Disney bought Marvel to build franchises that would appeal to young men and then turned those franchises into something young men wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Then it bought Star Wars and… well you know.
Now it’s looking for new ideas to appeal to young men with strong female gay characters.
Leadership at Walt Disney Studios has been pressing Hollywood creatives in recent months, multiple sources tell Variety, for movies that will bring young men back to the brand in a meaningful way. “Young men” is defined here by sources as ages 13-28, aka Gen Z.
You mean Predator: Badlands, swapping out Ahrnold for Elle Fanning, The Devil Wears Prada 2, the live-action Moana, Princess Diaries 3, and whatever Kathleen Kennedy next chooses to do with Star Wars isn’t going to do it?
Appealing to young men is such a mystery that Hollywood somehow knew how to do for about 70 years and then the young men began unaccountably disappearing even when Disney made that movie where an elderly Indiana Jones was replaced by a British woman. What do men want? It’s a mystery.
The sources say Disney has been seeking new IP and pitches such as splashy global adventures and treasure hunts, as well as seasonal fare like films for the Halloween corridor. The calls come as the Star Wars machine struggles to produce any film project and the superhero genre sheds audiences by the minute.
Why? No one knows. Hopefully Disney puts its best talent on it.
While two insiders say the mandate to recruit young males goes as high as the C-suite, the task primarily has fallen on David Greenbaum, the former Searchlight Pictures co-head brought on in 2024 to run Disney’s live-action film business. Greenbaum recently hired Daria Cercek, the savvy former Paramount Pictures co-chief, to assist in this effort
I’m sure Daria is on it. Kathleen Kennedy can mentor her in what men want. Realistically, they brought her in to develop games into movies which will be fine as long as she sticks to cartoon characters like Sonic, not human beings.
.But the Variety article goes on to note that Gen Z is much less likely to suffer from Disney nostalgia.
Disney’s sweet spot at the movies has been millennials. That generation rabidly consumed classic vault titles like “The Lion King,” “101 Dalmatians” and “Lilo & Stitch” as kids. Now, they bring their children in droves to see live-action reboots. … Gen Z is a different story… As it stands, Disney is in line with Sony Pictures and Paramount in its market share for Gen Z (10% of ticket buyers in 2024). That’s two points above Universal and two points below Warners.
Disney went all in on beating its IPs to death. Those IPs have nostalgia value for every generation except Z. Millennials are trying to infect their kids with this crap, but if the contamination stops at Z, Disney will be in very big trouble.
And there are signs that it already is. The superhero movies are faltering. So are the Star Wars Disney+ shows. The cartoons are still working, but for how much longer?
