Last Night, Disney Just Won Capitalism
By: August, In The Wake Of
Tags: Marvel, Pixar, Corporate Culture, Star Wars, Disney

I woke this morning as if from some horrible dream. A dream in which the whole world stopped to watch one corporation take a victory lap as they announced their market dominance for the next rest of our lives. We all sat in enraptured horror as an infinity of Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar and general Disney products was unfurled before us. Thank God, I thought, as I had my morning cigarette and coffee, that that was little more than a dream. I felt comforted by the fact that this capitalist hellscape had not come to pass and that it was merely a conjuration of the mountain of weed I had consumed during the night.

Image Credit: Aleš Kot @aleskot

Imagine my horror as I opened Twitter to remember that, no, all of that was real. It all happened. It was not the product of some Marxist fever dream apocalypse scenario. It was not the final passing visions of what Lenin saw before his death. Last night, Disney won Monopoly in real life and wouldn’t stop shoving it in our collective faces, as we watched, helpless to stop it.

Let’s get one thing straight: I shouldn’t have been able to watch what Dinsey livestreamed last night. None of us should. It was called Disney’s Investor Day Livestream. It was, primarily, a showcase to potential investors of Disney’s upcoming portfolio in order to garner interest for marketing and product placement from corporate investors. Why the fuck was I allowed to watch it?

Well, as it turns out, when Disney floods the market with Star Wars and Marvel products, Twitter freaks out and potential investors attempting to gauge insight as to whether these upcoming products will have an audience see that we will rightfully consume our corporate slop with a smile on our face as long as it’s something we asked for decades ago. The internet news cycle will talk about nothing but this until the turn of the New Year. That’s a lot of buzz that potential investors will be very keen to capitalise

So, let’s break down a non-comprehensive list of everything Disney actual, for real, announced live on stage last night so we can get a sense of what the fuck we were actually collectively assaulted with.

To begin, Disney confirmed that their current, collected direct-to-consumer streaming services now stand at over 137 million paid subscribers globally. A staggering number, but one which Disney hopes to increase to 300–350 million by 2024. And how do they expect to achieve such market saturation? How do they aim to have Disney+ pre-loaded on every screen bearing device by the end of the decade? Sheer, overwhelming force. Strap yourselves the fuck in, we’re going on a ride.

The newly announced Star, or Star+ in Latin America, branding will bring Disney’s 20th Century Fox and FX acquisitions to streaming so you can have a handy place to watch Die Hard and Alien and pretend that you’re still watching them on VHS with your dad who never left and still loves and is proud of you. American Horror Stories is a real thing that Ryan Murphy is doing for some reason. Taiki Waiti is overseeing Reservation Dogs, a TV series about Native American teenagers. Y: The Last Man got announced as a TV series by Disney. Yeah, let that one sink in. Disney renewed The Handmaid’s Tale for a fifth season because I guess they own that too. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia was renewed for a further four seasons, through to Season 18 in 2024.

And to top it off, Ridley Scott and Fargo and Legion’s Noah Hawley announced an Alien TV show. Set on Earth, it will dash all dreams of seeing a third prequel movie in which the Xenomorph becomes increasingly irrelevant and Michael Fassbender’s android selfcest gimmick shines. It will be critically acclaimed and watched by all and will kick off an Alien brand renaissance that will see Marvel comics and Disney published spinoff novels and maybe one day, we’ll see Neill Blombkamp’s Alien 5 actually materialise.

Other TV series announcements include a live action Beauty And The Beast prequel series with Luke Evans and Josh Gad reprising their roles as Gaston and LeFou, respectively. Maybe LeFou will kiss a man on screen! How scandalous. Swiss Family Robinson is being rebooted or remade or reimagined or however they want to call it. Turner & Hooch is being remade with Josh Peck. Yeah, the Drake & Josh one. The Mighty Ducks: The Game Changers is a TV series set to follow on from those beloved films with Emilio Estevez crawling out of irrelevancy to reprise his roal as… one of the Ducks, I presume? Oh, and Big Shot and The Mysterious Benedict Society are things that are also happening.

Sure. Fine. Okay. Whatever.

Which brings us to the first big juggernaut announcement section: Star Wars. The success of The Mandalorian Season Two has lead to Disney expanding the show into what they’ve dubbed “The Mandalorian Era,” with two new series coming off the back of backdoor pilots in the second season. The Rangers Of The Republic will see those two X-Wing pilots get their own goddamned show in which they attempt to bring law and order to the lawless fringes of the galaxy in the vacuum caused by the collapse of a despotic, fascist regime, something which I think will have no relevancy to the upcoming Biden/Harris administration. Meanwhile, alleged transphobic attacker Rosario Dawson continues to overshadow Ashley Eckhart’s decade plus of work by fronting the Ahsoka series. The three of these will culminate in what Disney calls a “climactic story event.” I hope it’s Mando crawling out of my screen to kill me in real life.

Meanwhile, Andor is a real show beginning production which sees Diego Luna reprising his Rogue One role of Cassian Andor in a prequel that will once again explore the early days of the Rebellion. Obi-Wan Kenobi got further confirmation of it taking place ten years after Revenge Of The Sith and the fact that someone Disney found the exact amount of money that would convince Hayden Christensen to return to Star Wars as Darth Vader. The show begins production in March.

Also announced where a Lando Calrissian event series; Visions, which will act as a continuity-adjacent What If? style anthology; and The Acolyte, a thriller set during the days of the High Republic because you know how you wanted more pre-Phantom content? Well, choke on it, you fuck.

Oh, and Disney also reiterated that The Bad Batch is a real thing in order to convince you that they aren’t abandoning the animated teams that rehabilitated the brand for years with The Clone Wars and Rebels in favour of cheap, fast live action shows shot on pre-rendered backgrounds with leftover props.

Lucasfilm’s announced Disney+ and film slate from Disney’s Investor Day livestream

Willow is returning as a Disney+ series with Warwick Davis reprising the title role because you remember Willow, right? With Madmartigan and everything? Yeah, prepare for six whole fucking seasons of it, bitch. Oh, also, Taika Waititi is also directing a Star Wars films because apparently Disney still makes Star Wars films alongside their TV slate.

Then, uh, and I’m not entirely sure how to put this: Patty Jenkins stared in a short piece of US Air Force propaganda that doubled as an announcement that she’s making a Rogue Squadron movie? Am I reading that right? Are we sure this all happened, like, for real?

And to cap it all off, Disney finally confirmed that James Mangold is in fact directing Indiana Jones 5 and Harrison Ford will be reprising the title role, marking the trifecta of films in which Harrison Ford dresses up as a character he played in the 80s to tell an audience surrogate that he’s not their real dad and that they should stop projecting all their faults and flaws onto him.

Now, with Lucasfilm out of the way, let’s get into the weeds. The real shit. You think that’s fucked up? Hocus Pocus 2 is happening. A new Cheaper By The Dozen with fucking Gabrielle Union is happening. Three Men And A Baby is being rebooted with Zac Efron. Whoopi Goldberg and Tyler Perry will star in a third Sister Act project.

John Mulaney and Andy Samberg will star in a hybrid live action/animation series titled Chip ‘n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers. Yeah, fuck you, you read that right.

Jude Law will star was Captain Hook in Peter Pan And Wendy. Amy Adams will return in a sequel to Enchanted, you know the one where she’s a cartoon Disney princess and falls into the real world that you keep getting mixed up with Ella Enchanted? Yeah, that one.

Robert Zemeckis will direct Tom Hanks in the role of, presumably, the entire human race in Pinocchio.

All of these are real things Disney announced last night.

Baymax, Zootopia+, Tiana, Moana The Series and Iwájú, a series made in partnership with African entertainment company Kugali, are all coming to Disney+. Raya And The Last Dragon will be available for a premium of $30 to watch on Disney+ in the comfort of your own home where you aren’t at risk of catching COVID. Win Or Lose will be Pixar’s first longform animated series. Luca is a film. Cars is becoming a TV show because we laughed in God’s face and for our hubris we smote us.

And we haven’t even got to the Marvel news.

Finally, to cap off Pixar news, Chris Evans (you know, the Captain America one) murdered Tim Allen live on stage and as the light faded from the eyes of his twitching corpse, uttering one final guttural grunt of masculine hyperdominance, Evans roared his announcement of his new reign as Buzz Lightyear in an animated film that will, in Evans own words, focus on the human Buzz Lightyear that inspired the fiction of the toy featured in Disney’s Pixar’s Toy Story.

love to interact with gods

As Tim Allen’s corpse was dragged off stage by stagehands in Goofy costumes from Disney World, Kevin Feige, overlord of cinema, announced Marvel’s slate of Disney+ product. Samuel L. Jackson will reprise his role as Nick Fury in a limited series adaptation of Brian Michael Bendis and Leinil Francis Yu’s Secret Invasion. Dominique Thorne will star as Riri Williams, a young black girl who is diagetically inspired by a old white billionaire war criminal to build her own experimental exosuit technology and take up violent vigilante action in the wake of his death, in Ironheart. Meanwhile, Don Cheadle finally pays off nearly a decade of Marvel of appearances will a starring role in Armour Wars, a show which posits “what if Tony Stark’s technology ends up in the wrong hands?” which conveniently dismisses that time that Tony Stark gave a sixteen year old a weapon of mass destruction that can unilaterally call down drone strikes on civilian targets. That really happened in that last Spider-Man film.

But it’s fine because 2012 Tumblr got it’s final wish as Hailee Steinfeld was confirmed as portraying Kate Bishop in the Hawkeye series no one wants. Meanwhile, Tatiana Maslany, Mark Ruffalo and fucking Tim Roth were confirmed for She-Hulk, proving that my seeing 2008’s The Incredible Hulk in theatres would pay off eventually. Moon Knight was mentioned. Guardians Of The Galaxy are getting a Holiday Special as well as a series of original shorts about Baby Groot, because we all love and remember Baby Groot, right?

In the middle of all of this, Barbara Windsor and Tony “Tiny” Lister died.

Finally, the new Ant-Man movie was officially titled Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania!, exclamation point and all, and the fucking hack who directed the two worst Spider-Man movies, Jon Watts, was announced to bring the corporately defined, featureless and creatively beige vision of the Fantastic Four to the MCU.

Marvel Studios’s Disney+ and film slate for the next three years

And then they talked about ESPN for a bit.

Now, let’s let that sink in for a moment. Breathe with me. In, out. Have another hit of your coffee and pretend like the next ten years of our life aren’t going to be spent watching the slow collapse of civilisation under the weight of late stage capitalism under the ever watchful eye of Michael “Mickey” Theodore Mouse.

Let’s circle back to my original point: why the fuck were any of us allowed to and encouraged to tune into Disney’s investor showcase livestream? Because, as it turns out, investors really like it when they thing they’re interested in investing in has a lot of groundswell under it. So as the internet melted down last night and we all watched product after product product get confirmed and showcased, potential investors flooded to work with Disney.

Disney just won capitalism last night. Any corporation that doesn’t want a slice of that pie, either by investing in or partnering with or becoming consumed by Disney, is leaving money on the table. The next two years of our lives are going to be inundated by scores of simultaneously running Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar and FX livestreaming series and movies and there’s nothing we can do about.

Because you know the thing about market saturation? If you give every single person that has eyes on your products at least one thing they really, really want, that they’ve waited years to come to life, then it’s really hard to actively combat their monopoly. When you’re that kid that’s waited eight years to see Kamala Khan in live action, it’s actually really hard to also oppose the flood of Star Wars content. When you’ve waited decades to see Rogue Squadron literalised on screen, it’s really hard to also decry the mockery Disney has made of the wider product by making a fucking Cassian Andor TV series.

That’s how they get us. By listening. We’ve all said for years that if they just give us this one thing be it a cool Alien TV show or an Obi-Wan Kenobi prequel series or a dope Moon Knight show or whatever, we’d let them get away with whatever they wanted. And they just gave you all of it at once. And there’s no way we’re not all going to watch at least one of these things at some point in our life time. And when you tangentially profit from every single person on Earth’s individual actions, you win capitalism.

As a great man once wrote: this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause.

All hail our Disney overlords. Spoils to the victor.