Bob’s Bomb Factory
Wish has flopped. It’s official. As of this writing, it has hauled in less than $49 million. It is Disney’s seventh bomb this year and it’s ninth bomb in a row (excluding Guardians 3). Wish is Bob Iger’s disaster. He owns it, every decision he’s made for the last six years contributed to its abject failure.
The ever-easily-trained Hollywood trade press has pulled out its official Disney Flop Playbook, flipped to some fairly dog-eared pages, and began reciting the list of excuses for a film that should have been a slam dunk for Disney. An animated Disney Princess film being released on Thanksgiving should have equaled mega-bucks for Cancer Rat.
But instead, Variety, Deadline, and the rest are having to once again, offer up excuses for its failure. “It’s that darn Disney Plus, don’t you know. It has audiences trained to wait until It’s on Disney Plus, so they aren’t going to the theaters. The theaters simply haven’t recovered from Covid and perhaps never will.”
Yeah, there’s a few problems with that. First, Disney Plus doesn’t have a subscriber base that is big enough to support that theory. Second, Mario, Barbenhiemer, and freaking Five Nights at Freddy’s have demonstrated that the theaters are indeed back. You just have to put something in them that people want to see. Third, Universal has been doing same-day streaming/theatrical releases and so far has made bank.
The problem isn’t Disney+, the problem is Disney. A brand that was a century in the making has been hopelessly damaged in its 100th year. I’m not going to say it was a long time in coming because the corporate cancer while present, didn’t metastasize and spread throughout the company until 2018. That was when Bob Iger appears to have suddenly decided that any dissenting opinion was a bad opinion. He also began transforming the Walt Disney Company into a springboard for his White House bid.
He started bringing in people whose primary job qualifications were their connections to the Democratic party. Being party hacks first and foremost, they began transforming the Walt Disney Company into an ideological bastion of leftism. These people are the ones who turned Disney into an SJW convergence nexus. They are also the people who began breaking key talent links. Case in point John Lasseter, when it became obvious that he was not a fellow traveler, he was accused of excessive hugging. This absolutely retarded accusation should have resulted in the immediate dismissal of the people who were clearly leading an internal revolt against their boss. Iger, however, had apparently grown tired of people wanting to run vital creative decisions past Lassetter before forwarding them to Bob.
Bob Iger has made a number of terrible decisions whose effects take digging to uncover. Not so the firing of John Lassetter, it is the most obvious of Bob Iger’s terrible decisions.
It feels like Iger was expecting Lassetter to wander off in the desert and fade from memory. As if someone destroyed by him would be obliterated forever. Instead, John Lassetter has looted every ounce of talent out of Disney’s animation department. This brain drain has likely caused irreversible damage to the Disney animation studio. The kind of mentoring relationships that are critical to an animation studio’s continuation and inertia are all gone. An animation studio is a collegium and all the professors have quit leaving the TAs to try and teach the 800-level courses.
Various people connected with the production have started leaking to John Trent and Jonas Campbell. The tale of woe is a completely expected one. Wish did indeed start life as a Disney Princess film and would have been a fairly decent capstone to Disney’s centennial celebration. But then it was hijacked by the Reimagine Tomorrow and Stories Matter groups that I have written about here before.
If John Lassetter was still working at Disney, then Wish would not have bombed.
Wish’s failure is all on Bob Iger.
