Until recently, the Disney studio seemed unstoppable on its way to dominate Hollywood.
But in 2023, its box office earnings plummeted, and the magic wore off.
Where exactly did it go wrong?
The year 2023 was supposed to be magical for The Walt Disney Company.
Walt and Roy Disney founded the studio in 1923, and many films, books and events are planned to celebrate its centenary.
- Keira Knightley banned "The Little Mermaid" from her daughters
- How Mickey Mouse was making brandy and listening to Radio Belgrade
- After 100 years, Minnie Mouse changes her dress for pants
Recent cartoons such as Ice kingdom i Moana proved that the animation division was in full bloom, and various mergers with other firms gave the company control over franchises such as Marvel and Pixar films, and Steeringthese zvezda.
"It was an amazing collection of brands in one place," says Charles Grant, box office success editor at Screen magazine International.
"Disney looked unstoppable in 2019."
And indeed, seven out of ten on the list of the top 10 most successful films in the world were from Disney productions, each of them earning more than a billion dollars at the box office.
If it seemed unlikely that 2023 would not be so successful, there was certainly hope that it would not be far from that.
Instead, 2023 became known as the year the magic of the studio healed.
At the time of writing, the three biggest world hits are Barbi, Super Mario Bros. i Oppenheimer, all works of Disney's rivals.
The so-called "Mouse house" is represented by Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in fourth place and with a feature remake Little mermaids in the ninth, but the misses greatly outnumbered the hits.
marvels was the lowest-grossing Marvel Studios film of all time.
It was, Gantt told BBC Culture, "an absolute disaster, and a reminder to studio bosses that just because a film made more than a billion dollars worldwide (as Captain Marvel 2019) does not automatically mean that the audience is eager for a sequel."
This year's second Marvel entry, Antman and the Wasp: Quantum mania, was a complete disappointment.
Haunted House was a real blunder.
Indiana Jones and the Artifact of Destiny he earned half as much Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 2008. years.
A Pixar cartoon Elemental it had a dismal opening weekend and, although its fortunes have since turned, Pixar chairman Jim Morris was none too happy when he said in August: "According to the box office numbers we're looking at now, it should make it back in theaters."
"This will definitely be a profitable movie for Disney."
A disappointing year is over By desire, a cartoon made especially to mark a century of Disney animation.
Audiences were in no mood to join in the celebration, and the film flopped on its first weekend Napoleon i The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Songbird and the Snake.
"It's a far, far cry from Disney's pre-pandemic Thanksgiving premieres," she wrote Rubin in Varajeti.
Gant points out that the company's recent kickback "may have been exaggerated" and that some of it "wasn't all that bad".
But this is the first year since 2014 (excluding the pandemic hiatus) that none of Disney's films have crossed the $XNUMX billion mark.
It turns out that when you see a star and make a wish, not all your dreams always come true.
Possible reasons for suffering
How did 2023 go so wrong?
Commentators have been scratching their heads for weeks Mouse houses, singling out several possible factors.
The key is that the covid-19 pandemic has accustomed people to watching movies at home instead of in theaters, and since Disney has a streaming service, everyone knows where to find his works.
If you're already a Disney+ subscriber, the logic goes, why would you buy a movie ticket that you can watch for free a month or two later?
Then there is "superhero fatigue", the reaction of the public "a lot more" to the wave of adaptations of second-rate comic book heroes - and this phenomenon also affected DC/Warner films Blue Beetle, Flash i Shazam!Wrath of the Gods, just like Marvel.
But there's another, more important explanation for Disney's woes this year.
Those movies just weren't good enough.
As diverse as they were, one thing they all had in common was their sloppiness: weak concepts, unconvincing visuals, and lame plots that must have been obvious to anyone watching.
As he noted Brennan Klein in Screen rent, Desire was the first Disney animated film to be labeled "rotten" on the views aggregator R since Chicken files of 2005..
And it wasn't a problem unique to 2023.
Last year's Disney sci-fi cartoon Wonderful world and the Pixar spinoff Toy stories Lighter, failed for the same reason.
But this year, film after film had glaring flaws that turned off audiences and critics alike.
Ignore the pandemic and superhero saturation or the appeal of streaming; whatever the circumstances, the few people who looked Desire or marvels they probably felt they deserved to be hits that would conquer the world box office.
This year, "Misja kuća" offered everything the same as before, but the audience didn't want it anymore.
If anything tied the below-average quality of those films together, it was how backward they looked.
Perhaps the studio heads were too burdened by the company's centennial, but they seemed determined to live on their former glory rather than try something creative.
They invested everything in nostalgia, at the expense of everything else.
The tagline on most Disney movie posters could have been: "Just like something you've seen before, only worse."
This complacent resting on one's laurels was in stark contrast to the Barbi i Oppenheimer.
One of these films jumped around in time while trying to figure out why the human race was so determined to destroy itself.
Another used a child's doll to mock the patriarchy and ended with a visit to the gynecologist. David Fir of Rolling Stone magazine called Barbi "the most subversive blockbuster of the 21st century".
And Disney?
"The Mouse House" offered everything the same as before, but the audience no longer wanted it.
That might come as a surprise when you consider that the company's last golden year, 2019, was marked by sequels and remakes.
Seven Disney films are in the top tenthe Avengers: Game over, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Ice Kingdom 2, Toy story 4, Lion King i Aladin.
Then again, while all of these films were derivative on some level, they promised audiences a window into something new.
Avengers: Endgame i Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker were the long-awaited final chapters of epic multi-part stories.
Lion King had photorealistic animals.
Ice Kingdom 2 was a big-budget sequel to a recent Disney cartoon, something that had never been attempted before.
A state of creative inertia
Compare all that to this year's crop of Disney movies.
The return of an aged Indiana Jones?
We already had that in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - and even then it wasn't anything particularly attractive.
The Little Mermaid?
The freshness of live-action remakes has lost steam, and since this one featured talking sea creatures, it was obvious from the first trailers that they would have been better off leaving it as a cartoon.
Elemental?
Pixar's writers often envision toys, cars, and emotions as people, so imagining the classic elements of fire, water, earth, and air as people was somewhat expected.
Desirea it was neither a sequel nor a remake, but it was still too anticipated for its own good.
Disney has given us too many well-intentioned, determined but clumsy fairy tale princesses in the past decade, and the latest of them, Asha, was surrounded by Peter Pan references, Mary Poppins, Pinocchio, and much more.
"Her reference to history only serves to remind us how unsurpassed Disney animation used to be - even more recently, at the time Ice kingdom - without offering us any roadside hints of hope for the future," he writes Donald Clark in the Irish Times.
And what about the Marvel movies?
The trouble is that they are Avengers: Endgame from 2019 rounded off a decade of interconnected blockbusters.
It was the concluding chapter in the so-called The saga of infinity, so everything since has felt like a post script or a footnote: worth a look if you're a fan of the title characters, but no longer a key part of the larger ongoing narrative.
Fortunately for Disney, Guardians of the Galaxy they've always seemed largely separate from the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so the third installment could be experienced as the finale of a distinctly separate trilogy.
Forwards Ant-man i Captain Marvel still seemed like they were trying to get over it Saga of infinity instead of moving on.
However, if there is a simple reason for all of Disney's woes, the good news is that there is also a simple solution to them.
All the studio needs to do is make better movies.
OK, easier said than done, but this year's setbacks should at least encourage the company to be a little more adventurous.
We're still talking about a mega-corporation, of course, so "adventurous" is a relative term in its case.
We can expect at least the superhero side of things to be shaken up by the revival The Fantastic Four i X-Men, the Marvel properties that were once owned by 20th Century Fox and have now been swallowed up by Disney.
We can expect a feature remake Moan, the first to feature live-action voice actors from the original cartoon.
Disney may not be anything particularly original for the foreseeable future, but it could be unoriginal in some very intriguing ways.
And that might be enough to bring back even a spark of magic.
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