Film Theory: Disney is FINALLY Dead, Here's Why

Disney is dying and it's easy to see why. Between back-to-back flops, burning money to supply Disney Plus, and movies that almost missed the mark, Disney is in trouble. But today I have the solution. And the answer that the Mouse House is looking for is

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on YouTube. Hello Internet. Welcome to Film Theory, the show that won't charge you $27 million a year to solve your problems. How's that for cost savings, Bob Iger? Have you noticed that a lot of movies have flopped recently? Fast X underperformed. It looks like The Flash will lose $200 million to Warner Brothers, making it the biggest bomb comic book movie in history.

Even objectively, big movies like Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning One failed to live up to expectations this summer. But the biggest victim of the box office bloodbath of the last two years has to be our mouse-eared overlords at Walt Disney Corp. Doctor Strange two, Thor three, and Black Panther two all fell short of expectations. The Little Mermaid greatly underperformed. Both Ant-Man Three and New Indiana Jones were also costly losers. No one even remembers that Disney's last animated feature, Strange World and Elemental, had the lowest opening of any modern Pixar

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, including Lightyear, the massive bomb that dropped just before.

The long and short of it all: things are bad in the Mouse House right now. Disney stock is at its lowest level since COVID hit in March 2020, and to turn things around, they are considering selling their television businesses, spinning off ESPN, and laying off thousands of employees. We are truly witnessing the death of the Disney Empire in real time right now. But I think t

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is a way to fix things. And the key to everything is YouTube. So grab your popcorn as I prepare to tell you a story far more compelling than anything published in recent years: It's time to fix Disney in three easy steps.

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Now if only it came in red. One day, Film Theory, one day. We have all this and more on our new Theoretical Apparel website, which you should visit by clicking the link in the description below or checking out the product shelf just below this video. Even if you don't want to buy anything, visit the site. It's actually really cool, with some fun surprises hidden inside. This year, we're really pushing ourselves to do bigger, more interesting things in the style world, probably because we now have a fashion channel, and I honestly think this is a great first step in that regard.

So check out all the amazing new fashion products we have on the website. And hey, what else? Maybe one day we'll open a theater store of our own at the local mall. There are quite a few vacant locations at Disney. They could use some new tenants to talk. Let's talk more about that Disney quandary, shall we? Basically, when you break it all down, Disney's problems largely boil down to three main issues: streaming, budget, and story. So let's go through them point by point. Starting with the transmission. One thing that everyone tends to overlook when starting a streaming service for the first time is that a constant flow of content is needed to make it work and to keep people hooked on the platform.

And creating content tends to be expensive, hence the extended merchandising push you just went through. But even if you thread the needle and manage to solve both problems, creating a lot of content for a relatively cheap price, it simply opens up a well of new problems that are harder to solve. Let me explain. To prevent people from bouncing off the platform, most of Disney's Star Studios have been relegated to content factories to feed the Disney Plus machine. In 2020, Disney held an Investor Day presentation in which Marvel and Lucas

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each announced ten projects. Pixar announced another six.

Not everything focused on the transmission, but much of it. Additionally, the service has been inundated with Disney diving into all of its other major IPs: live-action remakes of Peter Pan, serialized versions of High School Musical, the return of nostalgic classics like Willow, and the launch of anticipated new IPs like Artemis. Fowl. Disney owns some of the most beloved IPs on the planet, and it's been pulling them all off the shelves to try to keep its content offering on Disney plus strong and, most importantly, sticky, to keep all those picky streaming audiences that They are fast. to cancel a subscription.

Even though it's difficult and expensive to stay in that online content rut, at least on the surface, it looks like Disney managed to thread the needle. But in doing so, they actually expose themselves to a much worse problem: brand dilution. There's no arguing that almost every single one of these beloved franchises has become significantly less special over the last five years, simply because there are so many of them right now. Toy Story four, Lightyear, Toy Story five, you can only go to the pump so many times before the public can smell a blatant cash grab. Going back to those Investor Day announcements, most of the Star Wars ones, were quietly cancelled.

A completely different episode nine, a Boba Fett solo movie, a Rian Johnson trilogy, another Game of Thrones guys trilogy. When something new in Star Wars is announced, at this point, there is little confidence that it will ever see the light of day, let alone that it will be good. Andor, for example, was legitimately great. Seriously, it was the best Star Wars has produced in years. But do you know why no one saw it? Because he got buried under a series of disappointing projects like the Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Late Season Mandalorian, and episode nine.

People lost trust in the brand and as a result stopped prioritizing seeing all the new things being released. And the MCU? You are having the exact same problem right now. Check this out: Phase One had 746 minutes of content spread over five years, Phase Two had 757 minutes spread over three years, and then you had Phase Three with 1,500 minutes spread over another three years. It was a pretty significant jump, but it was nothing compared to phase four. Thanks in part to the introduction of Disney Plus and the streaming content requirement, Phase Four had a staggering 3,500 minutes spread over just two years.

There has been more MCU content in the last two years than in the previous 12 combined. A Marvel release used to feel like a must-see event. Nowadays, however, it is literally a weekly occurrence. So, of course, people will be less excited about new installments like Secret Invasion, regardless of their quality. Don't worry, we'll get to quality here in a second. What's worse, on his way to Disney plus, the mouse has lost a lot of money. They probably didn't need it. If you look at the list of original movies created and released by Disney, many of them will go directly to Disney plus without making money in a theater.

This year alone across all of its studios, six of Disney's 14 movies so far have been released directly to Disney Plus or Hulu, at no additional cost. In 2022, a whopping 27 were released on streaming and only 16 were in theaters. Now compare all of that to 2018, the year before Disney Plus launched, where Disney released only ten movies in total, all of which obviously went to theaters. Not only do these streaming releases mean they're losing a lot of money in theaters, but it becomes an even bigger problem when you combine it with our next big problem: the budget. The budgets of so many modern blockbusters, and especially those made by Disney, are simply out of control.

Indiana Jones and Dial of Destiny cost $300 million. Guardians Three and The Little Mermaid, $250 million each. Quantumania, a cool 200 thousand. They even spent $150 million on the Haunted Mansion. Why would you spend $150 million on a Haunted Mansion movie? And the real figure is probably more like $300 million when marketing is included. Not even Disney's animation wing is safe. Both Encanto and Strange World cost between $135 and $180 million. While almost all of Pixar's latest releases place their budgets between $150 and $200 and range. Now, you might be looking at all those numbers and thinking: Wow, that's a lot. But aren't all movies super expensive?

And the answer is yes, but also no. Yes, they cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but not that many hundreds of millions of dollars. When you look at other big blockbusters currently in theaters, most don't look like this. Oppenheimer had a huge cast and incredible experimental filmmaking techniques, and it cost only $100 million to make. John Wick, four elaborate action sequences featuring top-notch stunts and incredible set designs in multiple real-world locations, also cost just $100 million. Barbie is the biggest movie of the summer. It has iconic art direction, detailed fictional worlds with real settings, and top-notch actors who enjoyed being there.

And it was made for less than $150 million. As for animation, the recently released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie cost $70 million, while Puss in Boots, The Last Wish and Across the Spider-Verse, and the Super Mario Brothers movie cost around $100 million. each. All of this represents between half and a third of what Disney pays to make its movies. And it doesn't take a genius to understand that it is much easier to recover what you invest when you only have $70 million in the hole, instead of $200 million. However, all of this begs the question of why? Why are these movies so expensive?

Well, it's complicated. And ultimately it comes down to many different factors: an over-reliance on CGI, a drive to develop new technologies, writing that simply doesn't take budgets into account. But one of the biggest contributors to movie budget inflation at Disney that many people don't talk about is reshoots. A reshoot is when a film brings together cast and crew to reshoot scenes that didn't work or to film new scenes that become necessary as they move through the editing process. Don't get me wrong, reshoots are a perfectly normal part of production and can really help tie a film together.

Many very successful movies have had reshoots: Back to the Future, ET, Rocky, that's not the kind of thing I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about is when a movie studio sees the first cut of a movie, regrets it, and suddenly decides they basically need to start over from scratch. Probably the most famous example of this was Zack Snyder's Justice League. But Disney has also been guilty of this lately. More publicly with Solo, a Star Wars story. Originally, that movie was directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the two guys behind Spider-Verse and The Lego Movie.

But Disney didn't like what they saw, so they hired Ron Howard to reshoot about 80% of the movie, thus doubling its budget to about $300 million. Now, as we all know, Solo didn't do very well. It only grossed about $400 million worldwide, a figure that suddenly becomes a lot less painful to watch if its original budget was only $125 million. But all the transmission and budget changes in the world will beuseless if they continue to fail. On our third main point: history. Lately, many Disney films have failed to create a story worth telling and that audiences want to hear. Disney keeps hoping that you can still brand something and it will sell, but that doesn't work anymore.

The public is not stupid. They can tell when a story is told just because the accountants believe it will make money. Who ordered Zootopia two, Frozen three, Inside Out two, Toy Story five? Those are all real movies happening in the near future, even though that list seems like it should be a parody. But making unnecessary sequels is just the tip of the iceberg. Disney also no longer understands where its stories fit. Look no further than Eternals, which introduced a dozen new characters and 10,000 years of history into a two-hour movie. Why wasn't this a Disney plus series that could have given the concept time to breathe?

Meanwhile, they're clearly expanding on stories that don't need to be TV shows. The Obi-Wan series is a great example of this. There was a really strong central narrative about Obi-Wan's relationship with Vader that ultimately got buried under the bloatware of side quests and subplots. And hey, wouldn't you know? Obi Wan was originally written to be a two-hour movie that they decided to turn into a six-hour series. If you want a super recent example: Secret Invasion which, man, I have no idea what Marvel was thinking about this one. Let's take this iconic comic book story with an Avengers-level threat and adapt it into a spy thriller with basically no espionage, no thrills, and no Avengers.

What should have been this incredible highlight of the Avengers line of movies... I mean, who doesn't love themselves, a good impostor story... turned into yet another piece of wasted potential content for further dilute the MCU brand on Disney Plus. . And again, here's the problem when you start downloading a lot of content at once just to keep us on the digital treadmill: people start to see patterns. They see the trends, the formulas you are using. For example, with so many Big Temple Disney releases lately, a main character became tired just because he lost a loved one. It happened with Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Hell, even the Haunted Mansion in Secret Invasion, which you probably shouldn't know about, because why would you bother looking at those things? This generation of stories has seen our fictional heroes become miserable and, let's face it, that's not something fans want to see. We fell in love with these characters for a reason. They inspired us for a reason. Seeing them crushed under the same depression of reality that we real people face every day is no fun. Sure, it might be more realistic to see a disillusioned Indiana Jones, but audiences go to the movies to escape reality, to believe in something better, something bigger, to have something to look forward to and aspire to.

And Disney no longer delivers those hopeful messages. So that's a lot of pessimism, right? Is there a way that Disney and really the entire movie industry can fix all of these problems? Well, yes, actually. All you have to do: treat it like a YouTube channel. What I mean is that they need to schedule their movie list just like you do with a YouTube channel. I'm going to tell you a little secret, loyal theorist: we spend a lot of time thinking about the theories that we present on the different channels. With multiple weekly meetings trying to figure out what would work best and where, planning when things should improve and which videos complement each other, all for the overall health of the business.

You can't just post a video you want and expect everything to go well these days. No, you have to make sure you have strong videos here and there to keep the system and your viewers happy. And everything we talked about today with Disney are things that come up regularly in our daily conversations about how to handle things here at THEORIST. First of all, we have a quality bar that the episodes just have to meet, otherwise they won't get done. Our main metric to determine the success or failure of a video is not revenue, but you, the community.

Could we make more money by releasing more episodes each week? Probably. But in the process we would exhaust it and, of necessity, water down the show as we greenlight worse and worse episodes. Check out YouTube analytics, which gives you a handy little graph that ranks their most recent releases from 1 to 10 in terms of their performance. Well, ideally, each load you do should be one in ten. It's just not realistic to have those kinds of expectations. In the end, something is inevitably going to be a 10 out of 10. And if you're good at what you do, you know when those nines and tens are going to appear, so you have to surround that underperforming player with things that you know will do well.

Otherwise, you run the risk of taking L after L after L and starting to make a narrative about how bad your stuff is now, how much it's fallen apart. Or worse, the algorithm decides that people don't care about your channel anymore. Apply this concept to Disney and you'll immediately see what they have to do with their IP. When you have back-to-back disappointments like Marvel's recent slate, it creates a downward spiral that's pretty hard to break in the public consciousness. But if you strategically mix one or two good things with the bad things, it's suddenly much harder to craft a pessimistic narrative.

Here's an example of programming: Multiverse of Madness, Wakanda Forever, Guardians Three, Love and Thunder, Quantumania. That looks very different from what actually happened when the Guardians three showed up at the end. The actual release order gave you four disappointments in a row before you got a little boost with the generally well-received Guardians. But if the Guardians had been in the middle, the disappointments suddenly dissipate. There is a gap there. Mediocre films on both sides are just the cost of the franchise and a long wait for the next big event. In fact, I can make this lineup even better if Wakanda Forever had been first on the list.

Wakanda's lackluster performance was actually made significantly worse by the disappointment of Multiverse of Madness that came just before. If it had come before Doctor Strange, that movie wouldn't have had to endure all the extra scrutiny of "Is Marvel losing its way?", "If Wakanda Forever isn't good, that means it's the end of Marvel," which carries to a different cultural conversation around them. Release order matters when it comes to shaping the narrative around your brand, and it matters a lot. The same applies to any experimental episode. Disney needs to make movies about new IPs like Pixar's Elio or lesser-known characters like Marvel's Moon Knight.

But obviously those projects are going to be risky, so that risk is balanced by placing them among other projects that you hope will do well. Your Toy Story five, your Avengers, your Guardians. This accomplishes three things at once: it mitigates your risk, spreads out quoted cash grabs, and potentially finds your next explosive intellectual property. Again, let's look at film

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as an example. On this channel, we have some relatively safe things in our core lineup: analog horror, Spider-Man, nostalgic kids' shows, and knowing that we can put the things we're not sure about in between them. And then if something surprises you and manages to explode...

BAM! You have a strong new theme to place other unknowns in the middle. That is literally what happened to us with the Backrooms. We weren't sure one was going to work and it ended up being a huge hit with people wanting more and more of our analysis videos while wearing their absurdly comfortable new hazmat puffer jacket. The bet paid off and it did so in a big way. But we also know that we can't release too many of those things in too rapid a succession. We can't post a Backrooms theory every week because even though they'll do well, people will eventually stop caring if we do too much and stop coming back because we don't add anything to the conversation anymore.

Sound familiar, Star Wars? And you, Marvel? You identify? And in general, when running a YouTube channel, you need to know which episode ideas will work best as shorts and which ones deserve a full video. We're not trying to take something that's clearly short and then expand it into a full 15-minute video or vice versa. Just like Disney shouldn't watch something that's clearly an hour and a half movie and try to turn it into a ten episode miniseries just to get more viewing minutes on their streaming app. The content should fit where it tells the best story.

Lastly, in terms of our budget, we have to make sure that an episode can recoup the money that we spend to pay for it and the writers and editors that are working on it, and we budget based on ad sense alone. We hope to do with that video. Anything extra we get from brand deals or product sales or whatever is a nice bonus. It allows us to expand the team to do more ambitious projects, but we can't budget for every video that way because eventually we'll lose that bet and we won't be able to run the business anymore.

Think of our AdSense as your box office, Disney. Sure, from time to time we might make a more expensive video, something that requires a little more time, or just invest in a passion project. This will be maybe once or twice a year, not every release. Disney, you can't keep releasing one $300 million movie after another without knowing you're going to make that back at the box office. Budget according to what you know you're going to make at the theaters that way, all the ancillary stuff, that's gravy. Anything you earn on top of that, boom, is a bonus.

You became much more profitable. Do you know what will help you with that? Fixing the reshoot issue. Let me tell you, while researching this episode, as someone who runs a media company, my jaw dropped when I saw how often companies like Disney do reshoots that heavily revise the movie. How does your first day go without having a clear vision that the writers, directors, producers and the studio have agreed on? At Theorist we don't do an episode unless our entire senior creative team is on the same page about what that episode will be. And most importantly, when we work with brands, we require every stakeholder to review and lock the script before shooting begins.

That way, no one will be able to request a last minute change. We learned early on that those reshoots and re-edits cost a fortune and killed our process. But by forcing everyone to get on the same page from the start, even if it's painful and slows down the process a bit in the beginning, you save a lot of time, money and a lot of headaches on the other end of the much more expensive production. . process. Yet in its desperate attempt to catch up with Netflix with its streaming service, pouring money into its problems in the hope that it will go away, Disney has lost sight of what made entertainment work in the first place: doing what you can. , doing what you're good at, staying within budget and telling a story worth telling.

And if here on YouTube we can do it, there is no excuse. Or if they can't get their act together, even Disney's death was ultimately for the best. But hey, remember, go check out that new theoretical clothing line. Again, I can't stress enough how much work went into all of these elements because we wanted this to be more than your typical YouTuber merch, like, well, just put the logo on it. No, these are real clothes that have expert details on high-quality fabrics and things that will make you feel amazing when you wear them. So please do me a favor: go check out all the cool stuff we made by heading to the links to our theoretical clothing website in the description below.

Or maybe it's on the screen right now. I don't know. Perhaps through the magic of editing we can achieve this. And as always my friends, until next time, remember, everything is just a theory, a Film Theory! And cut.