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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38487 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Here was the list I was using, pulling the comparable big-budget entries (although missed Alice in Wonderland from 2010 which I guess actually was the success that caused them to lean into this approach).

Mulan is a weird one that just can't be compared box-office-wise, because it was scheduled for March 2020 and went through a number of postponements until the theatrical release was simply scrapped and it was dumped on streaming.

The point is that for many people who haven't been paying as much attention, one might think that TLM is comparable to Cowboy Bebop or Dragonball and maybe people just don't like these. But we're a decade into this being one major pillar of disney's huge blockbuster release strategy (right up there with marvel & star wars) which had led to their box office domination high-point by 2019. The whole 'Walt Disney Pictures' division basically transformed into just making these, and up until the pandemic I don't think it could be described as anything other than an insane success. So now if it's starting to falter like star wars, marvel, pixar, and walt disney animation all are, that's definitely a possible culture-war hot spot.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170322204733/http://deadline.com/2017/03/beauty-and-the-beast-sean-bailey-disney-emma-watson-1202047710/

Disney’s live-action division, which once struggled through an identity crisis and pricey flops like John Carter and The Lone Ranger, has found its sweet spot. The musical casts a light on an unsung part of the Disney moviemaking machine that has learned to lean in heavily on the live-action adaptations of beloved Disney-branded animated films. The label, which had two Pirates Of The Caribbean sequels in the billion-dollar club, notched its third with the Tim Burton-directed Johnny Depp-starrer Alice In Wonderland. It now seems a matter of time before Beauty And The Beast becomes its fourth. While a sequel to Alice failed — it was made even when Burton said no — The Jungle Book nearly cracked the billion-dollar mark with $966 million in global ticket sales.

Beauty And The Beast is just the latest example of a philosophical change within Disney’s most overshadowed silo. The baseball equivalent of Bailey’s mission statement is basically, be disciplined enough not to swing at bad pitches outside the strike zone. That wheelhouse has increasingly become about recapturing the animation library magic with live-action films, ideally supplying one or more of the three tentpole-sized annual films the division generates (supplemented by one or two films whose under $100 million budgets are far lower than the big pictures carry).

...

In a conversation Monday, Bailey credited the division’s escalating success rate to the silo system instituted by Disney chairman Bob Iger and managed by Alan Horn, the former longtime Warner Bros chief who stabilized a static operation and infused his own moral sensibilities on the slate. It is a program where each division stays in its own lane and isn’t pressured to make more movies than its marketing machine can handle, while maintaining quality controls. This differs from some studios that seem to be bent on filling a high number of films on a slate. Disney’s annual collective output usually doesn’t exceed a dozen. But eight of those Disney films are global blockbusters that suck all the oxygen out of the box office when they are released.

The collective results have turned Disney into the most consistently dominant studio Hollywood has seen in the modern era, to the point where it now dictates the release calendar, at least the most desirable summer and holiday corridors. Date a Pixar, Marvel superhero, Star Wars sequel/spinoff, Disney Animation or live-action animated film remake, and it is likely that other studios will then have to work around it.

Personally I think the only one of any of these I've seen is the Jungle Book, just because it was that strange situation where two different studios put out new jungle book adaptations at the same time.

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