Wednesday Morning Rant [Joe Mannix]

Disney has had a tough go of things recently. The cracks started to show years ago with declining quality of their film and television products, including the heretofore unthinkable notion of a Star Wars movie that actually lost money. The company is losing billions on Disney+ and its selection of expensive but low-quality programming and bad writing. Except for Avatar, its major franchises and studios are all dead or dying.

But all is not well elsewhere in the business, either. The parks are still propping the company up, but not without incident. The Star Wars theme park at Disney World - "Galaxy's Edge" - is unpopular and is probably losing money. The high-dollar, immersive "fan experience" hotel "Galactic Starcruiser" will close less than two years after it opened at a pricetag of at least a billion dollars. Not to mention, of course, the multi-year - if not multi-generational - trouble caused by Disney's ill-conceived war with the Florida government and the subsequent reformation of the Reedy Creek district.

But despite the body blows Disney has been taking for years, it remains tremendously powerful in the industry. Every bad movie, offensive show, lackluster theme park and destructive political action it has made is met with rave reviews from the professional critics, industry news outlets and mainstream press outfits. Everything Disney touched turned to crap, yet the captive outlets universally sang its praises.

There's always an excuse for failure, and the industry press has long been willing to plumb the depths to find an excuse for Disney's poor performance. "Turning Red" failed because it was a Disney+ release, not a theatrical release. It's COVID's fault. It isn't that the big franchises have been ground into dust by bad writing, bad effects, incompetence and offensive social messaging, it's that the audience has "Marvel Fatigue" or "Star Wars Fatigue." The "toxic fandom" was poisoning the well. Whatever the problem, whatever bone-headed or deliberately inciting decision Disney made, it has always been merely a victim of circumstance.

Until last week.

Disney decided to screen the newest Indiana Jones movie at Cannes and lift the review embargo more than a month before the film's release. For the first time in recent memory, Disney is being dragged through the mud by professional reviewers. They aren't panning the movie because of things that might be good signs for its performance - like with Top Gun: Maverick - but because apparently there's no there there. If the critics are to be believed, the movie is just mediocre or bad. Not what Disney was hoping for when they probably need to rake in about a billion dollars at the box office to turn a profit.

What finally caused the captive press to turn on its master? Is Disney's legacy of failure finally catching up to it? Did word go out that they were allowed to be mean about this one because Disney wants an excuse for a shakeup at Lucasfilm? Is it because Disney has less control of the foreign press? I don't know, but we'll see as time goes on. I hope that this is a case of the product finally being bad enough for long enough - and Disney being weakened enough - that even the shills aren't going to defend it anymore.

Are Disney's tentacles finally being severed?

posted by Open Blogger at 11:00 AM

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