Disney: The Latest Casualty of Woke

The Walt Disney Company is in deep trouble, says Spiked‘s Lauren Smith. Its last four high-profile releases bombed at the box office, losing over $1 billion between them. Here’s an excerpt.

Once Hollywood’s most successful film studio, Disney was dethroned last year by Universal Pictures.

The reason for Disney’s decline? It has gone woke, to an almost comical degree. Last year, the company admitted to investors that there was a growing “misalignment” between Disney’s output and “public and consumer tastes and preferences for entertainment”. “Consumers’ perceptions of our position on matters of public interest,” it said, are risking the company’s reputation and profits.

Viewing figures and box-office sales spell this out clearly. Audiences are growing sick of the woke slop that Disney has been serving them. They are tired with scripts that are weighed down by clunky political messaging. They are fed up with storylines being mangled to fit ‘progressive’ narratives. They are irked by Disney’s desire to lecture them instead of entertain them.

Even Disney franchises that were once guaranteed money-makers have struggled to excite audiences of late. Marvel Studios, which is owned by Disney, used to regularly break box-office records with its billion-dollar superhero films. As recently as 2019, Avengers: Endgame became the second-highest grossing movie of all time. But last year, Marvel registered its worst-ever year at the box office.

Its biggest flop last year was The Marvels, which failed to break even. One reason it probably did so badly was that it features none of the characters that audiences are most familiar with. Instead of beloved, well-established heroes like Captain America or Iron Man, The Marvels focuses on an ensemble cast of mainly diverse newcomers. So we follow the adventures of Ms. Marvel, a Muslim teen superhero from the Ms. Marvel TV miniseries, and Monica Rambeau, a black female side character from the WandaVision miniseries.

Practically all new Disney films place a huge emphasis on this kind of diversity casting. Karey Burke, president of Disney’s General Entertainment Content division, said in a leaked video in 2022 that she wants 50% of all Disney characters to be either LGBT or from an ethnic-minority background. Disney Television Animation executive producer Latoya Raveneau has similarly said she is “adding queerness” wherever she can to the shows she oversees.

Worth reading in full.