NY Times Says The Quiet Part Out Loud: Perhaps Audiences Have Passed Disney By

Nostalgia is the feeling that the Walt Disney Company thrives on. Main Street, U.S.A., in the Magic Kingdom, is the perfect example of this nostalgia. Walt Disney wanted to recreate his boyhood home, but not the way it actually was but the way it was in his imagination. Everything is seemingly perfect. And that is perhaps the problem with nostalgia; it can be manipulated and changed.

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Disney has relied on our nostalgia for decades. It’s why we continue to watch Disney movies and make the pilgrimage to Walt Disney World every year. It’s a longer for something from our past that was once there. We all want to push aside the travails of adulthood and be kids again. We all long to jump on a rollercoaster and yell, “Wahoo,” one more time.

But recently, Walt Disney Studios has encountered a problem with its desire to push nostalgia on its audiences: they have stopped listening, and the New York Times published an Op-Ed from movie critic Alissa Wilkinson that wonders aloud if perhaps audiences have tuned out Disney.

Wilkinson wrote in the New York Times:

The expectations of the 21st century, however, demand something else. In this new age, the tools for remixing culture are easy to access, whether you are a big corporation or just a kid in your bedroom, and that’s important: In a world that prefers to create by remixing, we can all make our own versions of Disney’s myths. But the company, built on imagination — its research and development teams are commonly called the Imagineers — actively discourages sharing that innovation in the spaces today’s audiences know and love best.

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Disney has struggled to find an audience recently, with the constant criticism that the studio keeps putting out sequels and live-action remakes of its classic animated films. Of the eight major theatrical releases Disney, Pixar, and Marvel Studios had in 2023, six were either sequels or live-action remakes, with only Elemental (2023) and Wish (2023) being original ideas. And Wish wasn’t so much an original Disney movie as a culmination of 100 years of Disney Animation Studios movie making. 

It should come as no surprise then that five of those eight movies that Disney released this year either have already or are on track to lose more than $100 million. That also doesn’t include Disney’s streaming losses. The audience has spoken, but is Disney actually listening?

Wilkinson ended her Op-Ed in the New York Times with:

Disney isn’t an outlier in struggling to navigate the new world. All of Hollywood is paddling wildly to stay afloat, and the industry today will almost certainly look completely different in a few years. But the specific challenges Disney faces are surprising for a company that prided itself for so long on being ahead of the curve. Walt Disney’s vision of youth savoring “the challenge and the promise of the future” is hard to locate in the reboots and prequels and origin stories and multi-episode side quests. Bob Iger said in that interview that “we have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.” Yet the company he leads has always been about messages, handed down across generations in beloved stories. The question is whether Disney can ensure, anymore, that people are listening.

It isn’t necessarily a threat but a new reality that Disney must face. If Disney continues ignoring its audience, the audience will eventually forget Disney and stop going to the theater.

Nostalgia for childhood will only get you so far. Eventually, you have to give the people something new to latch onto. Otherwise, Disney will become the idealized past like Main Street, U.S.A.