Pandora's Box, page 30
Iger put down Netflix, saying in 2019, “What Netflix is doing is making content to support a platform,” whereas Disney is a brand. But one of the reasons Disney was so reluctant to let Lizzie be Lizzie, so to speak, is that it is a brand.47 It’s no accident that theme parks and merchandising to one side, the most successful Disney’s brand is the least Disney, the outlier Marvel.
Netflix has been quick to take advantage of the fact that many of Disney’s creatives feel suffocated by the heavy hand of branding. A veritable parade of Disney producers has defected to Netflix—including Kanter, a twenty-year veteran. “I was ready to play outside the Disney sandbox,” she says. “The kind of content they were looking for just became less and less interesting for me. ‘Find the next Hannah Montana.’ But you know what? We did Hannah Montana. Why don’t we try to do something else? What you won’t find at Netflix are the remakes of remakes and spinoffs of spinoffs.”48
Perhaps the most high-profile defector was Doc McStuffins’ Chris Nee. In 2018, she left for an overall deal at Netflix’s animation division, which was becoming a refuge for disgruntled animators from Disney and Nickelodeon. She gained, in her words, “great creative freedom.” At Disney, she says, “To get a same-sex family into an episode was a fight over multiple seasons. You are in a constant notes mode. They weren’t looking to empower someone to create their own brand within the world of Disney. Over a period of almost ten years, I made two shows. Plus, they were very clear that two would be the cap. At Netflix, I have five different series in process right now. You get to kick down those barriers of ‘This programming is for this age.’ You can work in different age ranges. You can work across genres. I get fewer notes. I am left alone. They trust what I do and how I do it. It’s like night and day.”49
Nee says that although she knew how to make hits like Doc McStuffins, Netflix told her, “‘You don’t have to make the huge hit here. You can make the smaller, more personal thing because we’re trying to find specific programming for everyone.’ The idea of ‘You’re not going to be penalized for making a niche show’ appealed to me. For the creator it’s catnip to hear that Netflix has no brand. It’s one of their great selling points. How that will end up working overall for Netflix, that’s the big question. Or with the number of different streaming platforms, do you need some kind of identity to help people know where to look for what? I don’t know the answer to that.”
Shonda Rhimes agrees. One of the reasons she left ABC for Netflix is that Netflix isn’t branded. It “didn’t require you to make a show that is an ‘ABC show’ or to make a show that had a certain budget or tone to it,” she explains. “In network television, if you make a show, they just want you to make more of that show, and if you make a different kind of show, they’re worried it’s not going to work.”50
Says Nee, “For the most part I found the Netflix culture amazing. It really was meant to be this Shangri-la.” But, she goes on, it was almost too much of a good thing. She recalls, “At some point, I started saying, ‘It’s really hard working at a place where no one will say no about anything.’ You actually can’t tell that a yes is a yes. When the first of the animation projects got killed, there were a lot of people who felt relieved to know that there were walls in the room in which we were.”51
Netflix premiered three of her new shows in 2021—We the People; Ada Twist, Scientist; and Ridley Jones, “so it’s ‘so far so good,’” she said then. But “eyes wide open—all organizations change. Leaders change. The world changes. So I’ll be very happy here until I’m not.”52
As the female flight from Disney indicates, all was not well at “the happiest place on earth.” Disney has been charged by ten women with discriminating against female employees, which the company denies. According to one employee, a female producer was taken to lunch and advised to be more “ladylike.” Adds another source, men were given more latitude than women in terms of behavior. “There was one creator there who had a restraining order against him for harassing younger female employees, who was not allowed on the lot. And yet they did not let him go. They created an entire system around him, bringing in another co-showrunner so that he could give the notes to that person who would interact with staff.”53 Would a woman in the same position with, say, an abusive temper, be given the same consideration? Replies a former employee, “No. I would consider that a double standard.” As one source put it, “Disney is not a nice company.”54
Worse, Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Walt’s brother Roy O., and long a thorn in her family’s corporate side, offers a broader critique in a documentary she produced called The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales. Among other things, the doc attacked Disney’s leadership for its shabby treatment of its approximately 223,000 employees during the pandemic when it closed its parks.
The magnitude of the layoffs caused her to take to Twitter and tweet, “WHAT THE ACTUAL F***???,” calling Iger’s 2018 salary of $65.6 million and 2019 salary of $47,525,560 “insane” and “a naked indecency.” She asked, “What kind of a person feels comfortable with that?” especially at a time when Disney laid off nearly half its workforce, eventually amounting to thirty-two thousand employees by April 2020.55 “Let’s not pretend that [they] go somewhere and disappear,” she wrote. “They lose their houses, they are homeless, and they have to steal things to eat.”56 She quoted multiple park employees complaining that they had to “forage for food in other people’s garbage.”57
If Uncle Walt made a name for himself with Steamboat Willie, steampunk Star Wars generated one of Disney+’s first breakout hits of the Iger era, The Mandalorian. The Mandalorian himself is a bounty hunter played by Pedro Pascal, who then might have been familiar to Game of Thrones fans as Oberyn Martell, but we’re not talking Game of Thrones here. The Lucasfilm show is all action, little character, and most of what passes for dialogue is just noise, no better than computer-generated gibberish—“Chain codes,” “tracking fobs”—or worse: “Not so fast, Fennec!” or “Who’s this guy?” It’s all sound and fury, signifying money. Most of the characters look like the Stop the Stealers who descended on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, horns and all. The droids, who don’t have to pretend they’re actors, turn in the best performances. They even ended up on postage stamps, suggesting that Iger had added the US Postal Service to Disney’s holdings. Frozen in place, they look much more comfortable than they do when animated.
Despite The Mandalorian’s cachet, and Pascal’s emergence as a genuine action star in HBO Max’s The Last of Us, each Star Wars movie since The Force Awakens in 2015—The Last Jedi; Solo: A Star Wars Story; and The Rise of Skywalker—has done less business than the previous one, with Solo actually losing nearly $80 million.
According to one report, “agents” say, “Top filmmakers are dying to make a Star Wars movie—until they sign on and experience the micromanagement and plot-point-by-committee process.”58 The next Star Wars picture, written by Steven Knight, who replaced Lost’s Damon Lindelof (let’s hope it’s more Peaky Blinders than See), isn’t expected until 2025 at the earliest. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, who seems to be focusing exclusively on streaming, is taking the hit for neglecting the movie franchise, with Puck’s Matthew Belloni calling the lengthy gap between the last Star Wars movie and the next “borderline corporate negligence.”59
Meanwhile, it seems like Marvel is dropping new films and TV series every month. WandaVision, for example, generated an inordinate amount of press and won two Primetime Emmys, richly deserved. It’s another one of those shows that are interesting as a “metafiction.” On one level, it is about itself and its niche in the Disney firmament.
WandaVision begins as a proto-Disney, anti-Marvel show, an homage to everything Marvel isn’t, that is, a small screen, black-and-white simulacrum of a ’50s going on ’60s sitcom like I Love Lucy, featuring two B-list Avengers in love, Wanda Maximoff, and Vision, an android-slash-synthezoid-slash-technosapien (see After Yang), neither of whom made so much as a ripple in their previous MCU outings. It is five years since the “Snap,” wherein Thanos, the Big Bad of Avengers: Endgame, killed off half of all living things, including Vision (twice), with a click of his fingers.
The two live in connubial bliss in a hypernormal New Jersey suburb called Westview. All, however, is not what it seems. The sunny WandaVision is cleverly linked to the darker byways of the MCU by a slip of the tongue, whereupon Westview is revealed to be no more than an illusion, a spell called the Hex, cast by Wanda, who turns out to be the Scarlet Witch from the Avengers series. It’s a wish-fulfillment dream born of her desire for a happily-ever-after life of domestic bliss with Vision, with whom she is in love and has revived, re-created, or otherwise reanimated.
In this idyll, Ted Lasso could well be their next-door neighbor, but the Marvel world from which she is trying to escape will not be denied, and her actual next-door neighbor, nosy Agnes, is no Ted. It turns out that Wanda is not the only witch in town, and the new one is a bitch. “Agnes” is really Agatha Harkness, accused of practicing black magic during the Salem witch trials. (She has been spun off into her own series, Agatha: Coven of Chaos.) When she reveals her true nature, the two go full Marvel, flinging bolts of flaming energy at each other—to what end?
It seems that Wanda has to choose between family (Vision and her twin boys) encased in, say, The Dick Van Dyke Show that she has created with her spell, or doing the right thing by releasing the town from the Hex, which would entail Vision’s death. Despite a hopeful sentiment expressed by someone or other—“Families are forever”—hers isn’t. Revoking, nullifying, abrogating, or whatever it is you do to dispel a spell, she does it, returning the good citizens of Westview to their normal routines at the cost of her family. What started as an anti-Marvel show, in other words, pitting family-friendly Disney against family-unfriendly Marvel, ends up as an anti-Disney show, with Disney muscled by the mighty Marvel. The tail, in effect, is wagging the dog.
WandaVision is full of echoes, allusions, callbacks, and Easter eggs from old TV sitcoms and previous Marvel shows, creating a puzzle for superfans by entangling them in the increasingly intricate Marvel maze, all of which is fine. But when Black Widow was released, requiring The Washington Post to run a piece entitled, “The 7 Marvel Movies You Should See Before Black Widow,” the danger is that those who merely want to watch, not research a PhD in MCU studies, are left out in the cold. Ditto Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. For those studying for their MCU exams, The New York Times recommended rewatching five films to fully understand it.60
If the Lucasfilm franchise is too dumb for its own good, the Marvel franchise is too smart. On the other hand, the vacuum at Lucasfilm and the bottomless pit that is streaming may be stretching Marvel too thin. VFX artists complain of being “pixel-fucked” by the studio’s demands.61 Still, better smart than dumb, which is Disney’s problem.
Marvel, in other words, has done what Disney hasn’t—extended its brand instead of repeating itself. It retired, more or less, its first-, second-, and third-generation superheroes like Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and the Avengers—no matter how well they did at the box office—and replaced them with a batch of newbies comprised partly of wannabes neglected in previous shows, like the Scarlet Witch, Loki, and Black Widow, plus unfamiliars like the Eternals, all lumped together in the post-Avengers, so-called Phase 4? 5? Something? of the MCU. They’ve even begun to experiment with new characters, strangers to the MCU, as in Moon Knight. Ms. Marvel features the franchise’s first Muslim superhero, an Avengers-crazed Pakistani fangirl.
Still, if much of Disney’s “product” leaves a lot to be desired, while Marvel’s is ever evolving in interesting ways, there’s a downside to this dynamic. If shows like The Lion King keep on giving, Marvel keeps on taking. Even when its movies are “good of their kind,” Marvelizing the moviegoing experience sucks the life out of it. Jon Favreau started his career writing a more than promising indie film produced on a shoestring called Swingers in 1995. But ever since he ended up as Marvel’s go-to director for its blockbusters, indie filmmakers who constitute the lifeblood of our movies have jumped from festivals to franchises, traveling through what Washington Post film reviewer Ann Hornaday has called the “Sundance to spandex pipeline.”62
So far as indie talent goes, Marvel’s story is little different from that of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Like Favreau, many, many other promising indies filmmakers have been snatched by Marvel. Ryan Coogler went from Fruitvale Station to Black Panther. Cate Shortland traded in her debut indie, Somersault, which premiered at Cannes, for Black Widow. Chloé Zhao went from an Oscar for Nomadland to Marvel’s Eternals without Thanos even having to snap his fingers. Elizabeth Olsen, aka Wanda Maximoff, started her career at Sundance in 2011 with Silent House and Martha Marcy May Marlene. Some of the films, like Black Panther, are better than others, of course, but as critics are starting to notice, most are not even aimed at fan service, but corporate service.
“Small is beautiful” is a thing of the past, yet another relic of the ’60s. It’s not a phrase you hear much in today’s Hollywood. With its soup-to-nuts parks, worlds, uni- and multiverses, Disney has become our Homer, with tales of the Avengers and the X-Men our Odyssey and Iliad.
On February 25, 2020, Iger finally exited the C-suite, stepping down as CEO of Disney after fifteen years. As he explains it, with big helpings of humble pie for which he is famous, his thinking was, “Things had been quite good at the company in the period of time that I was CEO,” adding, “Subconsciously, I felt like I was always right, or I knew it all. Bringing someone in with a fresh perspective is like opening the windows and letting fresh air blow in.”63 The “fresh air” was named Bob Chapek, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the parks and cruise-ship division, and master of Mickey Mouse merchandising. Iger, at his farewell party, put himself next to Spielberg but put Chapek with the suits, a seating plan that did not bode well for the future.
Meanwhile, as is her wont, Abigail Disney wasted no time expressing her “disappointment” as soon as Bob Chapek was anointed. She called him “a person who never held a creative job in his life.”64 As agent Rick Rosen notes, “Historically, it has been easier for CEOs who had creative backgrounds like Iger to learn the business, than executives with business backgrounds to learn creative.”65
While Iger was known as a visionary, Chapek is known for his inability to see beyond the profit-and-loss numbers on the screen in front of him, as well as his dedication to raising prices and reducing costs. The entry fee for two nights in 2021 at Chapek’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser “immersive adventure” (which includes a hotel and food component, role-playing that teaches vital skills like how to wield a lightsaber as well as a visit to the Star Wars complex at the studio) starts at $4,800 for two people—in the middle of a week in off-season. In 2022, food prices were up 12 percent. According to Len Testa, author of various “unofficial guides” to Walt Disney’s Tragic Kingdom, the company has “essentially abandoned the middle class.”66 Chapek’s compensation, meanwhile, as of 2022, stood at $32.5 million.
Chapek never seemed to have been a student of the Life Lessons—fairness, tolerance, and so on—so freely dispensed by Disney films, and no sooner had he moved into the C-suite than he became embroiled in a fight with one of the biggest and most highly respected stars in Hollywood, Scarlett Johansson. She had played a supporting role as Black Widow in eight movies over eleven years, one of the few females among the Avengers, while she watched her male counterparts each star in multiple films, some of which grossed over $1 billion, before she was given one of her own—Black Widow. In July 2021, she sued Disney for breach of contract when the film, originally slated for a theatrical exhibition, was simultaneously aired on Disney+, sacrificing it, she argued, to build its streaming service. Naturally, it underperformed in theaters, negatively impacting her back-end deal, which included a cut of the box office.
During the ensuing war of words, Disney released a personal attack on Johansson, calling the suit “sad and distressing in its callous disregard for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.”67 The vitriol was virtually unprecedented. Despite the fact that males make up 63 percent of characters with speaking parts in movies with females at a mere 37 percent, Chapek picked the wrong woman to fool with, not to mention that it’s bad business for film companies to go to war with talent, particularly someone of Johansson’s stature. They later settled, but Disney-ologists felt that the blowup would never have happened under Iger.
The ball finally fell in January 2022, ending Iger’s long goodbye. The two Bobs were reduced to one, with Iger destined to inherit Robert Redford’s old handle, “Ordinary Bob.” Or so it seemed.
Disney, with its parks, cruises, and hotels, was particularly vulnerable to the pandemic. Although Iger made way for Chapek in February 2020, he announced that he would not only mentor his successor but actively see Disney through the crisis. By some accounts, this infuriated Chapek, who hadn’t asked for his help. Instead of consulting his storied predecessor, he froze him out of the decision-making process. Said one source, to Chapek, “It seemed like Iger wouldn’t get out of the way.”68
12
Can WBD’s Kid Stay in the Picture?
With Netflix and Disney hogging the limelight, Warner Bros. Discovery fights for its shot.
Back at the unhappiest place on earth—AT&T’s WarnerMedia—as one stumble followed another, it became clear even to Stankey that the marriage between the two companies was on the rocks. In May 2021, he turned around and spun off WarnerMedia into the arms of another AT&T property, the Discovery Channel, creating a new, stand-alone company rechristened Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), and run by Discovery head David Zaslav, who enjoyed the distinction of being one of the highest-paid executives in Hollywood, taking home $246.6 million in 2021 thanks to a stock option grant. He took home $39.3 million in 2022. AT&T stockholders own 71 percent of WBD.
