It is a changing of the guards. Disney’s end-of-2022 looks far stronger on Disney+ than it does in theaters. Has their streaming hit its stride?
Last night I was in a major rush. At the same time, I knew that I wanted to get a video out on Twitter detailing the crazy situation Disney finds itself in for the second-half of November through the end of December. Unfortunately for me, I concluded that if I went a few seconds over the ten minute mark it would be okay… and that turned out not to be true. Although Twitter didn’t crash last night as some over at WDWNT were thinking (along with plenty more online crazies), Twitter was rock-solid in preventing a more-than-ten-minutes video from being uploaded. With no time and no place to trim the video, I ended up having to mulligan.
So let’s dive into the meat and potatoes of what I was aiming to discuss last night.
Strange World is coming out for Thanksgiving Week and it’s possibly the first time ever that we can conclude a Disney animated film will flop at the box office. Let that sink in. It’s been ninety years of animated films from this one company and this is the first movie that is dead on arrival. Now the tricky part about that is that an odd situation has arisen out of Disney’s own misfortune. It’s the sort of scenario we haven’t seen since Rise of Skywalker’s poor box office performance propelled Frozen 2 to better box office results as families were desperate just to see something over a lackluster holiday season. In the case of Strange World, it may actually be lifted to a better-than-expected opening by Black Panther 2’s precipitous box office crash (as covered in our Spotlight Video by Valliant Renegade).
Even if Strange World performs better than expected, it still will almost certainly be a flop. And if Black Panther Wakanda Forever keeps dropping, it too will be a flop.
Yet while The Walt Disney Company is struggling at the box office mightily, the company has a new strategy that seems to be paying off like mad for streaming. After the tremendous success of Hocus Pocus 2 — a film with a $40 million budget that crushed Thor Love and Thunder in Disney+ viewership — the company is coming out with TWO additional nostalgia-driven properties that should drive ratings for weeks to come. Disenchanted is a sequel to Enchanted from a decade ago. Amy Adams is back and the soundtrack just might be as good, or better, than Encanto. If you haven’t heard Idina Menzel singing Love Power on the soundtrack, you’re missing out on what might be the next big thing. It’s not a song that I’m going to be jamming to in the car, but I guarantee you it will be the finale to multiple Disney fireworks shows in the future.
So while Disenchanted may be at the cusp of being Disney’s first real Disney+ exclusive movie phenom, they also have The Santa Clauses exploding in ratings through December. I saw the first episode and thought it was weak… but it doesn’t matter. It only has to be good enough to keep kids glued to the television and families will come along with them. They’re already talking about a second season, so Disney is likely feeling confident. And it didn’t go past me that Tim Allen managed to slip in a conservative joke to the first episode. It reminded me of the youth pastor quip in Spider-Man No Way Home — a reminder to conservative families that everything won’t be at their expense or the expense of their values. I’m not cheering on the joke or taking a position, I’m just noting from an analytical standpoint that it’s there and it’s purposeful.
"A truly weird thing to put in a kid's series" https://t.co/EORjW9ugu5
— NME (@NME) November 17, 2022
Surprise! Tim Allen made a Christmas joke as Santa Claus and the woke mob went nuts. https://t.co/VigLsuiVmG
— OutKick (@Outkick) November 17, 2022
Note I’m putting both points of view so you can gather how either side is responding.
It’s a really weird time for Disney and a strange flipping of power balance. The box office juggernaut has seen plenty of flops and break-evens at movies over the last three years. Now, this may be the first time in a sea change for the future where Disney has more exciting content on the small screen than the big screen through the end of the year.
My one caveat: never count out James Cameron, even if it seems like all is lost. And it sure seems that way for Avatar.
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