El Squibbonator

How would it be any different from buying Fox?

What makes you say never?

I honestly don't think we'll be seeing another big acquisition from Disney fro a very long time. The company is $45 billion in debt, both from the pandemic and from the Fox purchase, and it's going to take years for them to be in pure profit mode again to the point where they can even think about buying another big company. I saw one guy on another forum speculate that their next big acquisition would be Sony Pictures. Given Disney's present state, I'd sooner believe the rumors of them being bought out by Apple.

So anything not explicitly cancelled can be considered safe. . . for the time being.

Related to my earlier question, I remember seeing an article back in August saying that most of the layoffs and cancellations would mostly be over by the end of October. Given that it's now almost December and I haven't heard of any new cancellations for a while, what am I to make of this?

That's what I suspected. For there to be 38 shows that were cancelled outright (as opposed to being removed from HBO Max regardless of their status), they'd have to have even more shows in production than that. And I don't think they've ever had that many shows in production at once, period.

Who would replace him, though? WB just went through a huge merger, which is the reason he's in charge in the first place.

I'm confused about something. Yesterday I saw a tweet dated to November 2nd, claiming that WB had cancelled 38 shows as a result of their merger. I haven't seen that number anywhere else, but I have seen, in an article from August, that they had removed 37 shows from HBO Max. The question is, which of those descriptions is accurate, assuming they're talking about the same thing? The numbers in the two accounts are just one away from each other, so I'm pretty sure it's just a counting error. The question is, which one has the error? I'm skeptical of the first number, because I have a hard time believing WB even had 38 shows in production at the same time to begin with. Wikipedia tells me the number is closer to 15, but if you add in shows that were already complete but have been removed from HBO Max, you get somewhere around 37 or 38. So which is it? I also saw an article way back in August saying that the layoffs and cancellations were expected to mostly be over by the end of October; can anyone confirm or deny that?

You take that back! Big Hero 6 was awesome!

I didn't say I expected it to make 500-600M. I said that's how much it probably would have made if there was no pandemic, and Disney actually went out of their way to promote it. Obviously, neither of those things is true. The way things are, it'll probably struggle to break the 150M mark. Maybe it'll make it past 200M, the way Encanto did, but I doubt it.

That's my theory too. I know a lot of people are comparing this movie to Atlantis and Treasure Planet, but I think a better comparison might actually be Big Hero 6, Disney's last non-musical animated action/adventure movie. I seem to recall there being a lot more promotion for Big Hero 6 than there currently is for Strange World, not just on the company's part but from fans too (Baymax memes and the like). But we're not getting that here. If it were promoted more heavily, I could easily see Strange World performing somewhere between Wreck-it Ralph and Big Hero 6, earning somewhere between $500 and $600 million worldwide. But that's not what we're seeing. It's not like Disney to wait until so late to advertise one of their movies, or to put out so little promotion. The only explanation I can think of is that they're deliberately sabotaging it because there's some element of it they disapprove of. It's not like they'll ever admit it, of course. But this sort of thing has happened before. When The Owl House was cancelled on the Disney Channel, the official reason they gave was that its serialized format didn't fit in with the channel's other programming. But no one-- especially not the show's own creator-- believed that. Especially because Amphibia, another serialized show that aired on Disney Channel at the same time, was allowed to finish its run with a full three seasons. The only real difference between the two shows, content-wise, was that The Owl House had queer main characters. So where does this leave any future projects at Disney with LGBTQ main characters? In truth, I fear for their survival.

Like I said, they seem to be intentionally sabotaging it. At least Atlantis and Treasure Planet got plenty of promotion while they were in theaters, not that it helped.

I didn't say they were all like that. But I know I was, and most of my friends were too. And I think that speaks to why these movies rarely do well.

I know the guy who asked the question asked me to leave out other studios, but Pixar has WALL-E and Dreamworks has Home and arguably Monsters Vs. Aliens as well. And while it's kind of in an odd position regarding the whole sci-fi-vs-fantasy thing, and was made before Disney bought the franchise, it would be remiss of me not to mention Star Wars: The Clone Wars. But that's still not very many. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the reason we get so few animated science-fiction movies is because in the early years of animation, sci-fi wasn't a genre any of the big animation studios (Disney, Warner Bros., Fliescher, etc.) considered worth their time. For better or worse, the works of these studios informed the public of what animation was "good for", and that evidently did not include science-fiction. Bob Clampett tried to pitch an animated adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess Of Mars to Warner Bros. in 1936, but it didn't work; maybe if it had, animated science-fiction movies would be more of a "thing". As I mentioned before, Walt Disney himself was big on promoting science. But he seemed to hold science-fiction-- or at least "futuristic" science fiction, the sort that comes to mind when most people hear the phrase-- in rather low regard. Here's the "Mars And Beyond" documentary Disney hosted; there's an entire segment basically mocking the pulp sci-fi that was popular at the time. I get the impression from it that those were not the kind of movies Walt wanted to be making. And when one considers that, for so much of its later history, Disney labored under the question of "what would Walt have done", can you really blame them for not wanting to venture into the sci-fi genre? Another point to consider is that many of Disney's sci-fi movies-- animated or otherwise-- failed because they were pitched at an audience predisposed to ignore them. By the 1970s, Disney had acquired a reputation, not wholly unwarranted, mind you, for being saccharine and childish. In other words, kid's stuff. But movies like Tron, The Black Hole, Atlantis, Treasure Planet, and John Carter were meant to expand Disney's demographic to older thrill-seekers, especially teenage boys. While it seems as if Disney can do anything (a statement that seems a lot more ominous now than it did a few years ago), males ages 12-20 are the white whale the company has always failed to catch. Your average teenage boy wouldn't watch a Disney movie even if you paid him, and I know that because I was a teenage boy once and that's how we think. Disney seems to have had two major attempts to attract this audience, neither of which truly succeeded. Both coincided with times that the company was in poor financial straits. The first was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with movies like The Black Hole, Tron, and The Watcher In The Woods. The second was in the early 2000s. It gave us Atlantis and Treasure Planet, as well as the abortive "Disney Heroes" toy-line (intended to be the male counterpart of the Disney Princesses). There was Pirates of the Caribbean, admittedly, but that was based on a famous Disneyland ride, so it didn't really count. The persistent failure to attract the teen male audience was a factor in Disney acquiring Marvel, Lucasfilm, and eventually Fox; all companies with a history of appealing to that demographic. So where do we go from here? Will Disney ever make a successful "in-house" sci-fi movie aimed at this audience? The bottom line is, I don't know. Bob Chapek certainly doesn't seem interested in it, so I wouldn't bet on it happening anytime in the next few years. But beyond that, who knows?

There have actually been more than you might think. Off the top of my head, the ones I can name are Lilo and Stitch, Escape To Witch Mountain, The Absent-Minded Professor and its remake Flubber, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids movies, and, if you count 19th-century sci-fi, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. I might also mention Big Hero 6, though since it's loosely based on a Marvel comic I'm not sure how much it counts. Finally, I suppose if Tron counts as sci-fi, Wreck-it Ralph ought to as well. Notably, most of the above are comedies, or at least have strong comedy elements. Disney's reluctance to embrace "serious" science-fiction, outside of its Marvel and Star Wars subsidiaries, is actually kind of surprising when one considers that Walt Disney himself was pretty big on bringing science to the masses. Not only did he dedicate a whole section of Disneyland-- Tomorrowland-- to the future of technology, but he also hosted the documentary Man in Space with Wernher von Braun, which got millions of Americans excited about space travel. But even compared to Atlantis and Treasure Planet, Strange World is getting very little promotion. I was 9 years old when Treasure Planet came out, and I remember seeing ads for it everywhere-- on TV, in magazines, in stores, you name it. There were Happy Meal toys at McDonald's. Disney was promoting the hell out of that movie, it's just that not many people cared. With Strange World, on the other hand, we aren't getting that. It's like they're trying to bury it on purpose, like they have no faith in it. One rather disturbing theory I saw on Reddit was that Bob Chapek is trying to sabotage the movie's release because he personally disapproves of its gay main character. Given that his tenure has already seen the cancellation of Nimona, The Owl House, and Everyone's Talking About Jamie, as well as Lightyear being similarly underpromoted, it seems as plausible to me as anything else .

My big concern is that if this movie flops, it's going to scare Disney away from making non-musical action/adventure animated movies for a very long time.

This needs some context. See, the idea that Cartoon Network Studios was closing down completely seems to have originated on an animation news site called Cartoon Brew, which is widely read among animation enthusiasts. But it also has a long history of being overly sensationalistic and even outright untruthful in its journalism. So a lot of people saw Cartoon Brew's coverage of the story and immediately jumped to the worst-case scenario. It got so out of hand that an animator working at Cartoon Network (on their upcoming show Invincible Fight Girl, to be exact) sent an angrily-worded tweet to Cartoon Brew journalist Amid Amidi basically telling him to knock it off.

And now, after lengthy consideration, my Top 25 favorites! Some of these movies aren't ones I picked for the review thread, that's because I ultimately liked them more. 25. Invader Zim 24. Raven Island 23. Scales of Justice 22. Seals of Honor 21. Revenge Ex 20. The Mirage 19. War on Drugs: America's Modern Conflict 18. Super Monkey Ball 17. Warmth 16. Runaway Train 15. Tumbleweed 14. Kirby and the King's Caper 13. Red Rabbit 12. Vixen and the Castle of Doom 11. Sleepy Hollow 10. Tongue Tied 9. The Next Good Day 8. Heremias 7. Devil Bean 6. Matilda and the Night Children 5. Grace and Mercy 4. Among Us 3. Acne 2. Scythe 1. The Talons of the Hawk

With Big Hero 6, I don't think that many people were actually aware it was based on a comic book.

For those of you saying this is going to bomb. . . I'm just curious, but why? It's not like Disney hasn't had success with more adventure-oriented animated movies before. Big Hero 6 was exactly that, and the new trailer even promotes it as being "from the director of Big Hero 6", so they're definitely trying to play that connection up. Is it because the main character is gay? While that might have contributed some to Lightyear's failure, I doubt it was the only factor, or even the biggest factor. Lightyear came out the same week as Jurassic World Dominion, and Top Gun: Maverick was still going strong. Plus, it didn't have much connection to the Toy Story movies outside the name. Removing the lesbian kiss from Lightyear wouldn't have changed any of that. Strange World is the first new animated family movie to be released since DC Super-Pets at the end of July, and with Avatar: The Way of Water and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish not coming out until December 16th, it should have theaters more or less to itself for at least three weeks. This is in stark contrast to Treasure Planet, which came out the same weekend as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Given the lack of other family movies in Strange World's timeframe, I think a $50 million domestic opening weekend and a global gross above $300 million is doable.

I could have sworn I saw it on the release calendar. Should I swap it out for another movie?

December

Do we know what this movie's budget is? I want to say it's probably somewhere in the territory of $175-200 million.

That's why this movie needs to be successful. If it's not, we won't get any more openly gay main characters in Disney films for a very long time. We already know the writers had to protest to get a lesbian kiss into Lightyear, so it's not like this is something the company actively wants to do.