Only One Thing Can Save Disney’s ‘Wish’ Now…
Mouse House's non-woke tale suffers humiliating box office debut
Disney’s “Wish” isn’t just the company’s signature holiday release.
It’s a celebration of 100 years of storytelling magic. Or so the marketing tells us.
“Wish” tells an original story teeming with Disney shout outs, from references to Bambi to the adorable “Star” character connecting to Jiminy Cricket’s iconic song.
All that history and magic couldn’t lift “Wish” at the box office.
The film is slated to earn $32.3 million at the US box office over the five-day Thanksgiving weekend, one of the busiest movie-going periods of the year. That’s below even the modest estimates from just a few days ago. It’s also clear the film had no chance of reaching the $60 million mark Box Office Pro suggested during that span.
Disaster.
It’s an oddly perfect way to cap a terrible year for the Mouse House. Here’s a quick roll call of other calamitous releases on the studio’s 2023 ledger.
- “Haunted Mansion”
- “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”
- “The Creator”
- “The Marvels”
- “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”
“The Marvels” and “Indiana Jones” alone will cost Disney dearly.
Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” and “Elemental” found modest success, with the latter opening weakly but having serviceable “legs,” in industry terms.
And that’s the best, and only, hope left for “Wish.”
Will the film have legs over the holiday season? Parents will be itching to send their tykes to the movies over the next month, and the competition isn’t stiff at the moment. They won’t like the film’s 50 percent “rotten” score at RottenTomatoes.com, but audiences to date have been more kind – 83 percent “fresh.”
“Trolls Band Together” is doing modestly well and hits a similar demographic. “The Marvels” opened weakly and faded very fast. “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” already made most of the cash it will generate theatrically.
“Wonka” and “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” hit theaters Dec. 15, which could cut any momentum “Wish” carries up until that point.
The irony behind “Wish’s” weak box office debut?
The film doesn’t neatly align with Disney’s new woke agenda. Yes, the main character is an empowered young woman, but the story suggests the perils of Big Government and the glory of free will.
Even more shocking? We’re told dreams can come true … but you shouldn’t rely on the government to make that happen.
Had Disney pitched that message to the masses, “Wish” might have ended the company’s year on a rare high note.
The cost to make a movie now is over the top. While the stars make millions per flick, the plebes who do all the work are living in station wagons. Check out the 15 minutes of credits at the end. All those gafs, best boys, and caterers. All scratching out a living.
Wish IS woke. An ethnic teen female (named Asha) banding together with her diverse cast of friends to fight a revolution against the white male patriarchy. The main villain is, of course, a white guy.
WISH is woke. The empowered female lead and the 2 villains are white. Anti-patriarchy.
I respectfully disagree. We need male AND female leads, and the script (while mediocre) never has Asha lecture us … that would have turned the tide for me!
Still woke in the formulaic sense.
Young female ambiguously-brown-with-freckles (replacing the ambiguously-brown-with-mop-top that was their go-to for 15-10 years).
White male villain.
White male sub-villain.
No white male hero.
I get it – POC girls can be heroes, and white dudes can be villains. It’s the overrepresentation. No one complained when Pocahontas did it. No one complained when Mulan did it (although everyone was the same race).
But you know there was no way in HELL that Disney would’ve put a white male hero against a black female villain.
Until movie studios can do that type of casting or w/e, then there is no way people will trust that their decisions were anything other than at least partially agenda-driven.
But they aren’t changing course….At all.
This means that, despite hemorrhaging money, there must be a phantom-revenue-stream coming from somewhere.
Follow the money.
The problem with going woke isn’t just that it’s divisive, it’s that as soon as you put ANYTHING ahead of storytelling, be it an agenda or something else, the work suffers. And if you make it a trend to do so, eventually the audience gets sick of being served mediocrity and starts putting their money elsewhere. These franchises aren’t bulletproof. If you stop making them fun to watch, there’s a million other things people can see and do instead, and getting people’s trust back once you’ve broken it is incredibly hard for a brand to do. Disney has a very difficult decade ahead of them, no matter what they do at this point.
When you have people who would be sneered at and called ‘Amateur’s’ putting out films that simply are FAR superior than the ‘Professional’ garbage that’s been hitting the streets the last 5 years, you have a HUGE sustainability problem!
Go on youtube and look at D.U.S.T. , Omeleto, just to name a tiny few, video channels and you’ll get probably a years worth of movie watching right there from all sorts of imaginative dreaming., and it’s FREE. Most of it is not woke garbage either, and it does turn woek, CLICK GOODBYE!! There are 50 more videos and movies to instantly replace it!
Hollywood has far outlived it’s usefulness, and has become a cancer, it’s time for it to just go the way of the horse and buggy. With the tech that is available right now, you don’t even need real human actors anymore either. Another HUGE win for us ‘little people’
Since 2020, Disney already set the pattern for lower box office returns. Breaking $500 million is much harder than realistic. This doesn’t help when movies often cost more than $200 million each and Indiana Jones, Little Mermaid, and The Marvels costing $300 million to make despite any tax incentives. Don’t make movies costing more than $100 million.
I feel that’s the biggest reason why Hollywood is dying. Because these studios keep making higher budget films and yet most of them end up failing. When you also have these mid budget studios like A24 doing better than the entire industry. I don’t know what to say about this, but I feel pretty heart broken especially given by how good the film is according to the audience, Hollywood is an industry that really has lost touch with reality, now I don’t see a reason to support disney or any major studio anymore, because who know how badly they’re going to screw up
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When will Disney make a movie for boys? The femininity of men that Progressives DEI want. If Davy Crockett was to be remade by Disney, she would be a black lesbian. Where have the white man gone?
Many people have just come to expect a Disney offering to be rife with woke propaganda to the point that they just dismiss any new releases out of hand.
Not to mention that their stance in support of child grooming and child mutilation has caused many to boycott them outright.
I’m not sure they will ever win back the people who have written them off. My parents used to tell me that hurting someone is like driving a nail into wood. You can apologize to them and pull that nail back out, but the hole it made is still there. Even if Disney completely backtracks (even though they’ve shown no inclination to do so) and apologizes for their past anti-child stances, the image of Disney as a wholesome, family oriented company is gone forever.
They’ll either adapt to the new paradigm by reducing the budgets of their productions to a level that can be supported by the niche market they now appeal to, or they’ll go bankrupt.