Disney's unnatural clustering

Have you ever noticed there are periods of time when you feel like you are seeing certain actors in everything? It could of course be that they are blowing up, but sometimes, they're appearing in so many roles that you wonder how it was possible they even did all this work at the same time.

The answer is: They didn't. Because films have different periods of gestation, it's possible you did the work two years ago and it's only just now coming to the big screen. That's how an actor like John C. Reilly appears in The Sisters Brothers, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Holmes & Watson and Stan & Ollie, all released within a period of about four months in 2018. I'm not looking it up to confirm, but I'd bet he shot those over 18 months or more, rather than the intense four-month period their release dates would imply. Reilly himself had no control over when those movies would be released. He just showed up to work.

But a studio has a lot more control over the release of its movies, at least in theory. Often times they establish release dates in advance, then pull whatever strings are necessary to meet those release dates. Sometimes they miss and have to push it back, but for the most part, they don't.

Which is why I think it's so weird that Disney is giving us Dumbo, Aladdin and The Lion King all within 2019, at two-month intervals, starting at the end of this month.

I'm tempted to say it's like releasing three Star Wars movies within the space of five months, but that's not an exact parallel. These movies have nothing to do with each other in terms of story.

However, they are all part of Disney's most clearly delineated new initiative, which is to make live action remakes of most if not all of its classic films. I mean, it probably won't be all -- I doubt we're going to see the Treasure Planet or Home on the Range live action remake any time soon. But isn't that all the more reason to space them out? It's like they want to drain the whole well in 2019, and then move on. Who knows, maybe they do.

It seems hard to imagine that these films won't cannibalize one another in some way, either in terms of providing actual competition for one another or in terms of reducing our overall appetite for watered down CG versions of Disney classics. In North America, competition is not as much of a problem as it may be here in Australia, where movies tend to play longer in theaters.

I imagine these movies are messing with the Australian release strategy for children's movies, which often involves delaying releases to times that coincide with school holidays, which is why we are still waiting another month for the Lego Movie sequel. Dumbo's late March release works perfectly with the upcoming school holidays, which begin on April 5th, but Aladdin's May release can't rightly be pushed back to the end of June for the next school holidays, because The Lion King is hot on its heels.

Whether these movies cause logistical problems for one another, they just don't make sense from a strategy standpoint. You don't want to saturate the market with a particular type of film because the audience will stop considering it special and will kind of implicitly ask you for less of it. If they learned anything from the failure of Solo, maybe it should be that.

Or maybe they just think the appetite is inexhaustible for these live action remakes, as they are serving a different audience. Star Wars geeks rebelled (no pun intended) against the annual release of Star Wars movies, if not actually then implicitly, by not throwing their money at Solo. However, the money has been good for movies like Beauty and the Beast, so maybe either that Solo-type reckoning is still ahead, or will simply never happen.

Or maybe they recognize that the appetite is about to be exhausted, so better churn these out now before the audience definitively turns away from them.

Before I leave you I should probably explain that subject.

"Unnatural clustering" is a useful (if I do say so myself) term I coined in discussion of a phenomenon that occurs when ranking movies on Flickchart. (I can say I "coined it" because it's still used by people on my Flickcharters Facebook group). It refers to what happens when you are ranking movies in filters, as in, all Star Wars movies against each other. It's problematic to do it this way, because if one movie beats the other, it moves one spot ahead of it on the whole chart. In reality, those two films probably do not belong consecutively on your chart, but by forcing similar movies to duel each other, it's created the impression that they have landed naturally next to one another. That may occur in the course of random dueling, but filters force specific duels, and the problem is only worsened if Film C beats Film B, which had beaten Film A, leaving three consecutive Star Wars movies on your chart of potentially thousands of films.

Disney has created its own kind of unnatural clustering by taking three movies that would logically be their own types of tentpoles for the initiative they represent in their own calendar years. Instead, it's just 112 days from the release of the first to the release of the third.

For Disney, it could end up being a clusterfuck.

Not the curmudgeon he thinks he is

I've been getting more and more examples over time that my nearly seven-year-old does not hate "baby movies," even though he professes to. But Sunday was the coup de grace.

First a little background.

We recently got The Lion King out from the library, I think at my instigation. However, unlike other recent animated classics I've successfully pushed on my kids, this wasn't one of those where I'd planned to sit down with them and watch it. That's in part because The Lion King has never been a personal favorite. I didn't see it until more than a year after its release, and I've only seen it that one time. (I remember the exact timing of my viewing, October 1995, because I watched it with a girl I was dating at the time.)

My own partisanship or lack thereof was not a decisive factor in it making its way into our DVD player, probably because the younger one (age 3) still loves anything with animals in it. He's as much of a stereotype for his age as the older one is with his love of Pokemon and anything where someone has a gun. But the older one watched and like The Lion King too.

At some point we also acquired The Lion King 2: Simba's Pride from the library, which I have not seen and would have not played a role in selecting, since I've got a bit of a bias against straight-to-video sequels, whatever they may be. It turns out my wife was responsible for this one, not because of any interest or experience with it (she never even saw the original) but probably because my younger one found it in her presence and she added it to the stack. I wasn't even aware it was among our 30 or so library videos (they let you take out 50 at once!) until the younger one said he wanted to see it. "There is no Lion King 2," I even said when he said he wanted to watch it, forgetting for a moment about Simba's Pride and thinking that the fact we didn't have it was sufficient enough to negate its existence entirely. He proved me wrong on both counts.

It didn't get watched the day he originally talked about watching it, but he did select it as "his choose" for Sunday morning TV time. Usually in this scenario, the older one suffers through 20 minutes of the movie (at most) before declaring it now time for "his choose," which is fair enough, as you shouldn't have to suffer through an entire movie you don't want to watch.

But this time it wasn't a problem. This time, in fact, the older one never even took a choose. This time, in fact, the younger one stopped paying attention to Simba's Pride while the older one sat there, rapt, watching it to its completion.

I still would have written this post if that were all that happened. But it gets better.

When Simba's Pride finished, the older one said "I want to watch it again."

With a bit of a laugh, I clicked the back chapter button until he was at the beginning again.

Now normally, I wouldn't really want my children to watch two entire features' worth of screens before we got going on our day. That's a bit too indulgent. But when it comes to movies, I like to encourage their interest, and besides, I was handing over to my wife around 9:30 so a friend could come over to watch baseball with me on his computer. (Yes, I have an Australian friend who not only likes baseball, he even pays for the baseball package.) Consequently, I don't know how much of his second viewing he actually got through, but the fact of it at all was what interested me.

I'm crazy for movies, and I can only think of two definite times I've watched the same movie twice in the same day, and only one of those instances can be described as roughly consecutive. Now, kids are a bit more obsessive in this regard than adults, but it's certainly something he's never done before in a good four years of watching movies.

I still would have written this post if that were all that happened. But it gets better.

This morning, when I was getting ready for work, Simba's Pride came on again. It's school holidays, so we're letting them watch TV on weekday mornings as well. I was escorted out of the house with that pretty beautiful song "He Lives in You" that plays over the opening credits.

I still would have written this post if yada yada yada.

When I got home from work today, the kids were having "quiet time," which is code for "mummy and daddy are exhausted from a full day of entertaining you and now you must watch TV." Again, it's an allowance on a weekday made possible by school holidays.

Guess what was playing?

So this is clearly the most obsessive behavior my son has ever displayed toward a movie. Even the ones he says he loves he probably wouldn't watch more than twice in a week, and not likely on consecutive days in any case.

So now I simply must see this movie myself.

Since we have both the original and the sequel -- at least until our renewals run out -- I talked about making it a double feature one night when my wife is out of town at the end of this month. I planned to do it on my own to further my cinematic education (a refresher on The Lion King is always useful), and to be able to relate to my son on a topic he loves. But when I mentioned I might do that, he said, "Can I watch it with you?"

That might keep him up until 11 o'clock at night, but how can I refuse an offer like that?