3 Ingredients in Disney's Recipe for Box Office Success
Last night I saw Zootopia, fully planning on writing some sort of article related to it. It's 98% on Rotten Tomatoes had me thinking, "Maybe this movie will be ok?". Spoiler alert: It's quite good. It's my favorite movie since Star Wars, which was also made by Disney, which was the best movie I'd seen since Inside Out, which was also made by Disney and wait... Is there a trend here? Yes! Disney has been crushing it for the past few years, with an immaculate track record of both quality and success (other than John Ranger and The Lone Carter). So what makes these movies so universally wonderful? Well...
1. Disney Bought Pixar and Learned Their Secrets
Before Disney was a great movie factory, the best indicator of film quality was a Pixar logo showing up... right after a Disney logo. While every single Pixar film was inevitably produced and distributed by Disney, they were originally and entirely separate entity. This is why "Disney" made The Incredibles and Disney made Home on the Range in 2004. Do you remember Home on the Range? Wow that was bad.
After producing 100% of their films, Disney decided to buy Pixar in 2006, for a measly 7.4 Billion dollars. Steve Jobs might be famous for Apple, but the majority of his wealth came from Pixar, specifically their sale to Disney. But more importantly, why? Why spend an obscene amount of money like that to buy something they essentially already own? Because Pixar wanted to leave.
Thankfully Pixar found a good reason (or 7 billion reasons) to stick around, and now that they were officially residence of the House of Mouse, let Disney in on the secret to their success: films by committee.
Pixar's filmmaking strategy involves a ridiculous amount of collaboration from everyone at Pixar. If John Lasseter is working on something, Pete Docter gives input. If Brad Bird is making something, Lee Unkrich can chime in. While only one or two directors get credit per film, each of Pixar's master directors/writers/producers/animators has steered the boat at least a little. With so many people on deck, it makes sense Pixar has never hit an iceberg.
Disney adapted this strategy for all their tentpoles; and not just in animation. Marvel Studios, and it's success, are the direct result of the committee process. Kevin Feige is the John Lasseter, and Joss Whedon, Jon Favreau, and James Gunn are the committee. A group of people with different ideas and perspectives each add a little spice to each product, and end up creating something much more well rounded. And speaking of Marvel...
2. Disney Listens to Fans
Remember how freaked out everyone was when Disney bought Marvel, and then they made a bunch of great movies and nobody cared? Or how people said Disney buying Star Wars was the only way to make something worse than the prequels, and then got really excited when they saw the first trailer? Still, if tomorrow Disney came out and said they bought Thundercats, people would be out in the streets setting their Lion-O action figures on fire faster than you can say, "why does anyone care about something in which a character is named Lion-O? Is that his blood type?".
But they shouldn't. Because Disney seems to understand something that so many other people don't: fans are smart...ish. A big critique of The Force Awakens was that it pandered to hard to fans expectations. Those who said this, are in a sliver of a minority, because almost everyone who saw the movie loved it, and probably for that exact reason.
Fans of things are fans for certain reasons. Let's look at Deadpool. People like the violence, dirty jokes, and smarmy tone in relation to the character. So when he debuted in the PG-13 X-Men Origins with none of those things, people were upset. But when he re-debuted in Deadpool, people loved it. Deadpool has tripled the box office returns of Origins in a third of the release time. Is it just because fans liked it? Yes and no.
Beyond just getting fan-butts into seats, fan service just leads to better movies. A neutered Deadpool in Origins takes away all the good things about the character, and leaves new audiences wondering why anyone would care about the character in the first place. So back to The Force Awakens. The prequels felt like entirely different films from the originals, because George Lucas has stated on multiple occasions he didn't care what fans wanted. Meanwhile the Force Awakens panders to the old fans, and creates new ones for the same reasons the originals did.
And Disney applies this "satisfy the fans" mentality to all their movies. Wreck-It Ralph is a veritable buffet of fan service for old-school gamers, Tangled and Frozen modernizes tropes from the classic Disney princess films, and Zootopia is so adorable it makes you want to vomit a rainbow. But that's not enough to make great films.
3. Subtext is a Must
Minions does all of the things mentioned above. It was made by a committee, and is full of Minion fan-service. But that movie was awful. Really awful. Like an hour-long commercial with an air horn blaring next to your face awful. But it followed all the rules! Except for the third rule: stories need subtext.
This is a rule that dates back to the invention of stories themselves. Parables, fables, and legends, all meant something more than "that thing has a butt, and the butt might fart". Aesop, Homer, and even Jesus Christ of Nazareth all knew that if you were going to tell a story, it needed to have a point. Without it, a movie ends up a meaningless collection of color and noise, or in other words, Minions.
From Ant-Man to Zootopia, every Disney movie still has something happening below the surface level. Frozen teaches young girls the important lesson that a spontaneous decision could lead to marrying a sociopath who wants to murder your family. Dumbo teaches everyone that if they work hard, and get drunk enough to induce hallucinations, racial stereotypes will give you enough confidence to defy gravity. Dumbo was a weird movie.
=FINAL THOUGHTS=
At the end of last year, Disney held roughly 20% of the box office market share, meaning that 1 in 5 movies seen last year were Disney movies. With Zootopia, Finding Dory, Two Marvel films, and a Star Wars spin-off, it seems unlikely that they'll relinquish that much control this year. Many find this troubling news for independent filmmakers, but Disney's success isn't a patented system. Nothing is stopping new artists from collaborating with one another, there's plenty of audience data on the internet to learn what people are looking for, and ideally every movie being made should have some deeper meaning without having to think about it.
What I'm saying to new artists, hipster contrarians, and those who dislike Disney in general, is that there's nothing stopping you from adopting their model. A huge budget doesn't guarantee success, and Disney has two of the biggest flops of all time to prove it. At the end of the day, audiences are hungry for quality movies, with great stories and something to say. And I guess Minions. That's the new bar, rise above it.
