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I disagree with this article that this is all about their ability to "tell stories", as much as management that's really good at identifying which company to ac

I disagree with this article that this is all about their ability to "tell stories", as much as management that's really good at identifying which company to acquire next so they can squeeze every last cent from consumers for whichever IP they are pushing at the time. Most people I've talked to DON'T believe the star wars series has gotten better from a story telling perspective, as this article proposes. I don't think most people believe live-action remakes of their classic cartoons is quality story-telling. I think they are just really good at reading market trends, have enough money in their coffers to acquire whatever is becoming the next big thing, advertise and push it into becoming a cultural phenomenon, then moving onto whatever is next once they've exhausted that IP. Edit - and to be clear, I most likely have a very jaded view here. I don't like disney as a company, nor am I a fan of superhero movies, star wars, or a lot of what the company has been pushing for the last decade or so. I respect their ability to make a ton of money, but I don't like a majority of what they create anymore, nor how they treat a majority of their employees.

danShumway 7y ago
> I respect their ability to make a ton of money, but I don't like a majority of what they create anymore, nor how they treat a majority of their employees. That's a really good summation of my views on Disney. It's obvious they know how to build consistently polished stories that will be consistently enjoyable to a wide audience. I respect that. But it's not clear to me that's a goal worth pursuing, or that the artistic value of their movies has gone up because of that. It's good to have some media that's safe and predictable and that is primarily motivated by market trends. But when that's all a company is making, then behind that nice facade lies a deeply cynical way of looking at the world, where creative choices are calculated for broad appeal rather than for their inherent value. I'm not going to say that's all Disney makes. Just that the percentage of films Disney is making that fall into that category is growing at a rapid clip. It's a jaded view in the sense that I'm cynical about Disney, but it's really not me trying to crap on popular things. There are a lot of popular things that are really, really good. But I know when a movie actually feels special and honest to me, when I feel like the author genuinely had a good reason to make it, and made it because they loved it. And Disney movies don't feel that way to me. They're glossy, and pretty, and impressive, and they know the right things to say, but they're made of plastic instead of flesh.
- JeremySecond 7y ago
  > they're made of plastic instead of flesh Just the words I was looking for.
- thrower123 7y ago
  The insidious thing is that Disney is making an increasing share of all the things, too. I don't understand why they were allowed to buy 20th Century Fox.
  - friedman23 7y ago
    Because when you objectively analyze it, they don't have anything close to a monopoly on content.
    - JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
      How can you even say that? I’m dumbfounded. Only in this era of complete erosion of antitrust could this statement be made. Standard Oil would have been awed by this cornering of the market. https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/companies-disney-owns-worldwide/ https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/comp...
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        Pretty much all movie/TV content comes out of: Disney Comcast AT&T Amazon Apple Netflix CBS Sony Fox Corp It’s a get big or get crushed world right now. Of the latter 4, I wonder who Microsoft/Google/Verizon/Facebook will buy.
        scarface74 7y ago
        Well, seeing that you actually put Apple in that list shows a skewed perspective. As far as getting big or getting crushed - both Blumhouse and Tyler Perry Studios make movies that get wide releases with budgets between $5 and $10 million.
Sendotsh 7y ago
I'm a SW fan, have been my entire life. Not one of the fans that go super-deep into lore and nit-picking every aspect of every movie and debating it all (although I do respect that level of fan too, and think they create some interesting discussions/content), but I've watched every movie a few times, read a heap of the books, play all the games, collect the Lego, etc etc. I think that Disney is doing to SW what they do to everything... they make it appeal to the maximum possible audience for the maximum possible profit. There's no deep desire to create amazing stories, there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. The stuff they make is "good". You'll still pay for it, and enjoy it, but you'll always end up feeling like they could've done better. It's all just formulaic mass-produced share-holder stuff now, but it does the job.
- autoexec 7y ago
  > there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. They used to be much more experimental as an animation studio but some of those projects didn't do as well. It'd be great if they could alternate between telling "safe" stories and passion projects like Fantasia or even films like Tron but I guess it's hard to pitch something risky when you can get a guaranteed hit by doing it by the numbers. The last movie I think they really took a chance with was Treasure Planet and that movie was pitched over and over for more than a decade before they agreed to make it.
  - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
    I wish they'd done a live-action remake of treasure planet, The art direction would really lend itself to Disney's animation capabilities.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    The absence of competition reinforces conservatism. Bluth leaving Disney was the best thing to happen to them.
- mcphage 7y ago
  > I think that Disney is doing to SW what they do to everything... they make it appeal to the maximum possible audience for the maximum possible profit. There's no deep desire to create amazing stories, there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. The stuff they make is "good". You'll still pay for it, and enjoy it, but you'll always end up feeling like they could've done better. For Star Wars, at least, that's a pretty solid step up. I paid for Episodes 1-3, but didn't particularly enjoy them. Episodes 7 & 8 at least left me feeling good about what I just watched, and I quite liked Rogue One (I didn't see it in the theater, though).
autoexec 7y ago
I think it's fair to say that Disney is large enough that it's not only hard to quantify what impact the company itself has on the storytelling that gets done, but it's also hard say how much of the company is doing storytelling at all anymore. They've still got animated features, some TV cartoons, some live action sitcoms, but also theme parks and resorts, a video game studio, a theatrical group, a cruise line, a radio station (and a line up of recording artists), cable channels, retail chains, a timeshare program, and a publishing company. Storytelling factors in some of those somewhere but Disney has moved way beyond it's storytelling roots. I can't even say there's a strong central vision driving their films these days like when Walt was still alive and they were primarily an animation studio or even during their renaissance. When they are storytelling, their successes and failures seem to come down to who they hire or what companies/properties they pick up. I will say that at least on the animation side they seem to stay out of the way of the creative types and give them the freedom to do what they need to. Disney has some terrible business practices, but they do manage to get their hands on some incredibly talented people who have done some really good work over the years.
paulddraper 7y ago
> star wars series Ouch. Good point. Even The Last Jedi trainwreck (RT 44% audience score, record $150M drop after first weekend) STILL made the top 20 all-time grossing films (ignoring inflation). But nerdy stuff is cool, remakes are cool, rebels are cool...it's got fundamentally popular qualities. Put that into a good marketing engine, check the boxes and you've got a money maker.
TulliusCicero 7y ago
20 years from now, there'll be people pointing to now as the Disney golden age, saying, "I don't like all the isekai genemod content they're making these days. I just don't get the appeal of giant catgirls learning to live in an alternate dimension. Disney was better when it was all superheroes and Star Wars."
- paganel 7y ago
  Not sure about that. I remember that in the late '90s - early 2000s people were really hyped up about the animation movies of that era, and rightly so, we're talking about the early Pixar movies, Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" and "Spirited Away", Satoshi Kon's "Paranoia Agent" and "Perfect Blue" or about "Cowboy Bebop", people knew that they were contemporary with really, really great animation movies/series. Almost 20 years have passed since then and nothing similar is being done anymore, at least not in the mainstream.
  - krapp 7y ago
    >Almost 20 years have passed since then and nothing similar is being done anymore, at least not in the mainstream. Bear in mind that over 20 years, a lot of what was groundbreaking in terms of animation quality has become mainstream, so it's not surprising that people wouldn't be as floored by Toy Story 4 as they were by Toy Story. Anime was a relatively new phenomenon for many in the West back then as well - Cowboy Bebop was one of the "gateway drugs" into anime for a lot of people. I wouldn't assume that work of high quality is no longer being done - I've heard people talk about Your Name as if Makoto Shinkai were the next Hayao Miyazaki for instance - it just doesn't stand out in a crowd the way it once did, now that anime is no longer as niche and people have services like Crunchyroll.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    People absolutely talk about great more recent animated movies, like Your Name, Into the Spider-Verse, and Kubo and the Two Strings. Princes Mononoke is actually my favorite movie, I obviously agree that it's really excellent, but objectively I think Spider-Verse is just as good, even if it doesn't fit my preferences quite as much. For TV series, Mob Psycho 100 is absolutely top tier, I'd put it against Cowboy Bebop easily. Loved Bebop, but I think MP100 is the better series overall, both for story and animation quality. This is a combination of rose-tinted glasses, plus things accumulating social value over time. Eminem didn't rap about playing N64 games until long, long past the N64's heydey; it wasn't cool to mention that back in 1998. Pokemon is mainstream with adults now, but it was for real (young) nerds and dorks back when it started. Retro games are currently cool with those who scoffed at them when they were new. This phenomenon is especially prevalent with 'cult hits', like Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, which has a much more positive reputation now than it did at its own launch.
scarface74 7y ago
Well, if “most people you talk to” think it isn’t good and all of the new Star Wars movies (except for Solo) have done well, have you thought that your anecdotal survey of people you know may not be relevant?
TheHypnotist 7y ago
Considering the last iteration of Star Wars (the prequels), i'd say it's very hard to agree with you.
Game_Ender 7y ago
I think you missed a key section in the article where he talks about how miss-steps with a franchise can build, and that Disney made many miss-steps with Star Wars. He wrote a whole article about it [0], which he claims they: - rushed the films out - lacked singular vision to keep them consistent - subverted audience expectations in a bad way, re Luke Skywalker - retread too much of the same old ground leading to inability to generate momentum (ie. killing off characters in Rogue One). 0 - https://redef.com/original/star-wars-fatigue-is-a-myth-but-disneys-mistakes-were-real-costly-and-avoidable https://redef.com/original/star-wars-fatigue-is-a-myth-but-d...
EricE 7y ago
> I don't like a majority of what they create anymore, nor how they treat a majority of their employees. The contrast to this is stark after having watched "Imagineering" on Disney+ the other night. It reminded me about why I was a rabid Disney fan growing up - the values that Walt insisted on and why these days I'm more "meh"; what they have evolved into the longer Walt hasn't been around to keep people grounded on what really matters. It's pretty sad you can go from a company where employees invested their own money to keep construction of Disneyland going to the exploitative mess of a company that exists today :(

danShumway 7y ago

> I respect their ability to make a ton of money, but I don't like a majority of what they create anymore, nor how they treat a majority of their employees. That's a really good summation of my views on Disney. It's obvious they know how to build consistently polished stories that will be consistently enjoyable to a wide audience. I respect that. But it's not clear to me that's a goal worth pursuing, or that the artistic value of their movies has gone up because of that. It's good to have some media that's safe and predictable and that is primarily motivated by market trends. But when that's all a company is making, then behind that nice facade lies a deeply cynical way of looking at the world, where creative choices are calculated for broad appeal rather than for their inherent value. I'm not going to say that's all Disney makes. Just that the percentage of films Disney is making that fall into that category is growing at a rapid clip. It's a jaded view in the sense that I'm cynical about Disney, but it's really not me trying to crap on popular things. There are a lot of popular things that are really, really good. But I know when a movie actually feels special and honest to me, when I feel like the author genuinely had a good reason to make it, and made it because they loved it. And Disney movies don't feel that way to me. They're glossy, and pretty, and impressive, and they know the right things to say, but they're made of plastic instead of flesh.

JeremySecond 7y ago
> they're made of plastic instead of flesh Just the words I was looking for.
thrower123 7y ago
The insidious thing is that Disney is making an increasing share of all the things, too. I don't understand why they were allowed to buy 20th Century Fox.
- friedman23 7y ago
  Because when you objectively analyze it, they don't have anything close to a monopoly on content.
  - JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
    How can you even say that? I’m dumbfounded. Only in this era of complete erosion of antitrust could this statement be made. Standard Oil would have been awed by this cornering of the market. https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/companies-disney-owns-worldwide/ https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/comp...
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Pretty much all movie/TV content comes out of: Disney Comcast AT&T Amazon Apple Netflix CBS Sony Fox Corp It’s a get big or get crushed world right now. Of the latter 4, I wonder who Microsoft/Google/Verizon/Facebook will buy.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Well, seeing that you actually put Apple in that list shows a skewed perspective. As far as getting big or getting crushed - both Blumhouse and Tyler Perry Studios make movies that get wide releases with budgets between $5 and $10 million.

Sendotsh 7y ago

I'm a SW fan, have been my entire life. Not one of the fans that go super-deep into lore and nit-picking every aspect of every movie and debating it all (although I do respect that level of fan too, and think they create some interesting discussions/content), but I've watched every movie a few times, read a heap of the books, play all the games, collect the Lego, etc etc. I think that Disney is doing to SW what they do to everything... they make it appeal to the maximum possible audience for the maximum possible profit. There's no deep desire to create amazing stories, there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. The stuff they make is "good". You'll still pay for it, and enjoy it, but you'll always end up feeling like they could've done better. It's all just formulaic mass-produced share-holder stuff now, but it does the job.

autoexec 7y ago
> there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. They used to be much more experimental as an animation studio but some of those projects didn't do as well. It'd be great if they could alternate between telling "safe" stories and passion projects like Fantasia or even films like Tron but I guess it's hard to pitch something risky when you can get a guaranteed hit by doing it by the numbers. The last movie I think they really took a chance with was Treasure Planet and that movie was pitched over and over for more than a decade before they agreed to make it.
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  I wish they'd done a live-action remake of treasure planet, The art direction would really lend itself to Disney's animation capabilities.
- ethbro 7y ago
  The absence of competition reinforces conservatism. Bluth leaving Disney was the best thing to happen to them.
mcphage 7y ago
> I think that Disney is doing to SW what they do to everything... they make it appeal to the maximum possible audience for the maximum possible profit. There's no deep desire to create amazing stories, there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. The stuff they make is "good". You'll still pay for it, and enjoy it, but you'll always end up feeling like they could've done better. For Star Wars, at least, that's a pretty solid step up. I paid for Episodes 1-3, but didn't particularly enjoy them. Episodes 7 & 8 at least left me feeling good about what I just watched, and I quite liked Rogue One (I didn't see it in the theater, though).

autoexec 7y ago

I think it's fair to say that Disney is large enough that it's not only hard to quantify what impact the company itself has on the storytelling that gets done, but it's also hard say how much of the company is doing storytelling at all anymore. They've still got animated features, some TV cartoons, some live action sitcoms, but also theme parks and resorts, a video game studio, a theatrical group, a cruise line, a radio station (and a line up of recording artists), cable channels, retail chains, a timeshare program, and a publishing company. Storytelling factors in some of those somewhere but Disney has moved way beyond it's storytelling roots. I can't even say there's a strong central vision driving their films these days like when Walt was still alive and they were primarily an animation studio or even during their renaissance. When they are storytelling, their successes and failures seem to come down to who they hire or what companies/properties they pick up. I will say that at least on the animation side they seem to stay out of the way of the creative types and give them the freedom to do what they need to. Disney has some terrible business practices, but they do manage to get their hands on some incredibly talented people who have done some really good work over the years.

paulddraper 7y ago

> star wars series Ouch. Good point. Even The Last Jedi trainwreck (RT 44% audience score, record $150M drop after first weekend) STILL made the top 20 all-time grossing films (ignoring inflation). But nerdy stuff is cool, remakes are cool, rebels are cool...it's got fundamentally popular qualities. Put that into a good marketing engine, check the boxes and you've got a money maker.

TulliusCicero 7y ago

20 years from now, there'll be people pointing to now as the Disney golden age, saying, "I don't like all the isekai genemod content they're making these days. I just don't get the appeal of giant catgirls learning to live in an alternate dimension. Disney was better when it was all superheroes and Star Wars."

paganel 7y ago
Not sure about that. I remember that in the late '90s - early 2000s people were really hyped up about the animation movies of that era, and rightly so, we're talking about the early Pixar movies, Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" and "Spirited Away", Satoshi Kon's "Paranoia Agent" and "Perfect Blue" or about "Cowboy Bebop", people knew that they were contemporary with really, really great animation movies/series. Almost 20 years have passed since then and nothing similar is being done anymore, at least not in the mainstream.
- krapp 7y ago
  >Almost 20 years have passed since then and nothing similar is being done anymore, at least not in the mainstream. Bear in mind that over 20 years, a lot of what was groundbreaking in terms of animation quality has become mainstream, so it's not surprising that people wouldn't be as floored by Toy Story 4 as they were by Toy Story. Anime was a relatively new phenomenon for many in the West back then as well - Cowboy Bebop was one of the "gateway drugs" into anime for a lot of people. I wouldn't assume that work of high quality is no longer being done - I've heard people talk about Your Name as if Makoto Shinkai were the next Hayao Miyazaki for instance - it just doesn't stand out in a crowd the way it once did, now that anime is no longer as niche and people have services like Crunchyroll.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  People absolutely talk about great more recent animated movies, like Your Name, Into the Spider-Verse, and Kubo and the Two Strings. Princes Mononoke is actually my favorite movie, I obviously agree that it's really excellent, but objectively I think Spider-Verse is just as good, even if it doesn't fit my preferences quite as much. For TV series, Mob Psycho 100 is absolutely top tier, I'd put it against Cowboy Bebop easily. Loved Bebop, but I think MP100 is the better series overall, both for story and animation quality. This is a combination of rose-tinted glasses, plus things accumulating social value over time. Eminem didn't rap about playing N64 games until long, long past the N64's heydey; it wasn't cool to mention that back in 1998. Pokemon is mainstream with adults now, but it was for real (young) nerds and dorks back when it started. Retro games are currently cool with those who scoffed at them when they were new. This phenomenon is especially prevalent with 'cult hits', like Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, which has a much more positive reputation now than it did at its own launch.

scarface74 7y ago

Well, if “most people you talk to” think it isn’t good and all of the new Star Wars movies (except for Solo) have done well, have you thought that your anecdotal survey of people you know may not be relevant?

TheHypnotist 7y ago

Considering the last iteration of Star Wars (the prequels), i'd say it's very hard to agree with you.

Game_Ender 7y ago

I think you missed a key section in the article where he talks about how miss-steps with a franchise can build, and that Disney made many miss-steps with Star Wars. He wrote a whole article about it [0], which he claims they: - rushed the films out - lacked singular vision to keep them consistent - subverted audience expectations in a bad way, re Luke Skywalker - retread too much of the same old ground leading to inability to generate momentum (ie. killing off characters in Rogue One). 0 - https://redef.com/original/star-wars-fatigue-is-a-myth-but-disneys-mistakes-were-real-costly-and-avoidable https://redef.com/original/star-wars-fatigue-is-a-myth-but-d...

EricE 7y ago

> I don't like a majority of what they create anymore, nor how they treat a majority of their employees. The contrast to this is stark after having watched "Imagineering" on Disney+ the other night. It reminded me about why I was a rabid Disney fan growing up - the values that Walt insisted on and why these days I'm more "meh"; what they have evolved into the longer Walt hasn't been around to keep people grounded on what really matters. It's pretty sad you can go from a company where employees invested their own money to keep construction of Disneyland going to the exploitative mess of a company that exists today :(