I’m sure you know and have seen most of the new movies that Disney is shoveling out, and a lot of people have a lot of different opinions on the movies; some good, some bad, some very bad. So, is Disney falling off, or is it giving in to popular demand?

I think we can all agree that the movie “Wish” absolutely missed the mark. The animation, the songs, the characters, and the storyline. Everything was just so wrong with that movie. 

However, they have created some good ones, such as Inside Out 2, Turning Red, and Encanto. All three of these movies had a good plot, and the characters all made great developments. Movies such as Inside Out 2 created such nostalgia for the first movie without completely losing the original premise of the story. So what draws the line between a studio that’s failing and trying to make a quick buck and one that just had a couple of bad movies? I think that Disney has been going on a steady decline in recent years, with a couple of movies being great and the rest of them being flops. 

Reason one: Disney is shying away from true love stories, which is kinda what Disney’s whole brand is about. I get that they’re trying to show strong and independent female leads, which is great but not necessary. Several main female leads have a romantic relationship and are nowhere close to being dependent – Mulan, for example. She took on a whole army by herself and was still able to land a job as an army general. Or Tiana, who built her restaurant from the ground up by herself and still got married to her prince. 

Reason two: Disney is making all their characters shy, quirky, and awkward. One or two characters who have these traits are okay, but when it’s every movie and they’re either the main character or a major side character it gets really old fast because it’s very repetitive, most of the time the characters stay the same throughout the whole movie or at least a majority of it and don’t grow as a character. The old Disney movies used to be about princes who went through trials and got stronger because of them, and now it’s more like the trials are a lot smaller and the people going through them were all pick-me boys/girls, and let’s be honest, no one wants to watch that for hours. An example of this is in Elemental, where the whole time Wade was a huge crybaby and played the “Nice guy” role the entire movie. I get it if you’re emotional, but you don’t need to cry every two minutes you’re on screen. 

And finally, reason three is that Disney can’t make original movies anymore. The only movies that they do make are all either prequels, sequels, or live-action remakes. With some of the movies, it was fine, but with others, they’re just trying to draw out a story that has long ended. A great example of this would be the Toy Story movies. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Toy Story. I just feel like the franchise could’ve ended at movie three instead of dragging it out unnecessarily. Another example would be the live-action remakes of Mulan and The Lion King. I felt that both were unnecessary and were made to just make a quick buck. For the live-action Mulan, I loved it as its own a movie, not a remake. I think the original intention of Mulan got lost in the mix of the live action, they’re two entirely different movies. In the original movie, Mulan was meant to show that you can achieve anything if you work for it, and the remake already had her born with her abilities, which took out the entire presence of the original. Another thing: where did the witch come from? Like I said, it’s not a bad movie; it’s just not a good remake.   

I had so many problems with the live-action Lion King; it’s not even funny. I feel like all the intensity the original characters had was gone completely. I heard what the characters were saying, but I didn’t feel it. Also, you can get away with a lot more if the movie is animated than you can when it’s CGI. The original movie was so much more expressive and funnier because of the way that the characters were able to move around versus the live-action remake when they had no choice but to act like actual animals. 

I could keep going on and on about all the recent movies and all the Marvel movies, but if I did, this article would be over fifty pages, and let’s be real, ain’t no one is trying to read all that. 

As I originally said, the original Disney writing has been lost, and the company is just trying to make as much money as possible, and instead of spending the time on making a good quality movie, they’re just shoving movies out by the minute. So yes, in my opinion, Disney is falling off tremendously.