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.