Don't Blame 'Wokeness' For Disney's Recent Box Office Blunders

The likes of 'The Marvels,' 'Strange World' and 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' were theatrical flops despite, not because of, their comparatively inclusive storytelling

For the first time since 2015, the global box office leader, in terms of overall market share, was not Walt Disney. Comcast (Universal and Focus Features) was the 2023 champion, thanks to big earners like The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($1.4 billion), Oppenheimer ($950 million) and Fast X ($705 million), alongside smaller-scale wins like 5 Nights at Freddy’s ($297 million), M3gan ($191 million) and Trolls Band Together ($200 million-and-counting). Meanwhile, Illumination’s original Migration just passed the domestic total ($61 million) of Walt Disney’s Wish on 1/3 of the production budget. Walt Disney has not been the leader in theatrical animation since 2019. Moreover, after a year from hell, with essentially all of their key brands (Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Studios, Pixar, Walt Disney Animation, the live-action fairy tale sub-genre, etc.) underwhelming or outright tanking at the global box office, they aren’t the leader overall within the theatrical industry.  

There have been and will continue to be a lot of “What went wrong at Disney” articles, essays and conversations. I’d like to focus on one area which was not to blame. After Wish tanked over Thanksgiving weekend, Bob Iger made headlines with a statement many interpreted as him blaming the recent slew of Disney box office bombs on their inclusion and progressive messaging. “Creators lost sight of what their No. 1 objective needed to be,” Iger said at the DealBook. “We must entertain first. It’s not about messages.” A charitable reading of that statement would be Iger acknowledging the difference between Moana or Black Panther where diversity is baked into the recipe, versus films like Strange World and Wish have little to offer commercially beyond comparative inclusivity. Even presuming that Iger wasn’t essentially joining the “go woke go broke” brigade, it’s a narrative worth debunking.