\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>he Walt Disney Company is probably hoping that upon viewing the new trailer for the upcoming Star Wars film The Mandalorian and Grogu, audiences feel a swell of nostalgia. No, not for 1977, when Star Wars was fresh and wondrous; after all, Disney didn\u2019t even own it then. Not even for a decade ago, when the company brought the film series roaring back with 2015\u2019s The Force Awakens, still the highest-grossing movie in US box office history. Rather, the trailer, consciously or not, hopes to transport viewers, and presumably profits, back to the halcyon days of \u2026 2019.<\/p>\n They would probably settle for any time before their brief but tumultuous suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from ABC became national news. But 2019 would be preferable. That year, Disney\u2019s almost unprecedented box office domination, boasting an astonishing seven of the year\u2019s 10 biggest hits \u2013 and an eighth featuring Spider-Man, a Disney-owned character in a movie produced by Disney\u2019s Marvel Studios (but released by Sony). Remakes of Aladdin and The Lion King, sequels to Toy Story and Frozen, two to three Marvel installments (depending on how to count Spider-Man), and a new Star Wars movie added up to around $10bn in global grosses. If the Star Wars movie The Rise of Skywalker landed a little soft compared to its better-reviewed predecessors, even that cloud had a silver lining: the late 2019 debut of The Mandalorian on the then new Disney+ streaming service was an instant sensation. Even genuinely rapacious corporate moves, such as Disney\u2019s purchase of 20th Century Fox, were greeted in some fan corners with unthinking delight, because it meant some errant licensed Marvel characters could be in the MCU.<\/p>\n As the Covid-19 pandemic (as well as relatively bare franchise cupboards) made replicating those 2019 profits impossible over the next few years, the company at least attempted to burnish some goodwill from contemporary audiences in other ways. In particular, Disney\u2019s various entertainment brands\/fiefdoms \u2013 Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, etc \u2013 seemed to keep the company\u2019s most evil (or equivocating) corporate instincts at bay. In 2022, Pixar and Marvel employees helped push back against the company\u2019s initial silence on Florida\u2019s \u201cdon\u2019t say gay\u201d bill prohibiting discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in elementary school classrooms, which the company eventually condemned. Those companies were also beginning, after a long delay, to diversify their slate of movies, shows and characters, with projects such as Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Turning Red and The Acolyte.<\/p>\n But the mixed reception to some of these projects, as well as a general mortal terror that they couldn\u2019t somehow make a Frozen, Toy Story, Star Wars and Avengers movie happen every year in perpetuity, seemed to spook Disney somewhere in the transition period from supposedly brilliant CEO Bob Iger to stumblebum replacement Bob Chapek back to Iger again. Despite his savior status, Iger himself exposed that fear when he spoke with corporate-coded cowardice about future projects not putting forward \u201cany kind of agenda\u201d, a pledge in deference to meaninglessness that made even the more craven \u201cexclusively gay moments\u201d or long-delayed female-led Marvel movie seem fiery by comparison. Corporate skittishness over including gay or minority characters that might offend vague \u201cinternational audiences\u201d was now policy.<\/p>\n <\/span>A still from Elio.<\/span> Photograph: Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.\/PA<\/p>\n In some ways, the company was probably just catching some blowback from the much-delayed revelation that CEOs are largely useless figureheads. Yet a series of clumsy, cowardly decisions seemed to transcend boardroom drama. Disney has been carrying out Iger\u2019s edict in a sloppy panic. Seemingly rattled by the ire of random YouTubers, the vagaries of a post-pandemic world and the re-ascension of Donald Trumpo, this year alone the company\u2019s removed all references to a transgender character\u2019s identity on a Pixar streaming show; completed the bowdlerization of the Latino-driven Pixar movie Elio, which originally featured a queer-coded character; reoriented (and renamed) their corporate DEI initiatives to emphasize the generation of that old fan favorite, profit; dumped Black-led Marvel show Ironheart out in a single binge despite using a weekly release model for its marquee shows; and yanked Jimmy Kimmel off the air for expressing skepticism over the Maga-world reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk, before eventually backtracking. (ABC affiliates under Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar ownership will continue to pre-empt the show until further notice.) In an elegant cherry of bad PR, Disney apparently decided the time was also right for a streaming-service price increase, its third in three years.<\/p>\n Of course, as with any massive corporation, Disney\u2019s earlier diversity focus was probably more for the sake of public image and accompanying business interest than genuine empathy. It\u2019s worth asking, then, whether any of these decisions did, in fact, make money for the company especially compared to the profits generated by the Black Panther movies, or a more diverse Star Wars trilogy. The revised Elio could scarcely have made much less at the box office; it\u2019s the lowest-grossing Pixar movie other than those directly affected by the pandemic. Are any Disney+ subscriptions attributable to de-transing a supporting character on an eight-episode miniseries? On the other hand, plenty of people did seem to cancel their subscriptions over the Kimmel battle, and the company\u2019s stock price dipped over the past week. If the idea for any of this was winning back Maga folks in the long run, well, good luck with that. They\u2019re still fuming over the same-sex kiss in Lightyear or girls being in Star Wars or Black people being in anything. The plain truth is, there\u2019s a certain Maga demographic that accepts nothing less than full capitulation to their preferences and values \u2013 and you can\u2019t dabble in full capitulation.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why Disney\u2019s real wish must be for a 2019 revival. Back then, there might have been little teapot-level tempests here and there from audience segments who complain that a remake is too woke or, on the less rabid side, who regard the inclusion of, say, queer supporting characters as mild (and cynical) concessions, but $10bn buys executives a lot of confidence (even if it\u2019s apparently not enough for actual courage). After all, that\u2019s an environment where no one\u2019s favorite Star Wars film can still eke out a billion dollars worldwide.<\/p>\n Disney isn\u2019t alone in facing a tough entertainment landscape where movies don\u2019t gross quite as much and streaming services can easily tip into overspending. But it\u2019s the company that now seems most terrified of this new world, maybe because its late-2010s surge somehow created the impression that endless and unbeatable growth on the backs of perma-beloved nostalgia brands would be possible. It\u2019s not, and if there\u2019s an upside to Disney\u2019s morally checkered year, it\u2019s the revelation that brands are not bulletproof spine protection. No one mad about Jimmy Kimmel\u2019s suspension (or mad about his words to begin with) seems to be taking solace in the upcoming release of another Zootopia movie. The Mandalorian movie looks fun, fan-friendly, perfectly watchable \u2026 and that\u2019s not enough to save anyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Walt Disney Company is probably hoping that upon viewing the new trailer for the upcoming Star Wars film The Mandalorian and Grogu, audiences feel a swell of nostalgia. No, not for 1977, when Star Wars was fresh and wondrous; after all, Disney didn\u2019t even own it then. Not even for a decade ago, when<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23379,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[14260,2071,3707,1600,96,313,14261],"class_list":{"0":"post-23378","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-backbone","9":"tag-company","10":"tag-disney","11":"tag-fall","12":"tag-lost","13":"tag-rise","14":"tag-walt"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}