William Goldman: “Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.”
Damian Penny: “Well, actually…”
One of my less popular movie opinions is that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not, in fact, one of the worst movies ever made. I saw it in a theatre and thought it was…fine. A massive step down from the first three movies, but Indy surviving a nuclear explosion by hiding in a lead-lined fridge wasn’t really that much dumber than, say, falling out of an airplane and surviving by using an inflatable raft.
(Plus, the beloved Raiders of the Lost Ark had a massive plot hole - Indiana Jones somehow survived a trip from Egypt to Germany clinging to the outside of a U-Boat - and his adventures arguably didn’t affect the outcome anyway, since the Nazis ended up getting the Ark of the Covenant only for it to melt their faces off, but I digress.)
Crystal Skull didn’t leave anybody wanting more, though. Especially not after a decade and a half. And Disney spending almost $300 million to make it betrays a level of cockeyed, delusional optimism that makes investors in electric-vehicle startups appear hardened and realistic.
Is the movie bad? Honestly, the reviews I’ve seen suggest it came out better than the toxic word-of-mouth (much of it focused on alleged “wokeness,” because 2023) would have you believe. I’ll likely check it out when it arrives on the Disney+ streaming service.
Everyone else apparently had the same idea. And it’s the second time in less than a month that an expensive, high-profile Disney movie seriously underperformed at the box office.
Scratch that: it was the third.
In an age when movie studios rely on sequels, remakes and established properties like never before, Disney has a veritable superteam of franchises.
Of course, as Brooklyn Nets fans know all too well, most “superteams” don’t work out. With Star Wars, Pixar, in-house animated features, Marvel, and many other film and TV series competing for attention and resources, it’s hard for Disney keep everything straight.1
This theme-park fansite suggests the company has gotten too big to succeed, not to fail:
Once upon a time, Disney focused on films, television, and theme parks. Even then, it almost went under a few decades back. The animation renaissance starting in 1989, merchandising, and theme park expansions saved it.
Fast forward to Bob Iger coming in as CEO and his quest to acquire as many IPs and franchises as possible. Initially, it worked. Disney got Pixar, and that was an improvement. Then they got Marvel, and again, it boosted the company initially. Then came Star Wars and, finally, the ridiculous amount of money they spent on Fox. With each new acquisition, Disney spread itself thinner and thinner.
Finally came Disney+. While Disney+ helped save the company during the pandemic, the streaming service is not the “win” Disney expected it to be and is one of the reasons Disney needs to cut $5.5 billion. Like other streaming services, the post-pandemic world and the glut of streaming options have not helped Disney. I would argue that Disney+ has hastened the decline of Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel.
Just because you purchase a franchise does not mean you know how to run that franchise effectively. While Disney did great with Pixar initially, the bloom has rubbed off, and we have the box office bomb ‘Lightyear.’ Pixar, the one-time animation darling, has been reduced to direct to streaming or underperformance. My husband has been waiting for it to be absorbed into Disney Animation to save money.
Marvel. Again, this is another one that started strong, and except for a couple of films like ‘Spider-Man, No Way Home’ the returns have progressively dropped. Now animated Super Mario Bros has outperformed a Marvel film in the last few months!
It would be bad enough if Disney made a new Star Wars project every few years, or limited production to just one MCU movie per year. Instead, between theaters, Disney+ and even old-school cable and broadcast TV (ABC is still around, even if you haven’t thought about it since Desperate Housewives was on its schedule) the company seems intent on force-feeding us content like Homer Simpson receiving his ironic donut punishment in Hell.2
Not all of Disney’s recent high-profile projects have been bad: I like many of the Star Wars streaming series, and Luca was worthy of the Pixar brand. But overexposure and inconsistent quality mean I’ll wait and see if any of these new releases are any good, instead of rushing to watch them on opening day.3 Or I’ll wait to watch them on Disney+ in a few months.
Which is another area in which the company shot itself in the foot: obviously Disney had to adjust to the COVID-19 pandemic closing movie theaters, but now there’s almost an expectation that something like Elemental is meant to be watched at home.
When Disney bought the venerable 20th Century Fox movie studio a few years back, many observers feared the company was no longer an industry heavyweight but a monopoly deserving antitrust action by the American government.
I never bought into Disney being a monopoly, or anything close. The company’s share of the US box office was much larger than any other studio, but still below fifty percent. And that’s not even counting streaming services nor social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok, which have upended pop culture from the bottom up. Take Mr. Beast and any MCU actor, send both to a public place, and see who draws the bigger crowd of people under 30.
Its position is more like General Motors in its glory days, when it was a colossus that dominated the American car industry. In the seventies, GM did have over fifty percent market share.
…which probably contributed to its decline and ultimately its bankruptcy during the Great Recession. GM was so large and unwieldly and out of touch that it didn’t think it had to change, and when its managers did finally figure out how much the ground had shifted beneath them, they had to make their way through layers of bureaucracy and competing divisions and fiefdoms to get anything done.
That’s Disney in 2023. It’s not going away any time soon - General Motors’ fall from grace took several decades, and even after its bankruptcy and reorganization, Chevys and Cadillacs still sell by the millions - but the company hasn’t looked so beatable in decades. It wasn’t long ago that a new Pixar movie being overlooked and tepidly received, while animated films from Sony and freaking Illumination dominate the box office, would have been absolutely unthinkable.
I take it back: maybe William Goldman was right all along.
That’s just the really big franchises; a property like The Muppets might get more attention at a smaller studio like Paramount, but it’s completely lost in the shuffle at Disney.
How many of you even knew Disney owned The Muppets at all?
The Simpsons is part of the Disney empire now, too, and the new owners appear no more willing to let it die in peace.
You know what I did rush to see on the day it was released? Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, based on a Marvel character but produced and released by Sony.
Of course, Sony’s Marvel movies have been a mixed bag, but they hit a home run with the animated Spider-Verse series by going in a completely different direction than Disney.