[tamalpais]

I have so much respect for Disney and Bob Iger in particular. But something feels lacking about a single company controlling all the best-loved stories in a culture. It’s like a monopoly on sentiment.

Until the last 100 years or so it’s been the case that a given culture’s stories — folklores, mythologies, and religions — were in the public domain. And while they were at times subject to tight control, e.g., non-vernacular liturgies, they were more typically “owned” by everyone.

I don’t mean this as a criticism of copyright. I support copyright and how it incentivizes cultural creation. But I wonder about whether there’s space for more stories we all own, that can be interpreted by everyone, and, most importantly, that create the same powerful feelings of attachment Disney is so good at creating.

[SllX]

The stories that Disney owns are just a drop in the bucket compared to the whole rest of the world. I mean, no matter what you watch, read, play or listen to, there's only so many hours in the day for any of it. I remember the Aladdin and Lion King movies of my youth fondly, but no more fondly than say, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Smash Bros., Astro Boy, Final Fantasy, Lord of the Rings, Pac-Man, Pokémon, His Dark Materials, Animorphs, or the Harry Potter books. Last I checked, Disney doesn't own any of that and those were just the first handful of examples I pulled out of my hat. I think our media habits are even more fragmented nowadays than they were in my youth, and that's in part because YouTube, Steam, Twitch, Netflix, and the million and one other streaming services we have today didn't exist in the 90s. I think Cable TV was the new hotness, and that was choice compared to mere broadcast television.

[freddie_mercury]

What's more movies get privileged in a weird way over other things. Avengers: Endgame brought in $2.7 billion and is the highest grossing film of all time. Only 5 films ever have broken $2 billion.

Phantom of the Opera the musical has made $6 billion, blowing Avengers out of the water. Wicked the musical has grossed $3 billion, more than any movie ever made. Same for Mamma Mia!.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) made $600 million in the first 72-hours, far more than any movie ever. League of Legends makes $1.4 billion a year, again more than any movie ever made. Fortnite makes $2.4 billion.

In the UK, more people watched The X Factor than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The book Diary of a Wimpy Kid sold over a million copies in its latest installment.

Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.

[thaumasiotes]

> Avengers: Endgame brought in $2.7 billion and is the highest grossing film of all time. Only 5 films ever have broken $2 billion.

> Phantom of the Opera the musical has made $6 billion, blowing Avengers out of the water. Wicked the musical has grossed $3 billion, more than any movie ever made. Same for Mamma Mia!.

> In the UK, more people watched The X Factor than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The book Diary of a Wimpy Kid sold over a million copies in its latest installment.

> Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.

The first metric you mention is not the right one for discussing cultural impact. You'd want to compare number of tickets sold for Phantom of the Opera to number of tickets sold for Avengers: Endgame.

Weirdly, you go on to make the correct comparison for The X Factor.

I'm not convinced that popular video games haven't made their way into the conversations about cultural significance.

[tanilama]

> Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.

Really? What cultural affinity is there for Avengers? For Force Awakens?

I would argue movies have built an establishment of critics around itself, the disclosure surrounding it does appear to be more sophisticated and intellectual. But that doesn't mean the it is shaping the audience's perception the same way.

[krapp]

>Really? What cultural affinity is there for Avengers? For Force Awakens?

The Avengers is a part of a comic franchise that is almost 50 years old, and Star Wars basically invented the science fiction movie blockbuster over 40 years ago. Both have been deeply influential on generations of people and on the way their respective genres have been portrayed in all media.

To question whether there is cultural affinity for either is to fundamentally misunderstand modern Western pop culture, because these properties are more influential to it than the Bible and Shakespeare.

[tanilama]

Bob Iger is magical but I am not worrying about Disney's monopoly per say.

Yes, Disney is dominating Hollywood like no one had done before.

But Hollywood itself is as irrelevant as it has never been. It no longer dominates the world's attention, and the audience's choices are more abundant than ever.

[EricE]

The irony is Disney built it's success on re-telling classic tales from the public domain then turned and became the biggest proponent for copyright, denying those after them the same playing field they had.

Which is why incumbents tend to welcome onerous regulations once they are big enough to deal with them. It locks the young upstarts from coming up behind them and potentially overtaking them.

Amazon wasn't for having to collect state sales tax until they figured it out. Facebook didn't start talking about regulation being a good thing until they were big enough to easily absorb the impact.

Whats even better - you get to blame the regulations as the gatekeeper, not your own sleazy behavior.

[gamblor956]

There are multiple movies of all the stories that the Disney classic animated films are based on. Most of them are not made by Disney... Indeed, at least 3 of them are produced or distributed by Netflix.

Copyright doesn't stop people from making movies about folk tales. The cost of making a movie and the generally low returns do.