The Walt Disney Corporation, which recently absorbed Fox the way Putin absorbed the Ukraine–ie., a blatant violation of norms under the guise of friendliness executed with the full and corrupt approval of the Trump administration–has now released its prospective slate of films through 2027. I can only assume the upcoming slate stops at 2027 because that’s when the ritual will be complete and the scientists who toil beneath EPCOT will finally be able to transmute Walt Disney’s soul from his frozen corpse into the animatronic Lincoln so that Walt can use our greatest president’s natural charisma and indestructible titanium frame to kill all the Jews. But don’t worry, according to these upcoming movies, all that is good in this world will be dead long before that, in the run-up to what I’m calling The Disneypocalypse. Let’s see what horrors we have to look forward to!
2019
Yes, the very year in which we now reside! Time is a river whose current pulls us inexorably toward a waterfall, the spikes at the bottom of which represent bad movies which will nonetheless be everywhere and make too much money.
In May 2019, we have Tolkien (5/10/19, so, like three days from now), a biopic about J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, a masterpiece that changed fantasy forever. I can’t imagine this will be good, as Tolkien led an extremely boring life of smoking pipes and inventing languages that didn’t exist. Sure, he also experienced war, but is there any chance that this movie won’t betray Tolkien’s famous opinion of people trying to make his epic into an allegory for World War 2?
Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or views of those who like allegory or topical reference. But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.
-Tolkien, in his The Lord of the Rings second edition foreword
No. No, there is not.
One of the last titles released under Fox Searchlight, the devoured studio’s imprint for independent and smaller genre pictures, look for Tolkien to do absolutely nothing to stem the box office tide of Avengers: Endgame. Since the film opens this weekend, a trailer exists:
Christ.
Also in May: the live action remake of Aladdin (5/24/19). Disney’s insistence on doing live action remakes of all of its animated classics is monstrous and Aladdin will be no exception. It would be one thing if Disney had a new take on these stories–revisionist angles, gender swaps, perspective shifts, an aim at more adult sensibilities, any compelling reason to make a new movie here–but films like the live action Beauty and the Beast have proven that they absolutely do not. All they want is what are essentially shot for shot remakes, which only serves to highlight how the current style of desaturated, blandly directed movies-as-content is so much less engaging and exciting than the gorgeous color palette, careful design, and freeform movement of traditional animation. Here’s the trailer for this month’s bullshit money grab:
“Hey, so you asked me to cut a trailer that’s somehow romantic, nostalgic, funny, exciting, and thrilling at the same time, and that’s impossible? Question mark?”
“Have you tried putting big dramatic WHAMS under the romantic ballad to emphasize how exciting it is to watch a bad version of the thing you only liked originally because it was good?”
In June 2019 the content coming down the feed tubes into the movie trough starts with Dark Phoenix (6/7/19). A movie guaranteed to make me miss X-Men fucking 3, Dark Phoenix tackles once again the entire series’ most ham-handed metaphor (women are just toooo powerful, and then they turn into an alien murder-bird and something must be done about them), and I’m including the time Senator Mitch McConnell tried to pass a Mutant Registry shortly before turning into a puddle of goo, which was a metaphor for gun control. Disney owns Fox now, which means they can grind the X-Men into slurry that matches the MCU in lack-of-color and room temperature consistency, but Kevin Feige insists he has to wait at least five years to fit them into the Marvel schedule (unlike when he got his hands on Spider-Man and knocked down several old ladies in his rush to put Tom Holland in tights), probably because he’s afraid some of the X-Men aren’t just metaphorically gay. In the meantime, a couple of Fox X-Men movies were still in various stages of production when the merger happened and so now we might get to watch them and stuff. The series has a very, very mixed track record at this point: X-Men is seminal, X2 is still a very good superhero movie, and Logan is a masterpiece, while the series’ low points include such garbage piles as X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men: Apocalypse. I don’t have high hopes for Dark Phoenix (I don’t have high hopes either, but I cannot let this general libel towards the Dark Phoenix storyline stand, as it is one of the best storylines in comics history. It is too bad all movie versions of it will screw it up. – Ed), but let’s see if the trailer changes my mind:
…no, this looks pretty bad. Most disheartening sign here? The moral conflict just doesn’t seem compelling. This summer, the X-Men must choose… between stopping an all-powerful murder witch who enjoys losing control… and being nice to their friend. (And then one of them is a talking pie.)
Next up in June, it’s Toy Story 4, a movie that by all rights should not exist. But Pixar is part of Disney, and that means never letting a franchise end if they can find a way to pump out a new installment. Look out for live action remakes of the Pixar back catalog in the 2030s, everybody. (Well, not everybody. Walterbraham Lincolnsey will have wiped out the Jews by then. But everybody else.)
Look, I’m sure Toy Story 4 will be really good, because Pixar generally makes good-to-great films, and if nothing else, the animation is sure to be incredible. What stings here is how emotional Toy Story 3 was–and how much of that emotion was built around the idea of ending, of putting your toys away and growing up. Making a sequel to that undercuts what was a great movie. Not to mention that the Toy Story franchise has always had an uneasy relationship between its authentically moving stories and its commercialist roots, and you know one reason this movie is being made is to spur renewed sales of toys and other merchandise. “You’re Bonnie’s toy,” Woody explains to the Frankensteinian creation Forky. “You are going to help create happy memories that will last for the rest of her life!” And keep her happily forking over cash to see those memories reworked and remade, like a good consumer, for the rest of her life. Forky, who is a spork with googly eyes attached, is no doubt a self-referential joke at the idea of lazy cash grabs and big-eyed Disney characters designed to be adorable enough to merit mass production in plastic and plush. But isn’t there something even more sinister about a giant corporation that’s happy to jokingly acknowledge its own terribleness while reinforcing its hold over you? Somewhere in the bowels of Pixar, somebody is about to pay out on a bet that they can make America’s children fall in love with and buy toys of a fucking spork, and that makes me angry.
In July 2019, another Fox project gets dumped by the side of the road like your first wife’s kids. This time it’s Stuber (7/12/19), a comedy starring Kumail Nanjiani as an Uber driver who picks up Dave Bautista’s hard-boiled cop and gets involved in his case. Is Stuber an unofficial sidequel to The Big Sick, Nanjiani’s romantic comedy about how he met his wife when he was an Uber driver? Or is Stuber a reverse Die Hard 3, with Nanjiani in the Sam Jackson role? Or is Stuber a comedic take on Michael Mann’s Collateral, where Jamie Foxx is the cab driver and Tom Cruise is the passenger forcing him into an action movie? Or is Stuber a gender-swap remake of the 2004 Queen Latifah vehicle Taxi? Or is Stuber the big screen adaptation of everybody’s favorite short-lived TV series Taxi Brooklyn, about streetwise, French immigrant taxi driver Leo Romba, unofficial partner to frequent passenger and driven detective trying to solve the mystery of her father’s murder Cat Sullivan? Or is Stuber just an obnoxiously referential title reinforcing a monstrously unethical corporation’s enshrinement in the SNL-level comedy culture that exists today? The answer to all of these questions is yes, obviously. (But hey, Kumail and Dave are good actors who deserve to pick up a paycheck, so whatever.)
July also brings us yet another live action remake of an animated classic, Disney presents Disney’s The Lion King: A Walt Disney Production (7/19/19). Just take a look at these two trailers side by side and tell me something isn’t being lost visually here:
I have my problems with The Lion King as a narrative (for one thing, Simba is an asshole), but visually it’s magnificent–and compared to this CG bullshit, it’s clear, colorful, evocative, and cinematic.
“But Kyu, if they wanted to make a live action Lion King, how could you make that visually interesting?”
I don’t know, give it to Julie fucking Taymor?
I’m not even going to get into the de-queerification of Scar and other queer-coded Disney villains (short version: when the only queer rep are the bad guys, that’s not great, but neither is straight-washing them in the remakes). The bottom line is that, like all of these live action remakes, this movie doesn’t do anything to justify its own existence. Well, except for that one thing.
Dear God, are we still in 2019? August 2019 brings us a pair of the kind of smaller Fox movies that Disney definitely won’t be making anymore: a family movie told from the perspective of a dog called The Art of Racing in the Rain (8/19/19) (based on a bestselling book that did for auto racing and being a parent what Eat, Pray, Love did for eating, praying, and the Oxford comma; best Wikipedia quote: “Inspiration for the novel came after Stein … heard … a reading of [a] poem … told from a dog’s point of view”), and Ready or Not (8/23/19), a thriller (with hints of black comedy?) about a wedding that goes awry thanks to some very creepy in-laws. These movies are so small that they don’t even have trailers yet for me to mock despite the fact that they’re being released just four months from now, which is just not the Disney way.
September 2019 will finally see the release of Ad Astra (9/20/19), a movie I’m not going to yell at because it’s not only original science fiction, it’s from one of my favorite sub-genres of science fiction, Space is Angry and Wants to Kill You. I don’t know what director/co-writer James Gray is doing making a sci-fi movie (in which Brad Pitt looks for his missing father and things get kinda Heart of Darkness-y), since Gray has spent his whole career making small dramas that are mostly about crimes, but hey, if Claire Denis can make that leap, maybe Gray can, too.
October 2019 starts with The Woman in the Window (10/4/19), which I’m assuming is an adaptation of this umpteenth best-selling thriller with “girl” or “woman” in the title and not what it should be, an adaptation of this fantastic New Yorker profile of the novel’s author, Dan Mallory (who published under a pseudonym). The tl;dr is that Mallory, who got his book published using connections he built as an editor, may have plagiarized the story and also may not actually be an editor. An inveterate liar who seems fond of inventing stories about family members with cancer to garner sympathy, Mallory is apparently a world-class jerk who deserves none of his success. I have zero interest in another garden variety thriller, but would pay through the nose to see somebody tackle the book in a film that’s Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. meets The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which lies, fiction, and truth merge into a blackly comic thriller.
Next up is Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (10/18/19). I didn’t see the first Maleficent and I imagine I will happily die maintaining that state of affairs, so I don’t have much to say about this planned sequel (prequel? who knows?) except that 1) “Mistress of Evil” is a pretty terrible subtitle, and 2) what’s with Disney only being able to make movies about women if they have magic powers and are considered evil and dangerous by those around them?
November 2019 dumps off another box of Fox leftovers at the church potluck, Ford v. Ferrari (11/15/19), a movie that I will assume is a Cars spinoff in the Death Race 2000 cinematic universe. Actually, it’s what looks to be a pretty boring true life story of rival automakers trying to design a car to win Le Mans in the ’60s, albeit with an excellent cast (the film stars Christian Bale, who understands rivalry from his time as a magician in The Prestige, and Matt Damon, who understands rivalry from his joke feud with Jimmy Kimmel and his actual feud with Ben Affleck, who just will not admit he didn’t actually co-write Good Will Hunting) and director James “Yeah, I directed fucking Logan, bitches” Mangold at the helm. So who knows?
Also in November, just prepare your body for death now, it’s Frozen 2 (11/22/19). This Thanksgiving, you’ll learn what songs you’re going to have to hear four times a day for the next year! Frozen was a mess, so I don’t have high hopes for this sequel, but this may be a good time to point out that Frozen has been embraced by some LGBT+ people, who find that the movie’s narrative of a misunderstood outcast who runs away from her family in order to reclaim her true identity resonated with their own lives. I’m not saying they shouldn’t feel the way they feel, or get meaning from whatever story that works for them. But it troubles me to see people build a fandom around that, or push Twitter hashtags agitating to make Elsa gay within the text of this sequel film. Watching people stan a global megacorp is bad enough; watching them do so when that global megacorp actively chooses to erase and ignore them is pathetic and sad. Disney does not like or respect LGBT audiences. It does not believe LGBT characters belong in its movies. It will happily take their money, though, and as long as it continues to do so, it will continue to consider its absurd tokenism and vague allegories and unofficial Gay Days at Disneyland to be good enough.
Now let’s enjoy the Frozen 2 teaser trailer! It has a cute snowman in it!
December 2019 brings, as it does every year, a new Star Wars movie. Will Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (12/20/19) live up to expectations? Will fans who hated Rian Johnson’s excellent The Last Jedi return to the fold? Why can’t everybody just enjoy these great movies?
Thanks, President Robo-Disney! You have the wisdom of 10 unholy ghosts in the machine.
Full disclosure: this teaser made me tear up.
Finally, also in December, a Fox animated movie called Spies in Disguise (12/25/19). It’s worth noting that Star Wars is also basically a Christmas release, only Disney is so confident in its ability to make everyone see its tentpoles in their opening weekend that Disney is comfortable it can release a family movie five days later and not cannibalize its own box office receipts. That seems… bad? At any rate, this Fox holdover is by Blue Sky Studios, which tends to make mediocre, uninspired kids’ fare, like the Ice Age movies. That’s not always the case–their (ugh) Oscar-nominated Ferdinand was atrocious, while The Peanuts Movie was actually quite lovely, even if it didn’t receive a nomination in a competitive year (probably losing its slot to Shaun the Sheep, which I haven’t seen). Anyway, Peanuts at least proves Blue Sky has the potential to do exciting, innovative work. That said, Spies in Disguise is a comedy about a spy who disguises himself as a pigeon, so I’m guessing this is more uninspired kids’ fare. Will the main character poop on the bad guy’s head? Most definitely. Let’s just hope that when that happens he’s still a pigeon.
And that’s it for 2019. Two live action remakes, three movies about how women who can do things are dangerous, several movies about people who are also animals and animals who are also people, multiple as in more than one movies about race cars, a movie about a man who makes up stories, a movie about a man who makes up stories in a bad way, five sequels, and a five-way tie between Stuber, The Art of Racing in the Rain, Ad Astra, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and Spies in Disguise for crappiest title.
Disney just finalized their merger with Fox this year, so the rest of 2019 is nine movies from Fox or Fox Searchlight and six movies from Disney/Pixar. That’s the best that ratio will ever be, according to this schedule, as the Fox projects are released or canceled and everything new will be developed by Disney. It also seems likely that the future includes Disney taking a larger market share while releasing fewer movies–more $billion+ blockbusters like Avengers: Endgame, fewer boutique movies like Ready or Not. We’ll see that process continue to advance in Part 2 of this Disneypocalypse series, covering the 2020 slate.
-Kyu