Changes are afoot at Disney. You’ll be hearing a lot about this story in the coming hours.
Remember when Disney CEO Bob Iger blamed the creators at Disney for losing sight of what their jobs should be and promised shareholders that the company would start focusing on “entertaining” and “not messages” in their future films?
Iger’s promise to “quiet things down” at Disney “after years of culture wars” was taken one step further this late afternoon.
Axios is reporting that Disney is significantly downgrading its diversit, equit, and inclusion (DEI) programs, and will instead be focusing on “business outcomes.” The note, sent to employees, was obtained by the outlet. Some Disney employees aren’t too happy about this.
Hold on, that’s not the only thing changing over at the mouse house. More intriguingly, the company is also retracting all of the “trigger warnings” that had been previously attached to classic Disney movies.
The auto-play content advisory disclaimers, which ran before older titles on Disney+, such as “Dumbo” and “Peter Pan,” and which warned viewers the film “includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of peoples or cultures,” have been nixed from existence.
These changes come hot off the heels of, what Puck News called, Disney CEO Bob Iger’s $15 million “blood sacrifice” to Donald Trump after ABC News decided to, surprisingly, settle Trump’s defamation litigation against the network. Not to mention Pixar’s removal of a transgender character’s storyline from Disney+ series, “Win or Lose.”
You can’t say Iger didn’t warn us. I doubt these are the last changes we’re going to be seeing over at Disney. It’s quite clear that, amidst the “culture wars,” the company was losing a significant amount of conservative-leaning customers, and they quite simply are attempting to get them back.
“Hope,” Na’s first film in ten years — his last one being the exemplary “The Wailing” —is a gloriously messy, blood-soaked sci-fi epic that may become a cult classic despite—or because of—its polarizing nature.