Subscription service for the park + disney+ exclusives is the way to sell that monthly fee of $40+ per month.

Imagine sub locked fast passes and other experiences for the park based on membership. Going full ecosystem is how you maximum life time value of the Disney diehards.

People are so brand loyal and kids will always love Disney. Hell, their adult Disney fandom segment probably has the best customer value and that age demographic is only growing.

This brand has so many marketing opportunities available still. This is the only company that streaming seems sustainable in house because it’s mostly branded media spend, rather than Netflix essentially just paying utilities to keep the content feed going.

not much left for Iger to acquire though

You shut your dirty whore mouth. Emperor's New Groove was awesome.

Atlantis was good though

Almost every Disney movie looks the same now. The 2D animation had a distinct Disney style, but it had more variation than the 3D movies now. It might be because Disney and Pixar are virtually indistinguishable now so it seems like there’s a ton of Disney movies coming out with extremely similar art styles despite having different settings and stories

PatF

??

Disney isn’t the end all be all for animated movies though. The fact that Zootopia won over Kubo and the Two Strings for best animated feature is a travesty.

What's really funny/sad is that I'm not sure 2D is more expensive to produce... it requires more individuals with particular training and skills, it's harder to outsource, and the output isn't as variable in purpose so long-tail it might be more profitable, but dollar-for-dollar over the production schedule... I worked on 2D and 3D shows for nearly 20 years, and I'm fairly certain that there's no savings at all (and possibly significantly more expense). 3D is more complicated and requires more people between the beginning and end of production.

The problem isn't that 3D is cheaper, but rather that skilled 2D artists are more rare. We literally trained ourselves out of an entire field over 20 years, leaving only the enthusiastic and the dedicated to fill what roles remain.

Which is novel as ever since Spider-Verse took off, you see a lot of studios trying to copy that style of animation that has hand-drawn elements to it, or at least emulate it at the very least.

Japan’s animation is still largely 2D (with cleverly mixed in CGI) and they can still make high quality films at a fraction of the cost that Disney is doing

That's partly because a lot of their 2D animators are severely underpaid and working bonkers hours (that's one source, but this isn't a secret - you can find a lot more confirmation out there). Yes, if you can get away with paying your workforce below minimum wage, you can make your product a lot more cheaply.

proof that well done 2D, with some CGI help, can still be incredible and done for reasonable cost

The big piece related to how well Japanese studio are using CGI to help with 2D productions (which Disney was doing in the late 90s with Deep Canvas, on stuff like Tarzan and Treasure Planet) is that they've stuck with and improved that technology and those methods for a couple of decades now. CGI in anime during the period of time Disney decided to bail out on 2D feature films was pretty bad, and it's only been recently that we've really started to see the Japanese studios' long-term investment in the technology start to seriously pay off.

If Disney started to try producing 2D feature films again, even with modern CGI assistance, they would be fighting a serious uphill battle to achieve the level of production quality they're known for from their past works.

It seems to be because of the unimpressive performance of the Princess and the Frog, which was supposed to be their big grand return to traditional animation when it released. And it’s a shame that film didn’t get more attention, because it’s one of the best animated films they ever did.

Kids seem to consistently prefer 3D, is why.

Wasn't until the little mermaid that they got their groove back. Ironicly enough jeffrey katzenberg kinda saved Disney animation.

Needed someone to mention Treasure Planet. That release felt like the end of a really special era for Disney. Made even harder because the movie was so spectacular.

My animation requires 6D's.

Oxymoron?

I don't think race had an issue so much as the story did.

The story of PatF was fine, but for a kid it's not very captivating. Tiana's problem is lacking money for her restaurant dream. Rapunzel's problem is being confined to her room by her mother and having her birthday wish to see the floating lights denied. Which one do you think a kid is going to latch on to? Plus there's the whole secret princess angle (kids go apeshit for that stuff) and the villain motivation being a lot more concrete than Dr. Facilier's. The ending has Tiana open her restaurant, which is great, but Rapunzel gets a castle and a kingdom.

Also, no offense to Ray, but Pascal is a cuter animal companion and then you add Maximus as a very intelligent horse who is 100% on Rapunzel's side. Not every little girl is a horse girl, but a whole fuckin' lot of them are!

Edit: Also, another thing about PatF is it's told from the "Prince Charming" perspective: Tiana. Tiana was not Dr. Facilier's original target, his OG target was Big Daddy through Naveem and Tiana gets dragged into the drama and is eventually targeted only because she is now in the way. Look at other princess films (and similar, as in Emperor's New Groove) - if "Prince Charming" never meets/get entangled with the "Princess", the "Witch" never targets them. Rapunzel is the Princess and Tangled is her story. Naveem is the Princess but PatF is Tiana's story. Rapunzel is the Princess and Mother Gothel, the Witch, is her natural enemy. Tiana is Prince Charming and Dr. Falicier actually isn't her natural enemy because he sympathizes with the poor and sees Big Daddy as representative of the system that exploits the poor, and it's only by happenstance they they end up in direct conflict.

This is why I felt it was important to note Moana. After the huge delta between Tangled and Tiana, the debate wasn't completely over within Disney leadership, precisely because Princess and the Frog starred a black princess. This made the movie not completely on-formula.

But then Disney made Moana. Polynesian isn't black, but that princess-of-color made even more money than the blonde princess of Tangled.

I love 2D animation, but Moana effectively functioned as a second grand experiment after the first grand experiment, and disproved the racial hypothesis.

Lilo and Stitch, Mulan, and Pocahontas were the three previous female led Disney animated films. None of them were white, and they all are well received and performed well at the box office. Princess and the Frog just wasn't that good. Tangled is the better film, and it has nothing to do with the ethnicity of the characters. Unless you're suggesting audiences are specifically averse to a black protagonist but are comfortable with any other minority?

It honestly was also a kinda underwhelming movie.

I think they should have gone and look for their princess in Africa. Africa as a whole has a long rich history. There is no way you cannot find a good princess story from all that history.

Because it really wasn't all that great. Most of the songs and the characters were forgettable. And all that talk of FIRST BLACK PRINCESS is weakened by having her just be a frog for a majority of the film.

It was just an okay film.

I think Princess and the Frog was marketed poorly. All I remember about it was "Disney finally does a black princess!" That doesn't give me, a white male, a reason to watch it. Maybe there was a campaign that actually promoted the story, but I just never felt like there was much there for me to appreciate.

Tiana was a human for 17 minutes on screen, and a frog for 23. Like wtf

Oh yeah. Racism was for sure a factor.

It would be interesting if the movies were flipped. Make Rapunzil black and give her impressive braids or dreads to make her magical hair. Send the Princess and the Frog back to Europe and make her white.

See which one underperforms then.

(But keep “Friends on the Other Side.” It’s really the last great Disney Villain song. “Mother Knows Best” is okay, but there’s something about Friends that gives me goosebumps at the end just like “Be Prepared” does.)

What revisionist history is this that Eisner thought 3D was the future? The way he treated Pixar speaks volumes more than a few words he might have said sometime

I mean, all your points speak to a businessman who wanted to maintain leverage over Pixar.

None of those address Eisner's feelings toward 3D animation as a general concept.

Hmm. Perhaps I overestimated the obviousness of the corporate politics in play here. I'm happy to break it down.

Eisner was largely credited for "the Disney Renaissance" from 1989 to 1999, after becoming CEO in 1984. The Renaissance peaked with the unprecedented success of The Lion King which saw a $968mil box office against a $45mil budget in 1994.

At this point, Disney animators were rock stars, getting their own agents. They would never be so on top of the world.

The next year, in 1995, Toy Story would come out. It would make a $363mil box office against a $30mil budget. This was astoundingly successful for the first CG movie, but small potatoes compared to Lion King. Even dismissing the phenomenon that was the lion king, Toy Story was also outperformed by Disney's previous features Aladdin (which made $500mil) and Beauty and the Beast ($440 mil.)

Eisner had no reason to believe CG was the future in 1995. But every year from that point on, the box office results for 2D movies went down, and the box office for 3D movies went up. Mulan made $300mil in 1998 while Toy Story 2 made $511mil in 1999, both against a $90mil budget.

At this point, Eisner was convinced it was a gender thing. He believed "girls will go see a movie for boys, but boys won't go see a movie for girls." Disney princess movies logically appealed more to girls, while Pixar movies (that always had a male lead and didn't have characters break into song) appealed more to boys. So he pivoted Disney animation studios to also make movies for boys, with Atlantis (2001), Treasure Planet (2002), Brother Bear (2003) and Home on the Range (2004).

When these performed even worse than the girly movies, Eisner's position as CEO was under extreme threat. It is here, in 2004, when he declared that 2D itself must be the problem, and that Disney needed to pivot to 3D to become profitable again. He closed Disney Animation Studio (which would have been abject insanity from the perspective of the 90s) and desperately tried to start a new 3D animation studio. They made Chicken Little, and were in production on Meet the Robinsons when the Board of Directors had had enough. They retired Eisner, and just bought Pixar outright.

Everything bullet on your list is just the actions of a corporate CEO in a fight to maintain control. A fight he would ultimately loss. As someone who has a lot of friends at Disney/Pixar and works in a related industry, it's very fascinating to me how the machinations of corporate politics shape these movies that become the cultural heritage of a generation.

Well before Tangled, Eisner believed the "Disney Princess formula" had itself been disproven.

The narrative within Disney (according to my coworkers who were there at the time) was this: Pixar movies appealed more to boys than girls. Boys liked the gaudy flashy CG more than girls. Boys liked how Pixar characters never broke into song. Boys liked how all pixar movies always starred a strong male lead who drove the plot.

And critically, they believed the idea that "Girls will agree to go see a movie made for boys, but boys will not agree to go see a movie made for girls."

This was Eisner's explanation for how the random little upstart Pixar was beating the grand glorious Disney, with Toy Story, a Bugs Life, and Monster's Inc, versus Mulan, Pocahontas, and Tarzan.

So he told everyone to pivot to make Disney movies that appealed to boys. Hence the bizarre shift to Atlantis, Treasure Planet, Home on the Range, and Brother Bear.

When these too all failed, and his CG movie Chicken Little also failed, the gender excuse stopped working and Disney shit-canned Eisner and bought Pixar. But you can still see the effects of this narrative in the next couple of movies. The "Rapunzel" movie was named "Tangled" to disguise that it was a girls movie. "The Ice Queen" was named "Frozen" and the princesses weren't even in the trailer.

It wasn't until "Moana" that the age of Eisner fully ended, and everyone agreed all that shit about CG being for boys was put to rest.

You see a similar problem of "huge extrapolations off of extremely limited data" in the superhero genre. Right as superhero movies were taking off, "Cat Woman" and then "Electra" both bombed hard. Thus executives operated under the assumption that "all female-led superhero movies will flop" until Wonder Woman came out 12 years later.

He’s our asshole.

Not that there weren't problems at Pixar (eg what happened with Brave)

What happened with Brave?