The unfortunate and sad Disney effect

• Corporate behemoth’s model is a perfect example of business controlling culture

In the 19th century Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels may have been right to decry religion as the “opiate of the masses”. In 20thcentury mainstream entertainment, perhaps no other big studio was more responsible in delivering a new opiate for the masses than Disney.

Under the stewardship of its beloved, rags-to-riches, workaholic patriarch Walt Disney, it steadfastly crafted a space for itself as the ultimate provider of clean, pious family entertainment, filled with talking animals and flying humans and devoid of any of the nasty realities of sex, death, war or politics that shaped so much of the realities of the era.

Disney’s animated charms were squarely focused on offering a vision of a perfect world in which we sang and danced and saw love and virtue conquer all obstacles and lead us into the fabled land of “happily ever after”.

Sure, these visions were sometimes tainted by a distinctly unpleasant lack of recognition of the diversity of the real US and were often downright racist. But that’s not a thing that Disney wants us to dwell on. After all, it has made amends by attaching warnings to screenings of those past mistakes in the present era that point out that they are, “products of their time”.

These days the Disney corporation is a behemoth that includes much more than the animated fare that made its name and has extended to encompass the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the most successful franchise in movie history, as well as the Disney+ streaming service, which is fast becoming the frontrunner for the “world’s

largest streaming service” title. The world of superheroes is one that at least includes previously Disney no-go themes such as war, politics and brutal violence, though sex is still pretty much verboten.

The addition of its streaming service to the arsenal of the Disney army has also led to the disturbing creation of what David Alexander, writing in The Guardian, described as a popular film landscape, “drained of original content. This is the Disney+ model of film-making: it commands the current box office and adds to the corporation’s voracious ondemand library of identikit megahits. The films Disney makes follow this template, and so do those of its competitors.”

One could argue that, in spite of 20th-century Disney’s Pollyanna optimism-opiate model, the films that drove it were often still imaginative, creative and singular within the restrictions imposed by the corporation’s rose-tinted outlook. Disney’s recent road to multibillion-dollar success has been characterised by a marked lack of new imagination as far as the creation of much of its mainstay profitmaking products is concerned.

Franchises such as the MCU and Star Wars were not created by Disney but rather acquired by the company as a means of gaining access to the pockets of its dedicated legions of obsessive cross-generational fans. The stories and characters of the MCU owe their success to creators such as Stan Lee, while the Star Wars universe is forever an extension of the singular vision of George Lucas.

As far as Disney’s own output goes, it has mostly consisted of reboots and retreads of reliable classics from the glory days whose existence is often proven to be completely unnecessary and not always as profitable as executives would like us to believe. Live action remakes of animated classics such as Aladdin, The Jungle Book and The Lion King are technologically dazzling but emotionally hollow, unimaginative and unmagical shadows of their original linedrawn glory.

On the other hand, we have 2021’s Cruella, which Alexander bemoans, “As a major addition to the year’s film offerings ... unnecessary, a franchise-starter nobody asked for. Cruella de Vil had survived for 60 years without an origins story — did she really need one now?”

The answer is obviously no but the decision to make the film fits perfectly within the logic of the Disney business model where, “Disney needs to maintain simultaneous interest both in its new releases and in its growing catalogue of previously released on-demand movies. It needs to keep audiences seeing Disney films in cinemas while also driving up subscriptions to Disney+.”

It is doing this with great success as far as its short-term profits are concerned but the long-term consequences for the movies may be detrimental. One can only hope that this moment, in which a series of by-the-numbers reboots and franchise-fanboy films have led the blockbuster genre into its inevitable death spiral, will be looked upon in the future as dominated by “embarrassing relic[s], from when business controlled culture and decided to run it into the ground”.

Wish upon a star that they will not succeed.