Disney is admitting what many critics have been pointing out all along; that the path of left-leaning political partisanship and woke infusion into its products is causing its audience to walk away with middle fingers held high as they do it.
According to an SEC filing submitted by Disney, the company admits to facing "risks relating to misalignment" with American audiences:
We face risks relating to misalignment with public and consumer tastes and preferences for entertainment, travel and consumer products, which impact demand for our entertainment offerings and products and the profitability of any of our businesses.
Going into further detail, Disney noted that the market changes in "unpredictable ways" as it tries to keep up with content distribution in an ever-changing world. But even in the acknowledgment that Disney's gone wrong with its audience, it still seems to miss the big picture:
Many of our businesses increasingly depend on acceptance of our offerings and products by consumers outside the U.S. The success of our businesses therefore depends on our ability to successfully predict and adapt to changing consumer tastes and preferences outside as well as inside the U.S.
While Disney isn't naming any country in particular, we can safely assume it's referring to China, the other market that rakes in a good deal of money for Disney. The House of Mouse does a lot to bend over backward to China, but China is hardly its primary concern. In fact, it's an over-reliance on China that put a bad taste into the mouths of many here in America, especially after one of its live-action remakes, Mulan, was filmed in the shadow of a Uighur concentration camp. Disney even thanked the Turpan Public Security Bureau, the agency that oversees the region where this concentration camp is located.
Disney, in all its professed wokeness, even went so far as to minimize John Boyega's character "Finn" for the Chinese "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" poster, signaling that Disney is willing to get just as racist as China if it makes the company money.
But Disney's SEC filing continues to fumble the ball:
Moreover, we must often invest substantial amounts in content production and acquisition, acquisition of sports rights, launch of new sports-related studio programming, theme park attractions, cruise ships or hotels and other facilities or customer facing platforms before we know the extent to which these products will earn consumer acceptance, and these products may be introduced into a significantly different market or economic or social climate from the one we anticipated at the time of the investment decisions.
Disney believes that it has to invest more in content production and attractions at its theme parks. While this is partly true, part of the reason Disney is having so much trouble is that it flooded the public with outrageous amounts of content to the point where the public can't keep up, and it's doing so in a market where the public has lost interest in keeping up anyway.
Take, for instance, Disney's formerly hyper-successful Marvel property. Where the release of a Marvel movie used to be an event, Disney has made a habit of releasing new Marvel content on a continuous basis both in theaters and on its streaming platform Disney+. The too-often social justice-infused content aside, Disney forces you to watch these shows in order to keep up with the all-too-convoluted Marvel multiverse to understand what's happening in theaters, and hardly anyone is watching that.
It doesn't help that Disney+ is a streaming service that bled millions of customers.
Moreover, the failure of its Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser experience was a result of releasing an experience that played off its increasingly unpopular Star Wars sequels instead of relying on the original trilogy as a theme for the hotel. It got to the point where Disney was offering discounts to its own employees to stay there to give the impression that the attraction was being used. However, even the employees didn't want anything to do with it.
Disney eventually threw in the towel and closed the failed attraction down.
The final line is probably the most significant here.
"These products may be introduced into a significantly different market or economic or social climate from the one we anticipated at the time of the investment decisions."
Pre-pandemic decisions aside, the fact that Disney was headed in the wrong direction was something that was pretty obvious for years. Audiences had been voicing their distaste and displeasure about injections of leftist politics and woke themes into their movies, and instead of backing off, Disney doubled and tripled down. Even as audiences abandoned theaters, Disney continued to push these themes more and more to the point where some showrunners admitted they were doing so out of spite.
(READ: The She-Hulk Finale Proves Disapproving Audiences Are Getting to Woke Writers)
The audiences were more than happy to return the spite they received with their absence, and even now, you can see the damage Disney inflicted upon itself with its latest two flops, "The Marvels" and "Wish."
It was never a mystery as to what was killing Disney; they just chose to ignore it for the sake of pleasing woke investment firms that require socio-political capitulation and China.
Disney may realize the problem, and perhaps it's trying to course correct as seen by its reshoots and rewrites of "The Marvels," but Disney is a very large ship that will take a long time to course correct, and it's pretty clear that there are many within the company that have no desire to stop its descent into social justice madness now.
Perhaps the influence of Nelson Peltz and Trian Management, currently attempting to force its will on the Disney board, will help put Disney back on track as being the home of family-friendly, apolitical entertainment, but this, too, may take some time. Until Disney proves to the people that it's gotten its act together and quite a bit of proverbial bloodshed has happened in its upper ranks, I wouldn't bank on audiences returning.
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