Hacker Cinema
Wish
2023 · Film · 95 min
Directed by Chris Buck, Fawn Veerasunthorn
AnimationFamilyFantasyAdventure
Asha, a sharp-witted idealist, makes a wish so powerful that it is answered by a cosmic force – a little ball of boundless energy called Star. Together, Asha and Star confront a most formidable foe - the ruler of Rosas, King Magnifico - to save her community and prove that when the will of one courageous human connects with the magic of the stars, wondrous things can happen.
9 negative1 mixedfrom 10 commenters
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11 comments on Hacker News
One use that occurred to me is that fans will be able to "fix" some movies that dropped the ball.
For example, I saw a lot of people criticizing "Wish" (2023, Disney) for being a good movie in the first half, and totally dropping the ball in the last half. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm wondering if fans will be able to evolve the source material in the future to get the best possible version of it.
Maybe we will even get a good closure for Lost (2004)!
(I'm ignoring copyright aspects, of course, because those are too boring :D)
I had huge hopes for Mufasa and it was extremely mediocre. Below Wish and Moana 2 IMO. The bones of the plot were good, but the directing was bad. Too much crammed into too little runtime.
The music in recent Disney movies hasn’t been great, with the exception of Encanto. I just watched Mulan again and holy crap what a good movie. (Although it’s not Disney, I also watched Prince of Egypt again and that’s better than any movie Disney has made in a decade.)
I worked in the 3D animation industry for 6 years.
This is a great overview and something I could have benefited from when starting as a sysadmin in the sector!
Edit: Looks like the reviews for Wish are terrible. Maybe this intro to the industry was the best thing to come out of the film!
>Antman, Indiana Jones, Wish, all had white main characters,
DEI doesn't just affect main characters. See who were tasked to write and direct those movies and the DEI agendas they're forced to push. Clueless people with other flops under their belt, who got the projects out of DEI so Disney can look inclusive on social media.
And speaking of Indiana Jones, that flopped because they shoved a strong independent Girl Boss™ with an annoying personality to replace the beloved Indie as the main character who got sidelined in his own movie. It flopped because people go to an Indian Jones film to see Indie, not Fleabag. If you disrespect the fans they won't watch your movie.
Same stuff with Star Wars where Disney shoved Rey the super-powerful Girl Boss™ to replace Luke Skywalker the old and useless CIS white Jedi, and defeat all other evil white men in the movie by herself with her magic powers. Same with Marvel, Snow White, Little Mermaid and every other of Disneys trash remakes that are all about DEI instead of entertainment.
People go to see movies to get entertained. If you fail to entertain them because you wish instead to push DEI agendas on them, they won't pay for your content and you will lose money and ultimately your shareholders won't be happy and the free market will eventually correct this, so at least capitalism has some upsides.
See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_k8cDLe-Kk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E6wJpu0A8E
They were flops even if they made money because their expectations were so infinitely sky-high.
Force Awakens? Everyone who had ever seen Star Wars went to see it (extended family had a tradition of seeing Star Wars movies when they came out). Later ones didn’t have that, and we’ve never seen the last one.
Elemental obviously outperformed expectations but was no Toy Story. Wish is not doing well and looks unlikely to recover.
We’re long gone from the era of every single Disney (or Pixar) animated film being an absolute instant classic and powerhouse.
(Part of this may be the huge number of live action remakes - even if financially successful they seem entirely forgettable).
If you take "for years" to literally mean "more than one year", sure. I think it's colloquially understood to be far longer than that. "Encanto" came out in 2021 and I'd consider that a hit. The soundtrack saw wide play, everyone I know who's seen it loves it, and they're merchandising the hell out of it.
To be fair, I saw "Wish" with my family and we all enjoyed it, but it obviously didn't come close to "Frozen 2" numbers. They're not all hits. With animated film taking years to produce, those perhaps aren't the metric to use. It'll be another few years before the next major animated film by Disney is released.
The Marvel movies release more frequently and seem to print money. "Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3" came out last year and has done $845MM¹.
¹ -- https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2977202945/
Tangled (Repunzel), Moana (uses and remixes actual Polynesian myths), Frozen (based on the snow queen), Peter Pan, Little Mermaid - a stack of recent Disney movies have been based on existing IP. You just don't notice because they culturally steamroll the originals.
The most recent movie Wish - is just callbacks to other Disney movies, so does it count as original IP?
And this excludes their reboots - but also excludes Pixar which has done some original albeit lacklustre stuff recently.
> All this misandry and trying to portray any masculinity as toxic is just lame. It's very similar to Disney's queer coding of villains. I remember in my teens, while being a sexually confused and closed queer how sensitive I was to that bullshit and how awful and ashamed it made me feel. It's ludicrous how it's being done again, just the aggressor and targeted demographics are different now. I can't tell if that's just Disney's Modus Operandi, or of this is some type of bitter revenge writing. It sucked then and it sucks now, and it will continue to suck. We need to do better.
I disagree with a lot that you say, but I think I can agree with this paragraph.
The story of "Wish" needlessly shat on King Magnifico and I felt pretty uncomfortable about that writing. So I can agree that there's definitely an element of coding the Disney villain in a certain way.
Scar is the effeminate uncle. Ursula is coded as a drag-queen. Moving to the more recent movies: I can also agree that King Magnifico was coded as toxic masculinity (handsome, successful king), but they did a poor job in the movie saying why he actually deserved the punishment he got (or the betrayal of his wife).
That being said, its also just... how Disney movies always seem to have been written? Both the good and bad ones. Not really an excuse mind you, but for a happy-go-lucky musical for children, a lot of Disney Villains get rather harshly punished, and not all of them seem like they deserve said punishment.
> The only challenge these modern Disney SFLs face is not believing in themselves (and as someone who struggles on and off with self esteem issues, I realise how difficult those can be, but also it's not "enough" to base a whole character around just that), usually with a sprinkle of "blame the patriarchy" in there too.
Well lets talk about Live Action Mulan for example.
There's no "blame the Emperor" scene. In fact, the emperor is a badass who takes to single-combat on the frontlines. Maybe you could argue that the Bori Khan (the new name of the main bad guy) and his relationship with Xianniang / Witch / Hawk is a bit of a blame the patriarchy (female witch subservient to a warlord). But on the other hand, villains are often seen needlessly abusing their underlings (Darth Vader needlessly kills his officers. Megatron abuses Starscream, etc. etc.). So I'm not entirely sure if this is beyond the norm in these kind of settings.
People blame Mulan for a lot of faults and say its clear of Disney's issues today. But... has anyone aside me actually watched it? Its a crappy Chinese Kung Fu movie yes that has issues deciding if Wuxia is cool or not... and that's the main problem with it.
But if there's some level of "Woke messaging" going on here, I'm not seeing it.
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Edit: after further thought, Toxicly Masculine male villains were at least a thing since The Sword in the Stone, and Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. I argue it's not really a recent trope either.
Was there even a "message" in "Wish" ?? I enjoyed the movie, but it was terrible from a plot perspective and almost entirely vapid.
I don't think there were many messages in other recent Disney movies I enjoyed (ex: Little Mermaid live action, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) either.
Its more like, Disney's Phase4 / Phase5 of Marvel was just poorly written. They ran out of creative juice for the movies after they spent it all on the TV Series. Disney oversaturated us with Marvel and needs to cut back down to stories we can actually follow.
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Star Wars didn't seem to have much "messaging" either in my view. It was just two directors arguing over the plot with the audience getting confused in the middle. Is Ray a nobody? Or is she the grand-daughter of someone important? Well, both, because the directors / creative team behind Episodes 7/8/9 couldn't decide and didn't have the heart to make a decision.
That's just crappy storytelling. "Messaging" isn't the issue as much as the writers just suddenly started to suck recently.
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As far as I'm aware, the best recent Disney movie, critically, was the one with "obvious messaging". Elemental, which was about how to think about immigrants and how their culture/strength/weaknesses play a role in cities.
Judging by Disneys upcoming roster of films and TV shows I don't think they have learnt. Even after every film they released this year flopped, they're still persuing this failed philosophy. Their last two releases this year, the Marvels and Wish are going to lose them around $400 - $500million.
It doesn't matter though, they're rapidly turning into a very attractive takeover target with their stock price so depressed. The decision will so be taken out of their hands.
Its not 10 outright failures in a row, but they've been doing poorly for most of 2023.
Keep in mind that ~2X the official production budget is roughly the minimum threshold for a movie to break even, after factoring in marketing and the theater take:
Elemental was a modest success earning $495.9M against a $200M budget.
The Little Mermaid maybe barely broke even at $569.6M against a $297M budget.
Indiana Jones bombed hard, earning $384M against a $300M budget.
The Marvels is trending towards about $200M against a $274.8M budget.
Wish opened terribly this weekend, pulling in $49M in its first weekend against a $200M budget (will likely finish between $120-150M)
Edit: Forgot about Haunted Mansion, earning $117.5M against $150M.