Disney’s Strange World, a cartoon flick featuring a gay teenager, belly-flopped hard at the box office Thanksgiving weekend, doing so very poorly, and costing so very much to make, that it is now expected to lose something like $147 million when it’s all done.
Naturally, the right-wing press is over the moon. “Woke = Broke: America Says ‘No Thanks’ To Disney Cartoon With Gay Teenage Hero,” crowed the Daily Wire. “Disney’s latest attempt to go woke has them going broke,” cried the equally imaginative Louder With Crowder. “Americans Slam Demonic Disney for Trying to Teach Kids About Sexual Preferences in Its First Cartoon With Homosexual Main Character,” read a headline on the Liberty Daily news aggregation site feed.
But no one was quite so excited about the film’s box office failure as Breitbart’s John Nolte, who bashed out a column bashing the “gay groomers” at Disney and their “predatory embrace” of “the sicko trans movement.” (There are no trans characters in the film.)
Over Thanksgiving, the child groomers at Disney again sought to groom your child, which cost them a loss of up to $147 million.
With rhetoric like this prevalent on the right, it’s no wonder someone went and shot up a gay club.
Strange World, Disney’s latest … animated feature, is all about spreading environmental propaganda and exposing your child to adult sexuality. One of Strange World’s lead characters is a gay teenage boy in love with another boy. This plot point has nothing to do with teaching children tolerance for people who might be different and everything to do with shattering your child’s innocence.
I’m pretty sure no one in the family-friendly film is having explicit gay sex, but whatever.
Disney’s predatory embrace of child grooming, drag queens, and advocating the mutilation of children on the altar of the sicko trans movement is no longer a secret. The Disney brand is forever damaged. Decent parents no longer trust Disney, nor should they.
He equated Disney with a creepy child predator luring kids into his van.
Maybe turning your $250 million investment into the equivalent of a guy in a van holding candy and a camera is a poor way to do business?
But, Nolte insists, straight people aren’t being bigots because they reject a cartoon movie with a gay character. It’s just that.
homosexuality makes straight people uncomfortable. We don’t go to the movies to be uncomfortable. Mainstreaming it to children is unconscionable. Suddenly, instead of thinking about love, they are thinking about the complicated world of sexuality long before they are ready. Decent people don’t do that to children.
Meanwhile, the New York Post is celebrating a British dad who took his 9-year-old son to Hooters.
Somehow Nolte didn’t feel moved to write about this example of premature sexualization.
So why did Strange World flop, anyway? It may not be the gay subplot so much as the fact that no one has heard about it; as the Mary Sue points out, Disney fumbled publicity for the film. And those who did hear about it may have decided to wait a couple of months for it to start streaming on Disney+. Of course, by then, the right will have moved onto railing hysterically about something else too woke for their tastes.
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@Lakitha: I have friends (producers) who have been in Hollywood showbiz for decades, and they freely admit they can’t predict what’s going to hit. Sometimes they know the flops. They do the best they can and then it’s out of their hands.
They know that if there’s no publicity behind it, it could be the greatest work ever put on-screen and as just us Mammotheers have shown, it seems to be Marketing’s fault. Putting a movie against Wakanda (same studio, even!) which was advertised everywhere for months or a year and dumping it into theaters with no publicity is as stupid as it gets. Yes, you can advertise something a lot and it still will flop, but you at least have to try. Not even Happy Meals, ffs. I don’t watch kids’ TV but there probably weren’t ads there either.
@Ooglyboggles: I think you could have had no ad guards at all and been out looking for it and still missed it. Like I said, I literally watch a TV show titled “Nothing But Trailers” once a week and didn’t see the trailer there till maybe 10 days before it opened. When I saw it, I thought it was for *next* Thanksgiving and the 2022 really surprised me. Disney NEVER waits that long to start flogging their movies.
I saw ads for “Strange World,” and it just looked like yet another movie about people discovering a strange world. I’ve been seeing movies like that, both animated and live-action (and a lot in between), for as long as I’ve been watching TV, so movies about strange worlds aren’t that strange anymore, especially when they have a title so lame, non-descriptive and generic as “Strange World.” I mean, couldn’t they at least put a number in the title, like all those abstract-expressionists who keep on cranking out “Untitled” stuff? Or maybe specify what genre or sub-genre of “strange world” it’s about? Cute aliens? Man-eating plants? Sentient apes? Dinoworld? Catworld? Westworld? Man-eating NPCs in Gamingworld? Scott Pilgrim and every computer-game character ever created vs. the owners of the MetaMatrix?
Maybe Disney has done so many movies about strange worlds already that they ran out of both decently-thought-out ideas and remotely interesting titles at the same time? Seriously, the trailers I saw showed a place that was plenty strange, but not at all strikingly different from any other strange world I’d seen.
PS: I’m pretty sure it would take much more than a couple of gay characters to make a Disney movie bomb THIS bad. People skipping an otherwise watchable movie just for that reason might make a dent at the box office, but not a crater.
It’s like what happened some years ago with Disney’s John Carter. We’re only talking an adaptation of one of the Ur-texts of Western science fantasy here. They didn’t want to use “A Princess of Mars”, the title of the original novel, because Almighty Boys, who must be catered to first and foremost, have been carefully taught not to want to watch princess movies; they didn’t even call it John Carter of Mars, which would’ve given the audience some clue as to where in Storyland they should expect to be; they could, with full justification, have blurbed, “From the creator of Tarzan!” and, “Before Star Trek; before Star Wars; before Avatar—there was John Carter of Mars!” But the advertising was so perfunctory that I can’t help but suspect that the chief goal of the movie was to stake trademark claim—the same reason that there’s been a Lone Ranger movie every generation, long past the point where anyone younger than Boomers gives a shit.
I’ve seen a ton of ads for <i>Strange World</i>, but they all left me cold. I couldn’t really tell what it was actually about, but what I could glean from it earned a hearty “meh.” Apparently a family is reunited and learns to understand one another, I guess? Great, ‘cause it’s not like that ground has been covered in 50,000 other Disney movies, or anything like that. Which, to be fair, would be fine if I’d gotten the impression from the trailers that they were going to do an interesting take on it, but what little was there felt very paint-by-numbers.
Too, it just <i>looks</i> boring. The colors (the ones that weren’t various shades of brown, which appears to be 95% of the movie’s color palette) all looked washed out and dull. There’s a lot of action in the ads I’ve seen, but none of it made me think “wow, I’d like to see how that turns out.” If a thirty-second TV spot has me looking at the clock, wondering when the commercial will be over, there’s no way I’d spend money to see the whole thing in the theater.
Even the title is a yawn. “<i>Strange World</i>?” They spent nearly $200 million making this thing, and that’s the best they could come up with?
I don’t think having a gay character in the movie hurt it in any significant way. I think it just looks like a dud. Maybe it’s actually great, and I might check it out once it’s on TV, but nothing I’ve seen makes me want to seek it out.
Now, make an <i>Owl House</i> movie for theaters, and I’ll be first in line for tickets.
@Lakitha Tolbert:
Indeed. The company can not just think they’re doing everything right, but actually do everything right, and still be slammed by external factors they couldn’t easily predict.
Picture this: Big Studio is preparing to release Big Film on Friday the Whatever. They’ve done all the marketing right, have big names in the billing (director, composer, male and female lead…), and scoped out the competition when deciding on a release date, picking one where the only other films opening will be a mid-budget romcom, two tiny low-budget niche films, some foreign flick with subtitles, and one from some old franchise of declining popularity. No credible threat there.
Meanwhile, Little Indy Studio is preparing to release a low-budget film cobbled together out of old hobby-store model kits and miscellaneous junk, with a director nobody’s ever heard of, a cast of complete nobodies that isn’t even Z-list, a composer from nowhere, and a working title that squarely places the film in a tiny little niche genre, albeit one whose fans are reliable and dedicated and will surely turn out to see this film … all 3 of them.
Come Friday at 8, Big Studio’s film is playing to a nearly empty room because everyone’s in the next one over, watching Star Wars instead.
Oops. Betcha didn’t see that coming!
That’s the film studio version of “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy”.
That being said: this latest Disney flop has no such excuse. They screwed the pooch on the marketing and the timing, as you noted:
Especially these days, with poverty wages becoming ever more widespread since 2008, plus now the added extra fun of not-quite-hyperinflation-at-least-not-yet … all during a quadra-demic of COVID, monkeypox, RSV, and an unusually severe influenza. Conditions that might make a lot of films into box office flops that turn into sleeper hits when they hit the streaming sites and PPV in a few months.
That’d be Avatar the kids’ cartoon, not Avatar the vaporware space sci-fi “trilogy”, I assume? I haven’t seen any trailers for anything of the sort lately, and I often have the sci-fi channel on TV as background noise.
@FM Ox: And at least the Boomers would have maybe read the books as kids and gone to see it if they’d promoted it properly. Unlike Strange World (zzzz name) which wasn’t based on the new hotness or something people’d known for generations.
@Surplus: Nope, it’s the blue people with USB ponytails sequel that nobody’s been asking for. I mean, I go to sci-fi cons and nobody was dressing like them less than a year later.
@GSS ex-noob:
Unlike Strange World (zzzz name) which wasn’t based on the new hotness or something people’d known for generations.
Given that it’s under the Mouse’s aegis, I suppose I’d dimly imagined that it had something peripheral to do with Doctor Strange. (Tangential rant: Doctor Strange was my favorite Marvel superhero growing up—a devotion that the MCU movies have pretty well squandered; the first disappointed me and, from what I’ve heard of the second, they managed to burn and consume the lion’s share of decades’ worth of classic comics story arcs and alternate universes in the second. Also: Charlize Theron again? Do all the top-tier action roles have to continue going to the same couple dozen people?)
I think if I had children who were of an age to enjoy Disney I would just pay for the damn channel so I wouldn’t have to take them to the theater and sit through the damn movie myself. I’m old enough to have been dropped off at the theater on a Saturday afternoon while Mom grocery shopped but I don’t think people do that anymore.
@Mimi Haha:
I’m old enough to have been dropped off at the theater on a Saturday afternoon while Mom grocery shopped but I don’t think people do that anymore.
Until fairly recently, there was a shabby second-run discount cinema in my neighborhood where that still happened; they must have made their profit off the popcorn, and a lot of their clientele were kids who couldn’t wait for streaming or home video release to watch a favorite movie again and again and again.
The theater’s existence was tenuous, and COVID quarantine its final undoing; this summer they razed the building.
“Strange World” is a perfectly cool and serviceable title, I bet you philistines would prefer crap like “That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime”, “Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?” or “Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon”. (Links in case someone can’t believe that those are real titles).
I’m halfway joking, but not by much.
@Full Metal Ox: I remember how John Carter was done dirty. And a few years earlier, it seemed, at least to me, that Treasure Planet was barely marketed. I searched toy stores in vain for any figures of the characters; eventually I picked up a couple of little ones at a McDonalds restaurant.
I’ve heard John Carter had been greenlit by Disney execs who were gone by the time it reached post-production, and their replacements didn’t want it to reflect well on their predecessors. I’ve also heard that Treasure Planet was sunk in order to justify the decision to stop doing 2D animation. Basically, one of the problems with Disney being so big is that they can easily afford to sabotage their own work in the service of internal politics.
@GSS ex-noob: I’ve seen a few people use the metric of dividing a project’s budget by how many fanfics it has on Ao3. Avatar currently has 336, which sounds like a lot but for comparison Marvel’s Captain America movies have over 100,000 fics. Meanwhile Goncharov, which was invented out of Tumblr’s collective imagination two weeks ago and retconned to 1973, currently has 635 fics, nearly twice as many as Avatar.
Even when a movie succeeds you can sometimes tell, looking back at the original marketing, that the producers were wrong about who’d be the breakout character – I believe the earliest publicity for Star Wars emphasizes Grand Moff Tarkin as the Big Bad– which makes sense, given that he was played by one of the two recognizable actors Lucas had been able to hire for the project.
Hadn’t even heard of this film until reading this post. But then I don’t really keep track of Disney, I don’t think I have for 30 years. I did like that song from Encanto though. I might have to look out for Encanto.
@ moon custafer
There is a reason for that.
When Lucas was looking for where to film Star Wars it transpired that to make the film in the UK would only cost $4,000,000. That was less than half of the cost of shooting in the US.
However….American actors would need work visas. The unions here operated a bit of a closed shop; they blocked films that didn’t have UK actors. So to placate the unions, the producers listed the stars of the film as Cushing, Guinness, Prowse, Baker, Daniels, Mayhew…etc
At the bottom of the cast list were some bit parts, “Farm Boy”, “Pilot”, “Princess”.
In light of all the British talent the producers were able to placate the unions into allowing a few aspiring US actors to see what it was like working in the UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-42267308
When the film came out, the unions were of course furious. Which is why there are so many Brit actors in TESB. It was the only way the producers could get the unions to agree to let it be filmed in the UK.
To be fair, Grand Moff Tarkin in a sense was the big bad of Star Wars. He built the Death Star. He was clearly in charge there. He had some good banter with Leia and Vader. It’s a shame he was killed off.
Alright, I’ll try this again, since my original comment seems to have disappeared:
I’ve seen a ton of ads for Strange World, but they all left me cold. I couldn’t really tell what it was actually about, but what I could glean from it earned a hearty “meh.” Apparently a family is reunited and learns to understand one another, I guess? Great, ‘cause it’s not like that ground has been covered in 50,000 other Disney movies, or anything like that. Which, to be fair, would be fine if I’d gotten the impression from the trailers that they were going to do an interesting take on it, but what little was there felt very paint-by-numbers.
Too, it just looks boring. The colors (the ones that weren’t various shades of brown, which appears to be 95% of the movie’s color palette) all looked washed out and dull. There’s a lot of action in the ads I’ve seen, but none of it made me think “wow, I’d like to see how that turns out.” If a thirty-second TV spot has me looking at the clock, wondering when the commercial will be over, there’s no way I’d spend money to see the whole thing in the theater.
Even the title is a yawn. “Strange World?” They spent nearly $200 million making this thing, and that’s the best they could come up with?
I don’t think having a gay character in the movie hurt it in any significant way. I think it just looks like a dud. Maybe it’s actually great, and I might check it out once it’s on TV, but nothing I’ve seen makes me want to seek it out.
Now, make an Owl House movie for theaters, and I’ll be first in line for tickets.
“Demonic Disney”, huh? Is it my imagination, or has it become much more common recently to describe people or organisations as demonic? Obviously there have always been fundies doing this, but it feels like it has become almost mainstream in recent years. At this rate, when do we see the return of witch trials?
@Reaktor:
“Strange World” is a perfectly cool and serviceable title, I bet you philistines would prefer crap like “That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime”, “Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?” or “Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon”. (Links in case someone can’t believe that those are real titles).
I’m halfway joking, but not by much.
Oh, I absolutely believe you; those verbose Exactly-What-It-Says-On-The-Tin titles have become commonplace for Asian webnovels (and both furnish a summary and pique curiosity); “Strange World” tells the audience about as much as “Crunchy Food.” Yes, and?…
I can’t speak for the latter two, but That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime is a wonderful story of how the protagonist—a socially awkward virginal early millennial—not only survives a bewildering physical transformation in a dangerous fantasy RPG universe but winds up building an empire. It may not be a sentimental Power of Friendship story—Rimiru Tempest, né Mikami Satoru, is a constant strategist and manipulator who wields hard as well as soft power—but so much of his success involves treating the surrounding NPCs as people (and humanizing them thereby; since most of them are fantasy creatures, I regret not having a less anthropocentric word. Heck, the word “anthropocentric” is itself anthropocentric.)
@Reaktor, Full Metal Ox:
You missed ‘I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level’. Which is an interesting twist on the idea because the super-powerful protagonist not only gets where she does by treating others as people, but she’s also very explicitly somebody who was pretty much worked to death in her previous life and absolutely insists on making sure everybody has time to relax and be friendly now. It’s remarkably anti-corporate-culture in its own way. She’d have continued living a quiet life if it weren’t for a few idiots with ‘gunslinger syndrome’ deciding to challenge her to prove how badass they were, and that kicking off the entire series…
Strange World is a bad title for a cartoon, but a great one for many other projects (See IMDB). Which, also, c’mon — let’s not use a title that’s been on 2 TV series in the past 5 years alone.
@Moon Custafer: I like that metric, but it should also include the number of separate authors. But that’s a telling statistic.
@Surplus: Smokey and the Bandit did end up doing really well, though. I think I saw it twice. Which is way less than Star Wars, but it still got sequels and TV shows.
In many cities, Star Wars (and subsequent 2, plus CE3K and Indy) also was exclusively showing at the single big-screen fancy theaters for some months, not at the mallplexes till later. So there were only so many shows a day possible at the beginning. They were all full, though. A couple friends and I took changes of clothes and accessories so we could hide in the bathroom and see ROTJ 3 times one day of the last week it was in the big theater. We didn’t actually fool the usher the last time but he wasn’t getting paid enough to GAF.
(We did wonder why anyone would go to such lengths as Bandit did just for Coors, but a later friend of mine did that with a van and no car chases to make money in college, even before S&TB.)
@Jenora
So what I’m hearing is that she’d get along hilariously well with Vash the Stampede?
@Mediocrites, Longtime Lurker
So what I’m hearing is that she’d get along hilariously well with Vash the Stampede?
PEACE! AND! LOVE!
@Moon Custafer
Sabotage by new management was a major cause of Disney’s biggest (pre-Treasure Planet) flop, The Black Cauldron.
@Moon Custafer:
@GSS ex-noob: I’ve seen a few people use the metric of dividing a project’s budget by how many fanfics it has on Ao3. Avatar currently has 336, which sounds like a lot but for comparison Marvel’s Captain America movies have over 100,000 fics. Meanwhile Goncharov, which was invented out of Tumblr’s collective imagination two weeks ago and retconned to 1973, currently has 635 fics, nearly twice as many as Avatar.
@GSS ex-noob:
I like that metric, but it should also include the number of separate authors. But that’s a telling statistic.
Here’s a measure of how much The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising sucked: as measured in AO3 fic listings (a lot of which are backdated transplants), the dreaded influx of movie-specific fans (with consequent there-goes-the-neighborhood wailing from book fans)…never happened.
(Nor should it have. That film seemed to have treated the book fandom’s worst-case scenarios as a to-do list: the Celtic Pagan millennia-deep mythic context was erased; the protagonist was Yankwashed and aged up from 11 to 14–the better to work in a romantic subplot; Merriman and the Lady couldn’t have been more brazen Expies of Dumbledore and McGonagall; Book! Will has a loving and supportive family, and the tragedy is that his magical nature and duties distance him from them; the film finds it simpler to make the Stantons a bunch of Dursleyesque bullies.
I might, somewhat, have excused all the above had they delivered on the book’s two gift-wrapped set pieces. The instrument of Will’s magical initiation is The Book of Gramarye, which Will inhabits more than reads, each line launching a psychedelic immersion:
He might read no more than one line – I have journeyed as an eagle – and he was soaring suddenly aloft as if winged, learning through feeling, feeling the way of resting on the wind and tilting round the rising columns of air, of sweeping and soaring, of looking down at patchwork-green hills capped with dark trees, and a winding, glinting river between. And he knew as he flew that the eagle was one of the only five birds who could see the Dark, and instantly he knew the other four, and in turn he was each of them . . .
He read: … you come to the place where is the oldest creature that is in this world, and he that has fared furthest afield, the Eagle of Gwernabwy … and Will was up on a bare crag of rock above the world, resting without fear on a grey- black glittering shelf of granite, and his right side leaned against a soft, gold-feathered leg and a folded wing, and his hand rested beside a cruel steel-hard hooked claw, while in his ear a harsh voice whispered the words that would control wind and storm, sky and air, cloud and rain, and snow and hail – and everything in the sky save the sun and the moon, the planets and the stars.
Then he was flying again, at large in the blue-black sky, with the stars blazing timeless around his head, and the patterns of the stars made themselves known to him, both like and unlike the shapes and powers attributed to them by men long ago. The Herdsman passed, nodding, the bright star Arcturus at his knee; the Bull roared by, bearing the great sun Aldebaran and the small group of the Pleiades singing in small melodic voices, like no voices he had ever heard. Up he flew, and outward, through black space, and saw the dead stars, the blazing stars, the thin scattering of life that peopled the infinite emptiness beyond. And when he was done, he knew every star in the heavens, both by name and as charted astronomical points, and again as something much more than either; and he knew every spell of the sun and moon; he knew the mystery of Uranus and the despair of Mercury, and he had ridden on a comet’s tail.
In the movie he Googles the magic lore.
The second is the Dark and Stormy Night when Herne the Hunter, antlered, golden-eyed, and terrible, leads his army of ghost hounds stampeding on the first Wild Hunt in a thousand years; you’d think, wouldn’t you, that that would be the perfect occasion to go apeshit with the special effects? You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a film adaptation would at least include it?
The only explanation that makes anything resembling Earth sense is that the whole fiasco was some sort of money-laundering scam à la The Producers.
@David Futrelle: I’ve got a comment (including a lengthy literary quote) that’s been suspected as spam; could you approve it, please?