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Who’s Afraid of Mickey Mouse?
My life would be so much easier — and happier — if I could avoid getting myself worked up about stuff that doesn’t, and never will, affect me. I am the old man railing at the clouds, except I’m in my late-20s and I’m screaming at super-mega-corporations in adjacent industries.
This week I’ve been exercised by Disney, HBO and the discourse in between. There are basically two threads to this — firstly, at Disney’s investor event they announced a massive slate of projects that are almost all doubling-down on extant properties from the Disney/Marvel/Star Wars universe that they’ve brought together. 50 new movies and shows were teased (not one of which I feel like I’m interested in) and include forcing the reanimated corpse of Harrison Ford to dust of the fedora, as well as origin stories for Lando Calrissian, Mufasa and Buzz Lightyear.
So that is all visibly and obviously annoying, provided you’re not a Disney shareholder.
Onto HBO. HBO is also shilling its streaming platform, HBO Max, but, unlike Disney, seems also to be grappling with the cinematic disaster that 2020 has been. In order to free up their slate (and hedge against the uncertainty of how open cinemas will be in 2021) they’ve announced a concurrent streaming/cinematic release for most of the big Warner Bros titles in 2021, such as Dune, The Suicide Squad and Matrix 4. This has…
