia-driven projects that were being readied. The offerings from the Disney motion picture and television units look especially dire. We've been promised sequels for "Hocus Pocus," "Sister Act," and "Enchanted," and reboots of "Three Men and a Baby," "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," "Swiss Family Robinson," "Night at the Museum," and "Cheaper by the Dozen." "The Mighty Ducks," "Turner and Hooch," and "Percy Jackson" are getting turned into a series. The CGI version of "The Lion King" is getting a prequel. The live action "Beauty and the Beast" is getting a midquel. "Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers" is getting the live action treatment, for some deranged reason. "Cruella" is still a thing that is happening. There are a couple of originals, mostly based around YA series and true-life stories of inspiring sports stars, but they got very little emphasis.
This was echoed across nearly every unit. PIXAR actually has a very promising slate of originals, with "Soul," "Luca," and "Going Red" up next, and a new series called "Win or Lose," but all the attention has been on the announcement of a new "Toy Story" spinoff called "Lightyear" due in 2022. FX announced a Rolling Stones series and a new adaptation of James Clavell's "Shogun," but the big deal is that Noah Hawley is making an "Alien" series set on Earth, and I don't know if that's a good idea, honestly. WDAS, to their credit, put features "Encanto" and "Raya and the Last Dragon" directly in the spotlight, but I couldn't help but notice that all but one of their animated series offerings, the Pan-African sci-fi series Iwájú, are all based directly on recent films: "Baymax," "Zootopia+," "Tiana" and "Moana, The Series." To be fair, Disney has always done this with their animated films as far back as "The Little Mermaid." We're usually not hit with so many at once, though.
I know my reaction has a lot to do with the marketing here. Disney is notoriously secretive about long term plans, and we just got a lot of information spanning years of content released all at once. And this is all in the context of an investor presentation aimed at business and finance people, not the consumers. Disney's tactics are not new, but it's a lot harder to ignore their more uncomfortably business-driven content decisions in this format. The branded, already proven franchise stuff is being promoted more heavily because it looks safer to investors. And the glut of announcements helps the narrative that Disney+ is going to have plenty of content to compete with the other streaming services.
And this is why the two clear stars of the day were Lucasfilm and Marvel, which have at least a dozen titles apiece in the works for Disney+, in addition to theatrical projects. I'm not looking forward to a Lando Calrissian miniseries, or two spinoffs from "The Mandalorian," but some of the "Star Wars" projects look fun. I wonder if "Acolyte" might be a secret Mara Jade show. Reading between the lines, the recently completed sequel trilogy was apparently viewed as such a failure, none of the new projects appear to be connected to them, with the possible exception of the "A Droid Story" series. I do wonder about the wisdom of investing so much into this one universe after a single hit, "The Mandalorian," and some notable missteps.
As for Marvel, well, that universe has already proven the ability to sustain plenty of separate titles across many different platforms. Also, they're committed to giving us some new and diverse heroes like Kamala Khan, Riri Williams, and Moon Knight, so I'm not going to complain. Oh, and Samuel L. Jackson and Don Cheadle look to be finally the leads of their own projects. Still, the Lucasfilm and Marvel projects share one big issue - the shared universe concept means it's going to take much more effort to keep up with the storytelling in these franchises. I've already been very cool on elements of the Dave Filoni-verse being brought into "The Mandalorian" this year, and it looks like it's going to get about ten times worse very soon.
Oh boy. I think it's finally happened. I've grown out of Disney fandom.
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