How to Save Disney

Let’s take a break from the drama of the 2024 election, the great struggle to rule the American imperium, and talk about another empire dealing with turmoil and self-doubt: the almighty Walt Disney Company, the House of the Mouse, which is currently poised somewhere between cultural hegemony and internal decay.

The hegemony is easy to see: The most successful movies of the summer, with a cool billion in domestic gross between them, are “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Inside Out 2,” Marvel and Pixar remixes that prove that rumors of either Disney subsidiary’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. In the feast-or-famine landscape of contemporary cinematic box office, Disney is gorging itself at the high table once again.

The decay and self-doubt, meanwhile, have a lot of different manifestations — enough to inspire a new podcast series from Vulture and Vox Media as well as many other what’s-wrong-with-Disney ruminations. There are the recent stumbles into culture-war controversy and a related impulse to blame the fans when self-consciously diverse content disappoints commercially. There’s the stagnant stock price, the big layoffs last year and the smaller ones this year.

But really, the problems can be summed up in a single sentence: The old stuff still sells, but nobody likes the new stuff. Disney’s summer proves that it can still make bank by dragging Hugh Jackman out for yet another round as Wolverine and spinning up a new set of emotions for a Pixar sequel. But when it comes to new content and new storytelling, the Mouse is struggling to connect.

The attempts to advance new Marvel story lines haven’t gone particularly well. With a few exceptions, the “Star Wars” shows and sequels, last year’s “Ahsoka” included, are mediocre, polarizing and unloved — so much so in the case of the regrettable sequel trilogy that there hasn’t been a new “Star Wars” movie since.

Meanwhile, Pixar has descended from inspired to middling and Disney’s core animation department hasn’t produced a really good kids movie since “Moana” launched in 2016. Last fall’s “Wish,” promoted with some fanfare alongside the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Company, was pronounced to be a dud by my tweenage daughters as soon as I picked them up from the movie theater, and its utter lack of a cultural footprint bears them out.

Small wonder, then, that the near future slate of Disney movies is mostly just familiar properties and sequels. It’s equally telling that Marvel’s big (and expensive) coup for this summer was convincing Robert Downey Jr. to return to the Marvel universe, this time as a bad guy, Doctor Doom. It’s a move that will probably print money for a film or two, the way “Deadpool & Wolverine” is doing, without solving the empire’s creativity problem.

What might solve it? As a (sometimes unwilling) connoisseur of children’s entertainment, I have a few ideas.

1. Just adapt a classic fairy tale! Since the successful one-two punch of “Tangled” (for my money the best Disney movie of the past two decades) and “Frozen,” an adaptation of “Rapunzel” and a reworking of “The Snow Queen,” Disney’s animation department has favored non-European settings, stories that are light on both classic villainy and classic romance, and narratives that may draw on Polynesian mythology or Southeast Asian legends but try to basically make up their magical stories instead of adapting older source material.

And unfortunately for Disney, it’s actually quite hard to just make up a really good fairy tale. These things are passed down through the collective unconscious or associated with weird geniuses and Grimm-level compilers for a reason. The makers of “Moana” mostly pulled it off, but from “Wish” to “Raya and the Last Dragon” and “Encanto” (and I would throw in an earlier fairy-tale-ish Pixar movie, “Brave,” as well), too many recent Disney movies play more like middling fantasy novels or weak imitations of magical realism than genuinely archetypal quest narratives or romances.

True, the most famous fairy tales have already been Disneyfied, but the world’s storehouse still includes a lot more material, some famous and some more obscure. With some plot renovations, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Wild Swans” would have cinematic potential. If you want to move beyond the landscapes of Western Europe, Russian folk tales about Ivan Tsarevitch and the Firebird offer a rich vein. If you want something instantly recognizable, then “Rumpelstiltskin” might be the name you need. (For each of these I’m linking to an especially good illustrated children’s adaptation, in case any Disney producers need inspiration.)

Or find a completely non-European legend (“Mulan” fell into that category) and just adapt it straightforwardly. The point is to stop starting from scratch, stop imagining that your writers are better at mythmaking than the storytellers of the past, and recognize that the core Disney business has always been translation, not invention.

2. Treat Darth Vader like Batman. The “Star Wars” franchise is stuck in a bad position: On the one hand it has a fan base invested in the continuity of all its story lines, in making sure that timelines match up and shows don’t contradict each other, while on the other hand those timelines are increasingly clogged with stories that nobody especially likes.

There’s no ideal solution but the longer this goes on the more the need for continuity will be a prison. So Disney should just take the hit — the way it already did when it declared a lot of beloved expanded universe books and comics “noncanonical” a decade ago (and then filched their best characters for its own films) — and let some interesting directors take another crack at elements of its mythos already covered by existing shows and movies. Just as there’s a Tim Burton Batman and a Christopher Nolan Batman and a Matt Reeves Batman (and, yes, yes, even a Joel Schumacher Batman), all covering some of the same ground, there could be a new version of the Vader origin story, or a new set of sequels to the original movies that simply ditch all the mistakes the existing sequel trilogy made.

I know that this advice cuts against my usual critique of repetition and remakes as symptoms of decadence in popular culture. But the problem with most Hollywood remakes is that they take a well-told story and tell it again with less imagination. Whereas “Star Wars” is in an unusual place in that it’s told a lot of potentially interesting tales especially badly. And if you’ve produced mediocre versions of what should be your best stories, you’re leaving a lot on the table if you never touch those stories again.

3. Find your fantasy. This is the genre where Disney’s empire is weakest: Warner Brothers and Amazon have partial rights to “Lord of the Rings,” Warner Brothers has the “Harry Potter” stories and Universal has the Potter theme park; you can find the last round of Narnia movies on Disney+ but the next attempt at adaptation is being done by Greta Gerwig for Netflix. Disney does own the rights to the Percy Jackson books, probably the most popular non-Potter kids’ fantasy series of recent years, but it turned them into a middling streaming series.

Unfortunately, you can’t just wave a wand and make the next Tolkien or Rowling series magically appear. There are plenty of fantasy novels on my bookshelf that I’d like to see adapted, but most of them are somewhat more adult; if one hit it big it would probably be as an HBO series, not a for-all-ages phenomenon. Disney did make a (not so great) movie from Lloyd Alexander’s “Chronicles of Prydain” once upon a time, and those are probably the kids’ fantasy novels that I’d most like to see adapted, with Susan Cooper’s “Dark Is Rising” series as another possibility. But neither is especially theme-park-ready.

Still, if I were in charge of Disney’s brand and ambitions, I’d be looking around constantly for the next big thing or some underappreciated older thing in fantasy, and imagining a world where dragons or broomsticks and winged horses soar over the next Disney World expansion.