The Big Picture

by Ben Fritz

  As Miramax and Touchstone withered, Disney’s release slate shrank year by year, just as Iger had believed was essential. The studio released thirty movies in 2005, then twenty-one in 2007 and 2008, and just ten by 2013—a direct contrast to the old strategy of Katzenberg and so many others in Hollywood, which was to flood the market and count on a few major hits emerging from the morass. Iger believed that more successes would come from more refined concentration. “When you’re releasing a new film every two weeks, no wonder the returns are so low, because there’s no focus,” Iger observed.

  Culling the slate was one thing, but as Iger and Disney learned the hard way over the next few years, building it back up with hits was a more challenging task. Until 2012, in fact, Disney’s slate was not noticeably better on a consistent basis, save for the addition of Pixar, which released successes like Cars, Wall-E, and Toy Story 3 every year.

  Iger and Cook still believed the Disney live-action label was key to powering better returns. Sequels to Pirates in 2006 and 2007 were indeed huge hits. However, much like Sony’s Spider-Man 3, they displeased many fans and left the series in a creative funk.

  Apart from those two movies, the Disney live-action label was largely a mess for nearly a decade after Iger took over. Under the CEO’s mantra of fewer, bigger movies, the studio spent well over $100 million each on films stuffed with visual effects and meant to appeal to a broad array of moviegoers around the world. Many came with well-known titles, whether from Disney’s rich lore or elsewhere, and carried a PG-13 rating. All were designed to spawn franchises. They were, in other words, attempts to replicate the success of Pirates of the Caribbean. And nearly all of them failed.

  Some were merely disappointments that didn’t match the studio’s lofty ambitions. Those included Tron: Legacy, an updated version of Disney’s 1982 cult classic; G-Force, Jerry Bruckheimer’s team of special agent rodents; and Prince of Persia, starring Jake Gyllenhaal in an adaptation of the hit video games.

  More Disney live-action movies in this period, however, were outright disasters that lost hundreds of millions. Among the mega-flops were Mars Needs Moms, a motion-captured adaptation of a best-selling children’s book; John Carter, the Pixar director Andrew Stanton’s take on the classic science-fiction stories; The Lone Ranger, in which Bruckheimer and Depp attempted to update the hero of the Old West; and Tomorrowland, a preachy science-fiction story starring George Clooney, which shared a name with an area in Disney theme parks.

  “All of the characteristics of the movies as Disney tentpoles were right, but they just weren’t good enough,” Iger told me about the string of disappointments. “What we learned is we have to be more selective in what we make and we have to demand more perfection.” Together, those flops signaled that although Disney under Iger knew what it wanted to do with its movie business, it was still struggling to figure out how to do it.

  In 2009, the CEO attempted to shock the system with another big move. Firing Dick Cook caused jaws to hit the floor throughout Hollywood. After thirty-eight years at the company and seven atop its studio, Cook was one of the most beloved personalities at Disney, admired by his staff and the entire entertainment industry.

  The ostensible reason for the ouster was that Cook ran the studio too much like a silo, refusing to cooperate with other divisions as much as the CEO wanted. Four days before he was fired, in fact, Cook had refused to tell corporate executives that at the company’s D23 convention (Disney’s version of Comic-Con), he was planning to bring out Depp, Miley Cyrus, and the director Tim Burton to wow fans.

  But top executives also believed Cook was fundamentally part of the old guard. Yes, he was popular with employees and creative talent like Depp. But the suits who ran the Walt Disney Company believed he just wasn’t the right person to make the radical changes Iger wanted to see in the movie business. It was a classic clash between someone who believed he was a staunch defender of a brand and the bottom-line-focused bosses who believed success could be measured entirely in numbers.

  And so the fifty-nine-year-old Cook was pushed aside and replaced with the slicker, more corporate-friendly head of the Disney Channel, Rich Ross. Ross’s two-and-a-half-year tenure atop Walt Disney Studios was a disaster—a sign that although Iger had a clear strategic vision for where the movie business needed to go, he still wasn’t sure how to get there. It was one thing for a “disruptor” like Iger to shake up the movie studio from afar, and quite another to put such a person in charge. Ross replaced most of the studio’s top executives and in short order soured relationships with movie theaters, producers, and others. It was too much change, too fast.

  The studio’s finances would have been hit hard by this too, if not for Iger’s next ground-shaking move: his $4 billion acquisition of Marvel in 2009.

  Executives at the studio had long thought Marvel would be a great fit. Aware that Disney was leading the way in an age when branding mattered more for movies, they held blue-sky discussions about what assets they would love to add to their portfolio, if feasibility wasn’t an issue. At one such meeting in the mid-2000s, held in the seventy-year-old “Hyperion bungalow” on the lot, a group of thirty to forty people threw out a handful of names, including Marvel, DC Comics, and Lucasfilm, the owner of Star Wars. It was a pie-in-the-sky exercise. Or so they thought.

  When Iger surprised the industry, and most people at his own company, by purchasing Marvel, he also brought much-needed relief to its movie business. Beginning in 2012, all of Marvel Studios’ big-budget superhero pictures would be released by Disney, taking up two slots per year on its slimmed-down slate. That meant Ross and his team would have to conjure up two fewer Disney-branded films each year.

  The first Marvel movie released by Disney was The Avengers, which grossed $1.5 billion and offered a preview of just how successful the new division would be.

  A Collection of Brands

  Iger’s original vision had been to focus his movie studio on one brand: Disney. But now it was home to several brands, including Pixar, Disney Animation, Marvel, and the live-action business. The job of the studio chairman was no longer to be an agent of change, but a parental figure who could keep the different divisions, with their distinct personalities, happy and working together harmoniously.

  Rich Ross was certainly not the man for that job, and amid increasing dissatisfaction at the studio, Iger fired him in 2012. His replacement was Alan Horn, a longtime president of Warner Bros. who was much more similar to Cook than Ross in gravitas, knowledge, and the respect he garnered throughout Hollywood. With nothing at stake as to how the studio used to be run, he was fully onboard with Iger’s vision. This included fixing the Disney live-action label.

  A hint of how to do that had emerged at the beginning of Ross’s tenure, with a movie greenlit near the end of Cook’s: Alice in Wonderland. People inside and outside the company weren’t sure if it had succeeded so spectacularly because it starred Depp, because of Burton’s unique style, or because it was the first major digital 3D film after Avatar had made the technology popular worldwide.

  Disney executives suspected something else: perhaps, due to the company’s legacy of animated hits based on them, fairy tales were a unique Disney asset. Perhaps Alice in Wonderland succeeded in large part because in people’s minds the title perfectly matched the name of the company releasing the film. That theory was put to the test with another adaptation, one that wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows among defenders of the animated tradition because it offered an alternative take on a classic tale.

  Maleficent told the story of Sleeping Beauty through the eyes of its villain, played by Angelina Jolie and given a new and sympathetic backstory. It was a troubled production, with cost overruns, reshoots, and extensive changes in the editing room. The end result was still muddled, and many inside the company figured it would bomb. But the 2014 release was a huge success, overcoming bad reviews to gross $759 million.

  Finally, after so many years of flops and missteps in an attempt to fig
ure out what made for a successful Disney live-action movie and how to replicate the success of Pirates of the Caribbean, the company had an answer: comb through its library of animated fairy tales and start remaking them, with a modest twist to update them for modern sensibilities.

  It couldn’t be that simple, could it?

  But it was. Cinderella, which retold the story of the peasant turned princess while making her less of a passive participant in her own life, was a hit in 2015, grossing $543 million. The Jungle Book, which dropped the original’s unsettling colonialist themes, was a blockbuster in 2016, with $967 million. Beauty and the Beast, which added a new backstory and songs, was a juggernaut in 2017, outgrossing Alice with $1.26 billion. Executives were now confident that, just like Marvel, they had a brand that couldn’t miss. Upcoming remakes—Mulan, Dumbo, The Lion King—all seemed like surefire hits.

  By then, Disney also had bought yet another brand once just a dream for employees brainstorming in a bungalow: Star Wars. Iger’s $4 billion purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012 had been his second acquisition in three years that shocked Hollywood. Even executives at 20th Century Fox, which had released all six Star Wars movies for Lucas, didn’t know it was coming. But Disney—with its theme parks, consumer products business, and successful track record of integrating Pixar and Marvel—had advantages no competitor could match.

  The purchase price had been based on Disney’s assumptions about how much money it could make releasing three new Star Wars sequels (episodes VII, VIII, and IX) in 2015, 2017, and 2019; Lucas had begun work on them. Soon after the sale, however, the company realized it had more than enough ideas to support the release of Star Wars movies annually and to create a sci-fi cinematic universe much like the one that was raking in profits for Marvel. And so while 2015’s episode VII, titled The Force Awakens, was a blockbuster, with ticket sales of more than $2 billion, 2016’s spinoff Rogue One was also a huge hit, grossing more than $1 billion and proving you really couldn’t go wrong when a film had “Star Wars” in the title.

  Under Horn, Disney’s studio was a collection of production houses, each with a specialty and each overseen by a formerly independent producer who now did that job inside the company. Feige made the Marvel superhero films, Lasseter ran animation, Kathy Kennedy was in charge of Lucasfilm’s Star Wars stable, and Sean Bailey made the Disney live-action fairy tales. All of them did their own thing, while Horn’s centralized marketing and distribution team put the productions into theaters and maximized their profits.

  Combined, the results were astronomical. Disney’s motion-picture profit margin reached 21 percent in fiscal 2014, 24 percent in 2015, and 29 percent in 2016. Bob Iger was hailed on Wall Street as a hero. “The biggest change,” he told me in his typically blunt style, “is that people now look at movies like a real business.”

  Other studios tried to follow suit. Warner not only finally gave its DC superheroes, like Batman and Wonder Woman, their own cinematic universe, but tried to get into the animation remake business itself, since the fairy tales on which Disney had based many of its animated classics were in the public domain and thus fair game.

  But without the Disney brand, fairy-tale movies proved far less appealing to audiences. Warner’s Pan, a new origin story for the boy who could fly, starring Hugh Jackman, was a bomb in 2015, and its King Arthur, the character whom many people know from Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, was a disaster as well. Warner’s own attempt at a Jungle Book remake, meanwhile, was delayed to 2018 amid worries at the studio it couldn’t measure up to Disney’s hit.

  Brand wasn’t the only advantage Disney had over its competitors. The frustrating fact for the rest of Hollywood was that Disney’s franchise movies were rarely bad. Sure, there was little chance of a surprise hit like Gravity or Straight Outta Compton emerging from Iger’s company, since it took so few risks. But nearly every Marvel, Star Wars, and fairy-tale movie thrilled fans and got solid marks from critics.

  That kind of consistent quality was unheard of in Hollywood. Iger attributed it to the studio’s tiny slate. Typically, production presidents at a studio oversee a dozen or more films annually. Feige, Kennedy, Lasseter, and Bailey each had a literal handful. They were heavily involved in every movie they made, meaning there was no excuse for mediocre results.

  Time was also not an issue at Disney. At Sony, and most other studios, moving the release dates of movies around was dangerous because it affected the promised profits for a fiscal year. But with its movie studio succeeding at such a high level, Iger could afford to let big productions slip when needed, and to spend substantial sums on reshoots. For example, episode VII of Star Wars was originally supposed to come out in the summer of 2015, but was pushed back six months into the next fiscal year when it became clear that a heavily rewritten script wouldn’t be ready in time. Likewise, early cuts of Rogue One were clearly flawed. When Kennedy and Horn determined that six weeks of reshoots, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, would be needed to fix it, Iger didn’t blink.

  Inspired in large part by Lasseter and Catmull’s philosophy at Pixar—that nobody would remember if a movie was late, but everyone would remember if it was bad—Iger took a quality-over-quantity approach that his company’s success afforded. “We’re playing by different rules and we’re going to continue to,” the CEO said succinctly.

  By 2016, the company was making its last attempts to color outside the lines of its brands. That year saw it release The Finest Hours, an $80 million story of a real-world Coast Guard rescue, and Queen of Katwe, a low-budget tale about an unlikely African chess champion. Both were well reviewed and had inspirational themes that perfectly fit the Disney brand. Iger politely referred to such films as “brand deposits,” figuring that even if they couldn’t make as much money as Star Wars or Cinderella movies, they reflected well on the company in the minds of audiences worldwide.

  But good feelings about Disney weren’t worth the $75 million that Disney lost on The Finest Hours, or the millions more on Katwe when it grossed a measly $10 million at the box office. By the end of that year, no “brand deposits” were on the Disney slate anymore. Audiences would accept new stories from Disney, it seemed, only in the form of animation, as evidenced by hits such as Inside Out and Moana.

  Executives in Bailey’s live-action group were now focused almost entirely on adapting animated classics, even though everyone knew they would eventually run out of material. “We’d like new ideas to come from the live-action Disney studio too,” Iger admitted, describing it as perhaps a long-term aspiration rather than a short-term mandate. “They have not found their stride there yet, but they will.”

  There certainly wasn’t any urgency. Between animation, live-action fairy tales, Marvel, and Star Wars, Disney had a collection of the industry’s best brands at a time when that defined success in the motion picture business.

  Conventional Hollywood wisdom said that fickle audiences would lose interest in any or all of those franchises, which would fade to obscurity, much as Friday the 13th and Planet of the Apes had in the past. But those series didn’t have teams of producers backed by the world’s largest media company, whose sole job was to keep them vibrant. And if anything did start to falter, well, Disney had reserve ammunition. Its purchase of Lucasfilm brought it another well-known movie brand, one it wasn’t initially sure what to do with.

  At any other studio, Indiana Jones would be rushed to the front burner and turned into the industry’s next cinematic universe. But Disney had no need to hurry. After a few years of pondering the matter and working out a deal with the producer Steven Spielberg, executives finally decided sure, why not go for it? And so it scheduled a reboot of Indiana Jones for July 2020, three weeks after its latest Pixar production and four weeks before a Marvel superhero movie.

  11

  The Producers

  Creativity Meets Franchise Management

  For everyone in Hollywood who’s not at Disney and therefore doesn’t enjoy a self-perpetuating cycle of
box-office dominance, success has become tenuous and tricky.

  Since they don’t own and control Marvel or Star Wars, other studios get their hands on intellectual property with big-screen potential however they can, and then often rely on a new breed of filmmakers—of a sort—to make them successful.

  They’re typically not directors, the creative forces who used to wield the most power in Hollywood, but rather producers and writers who sit in between studios and their most valuable franchises. By keeping one movie after another after another in a cinematic series on track, on budget, and creatively consistent yet fresh, they serve what has become one of the most important roles in modern Hollywood.

  At one such operation, the lobby is covered not with classic movie posters and coffee table art books, like producers’ offices of yore, but rather with a giant mural that reads WELCOME TO BRICKSBURG. Made out of Legos, the wall-spanning work of art also includes space for visitors to post their own creations with conveniently provided plastic bricks. On a warm summer day in 2016, previous guests had marked their presence with a pirate ship, a space shuttle, a dinosaur, pyramids, and a castle.

  Technically speaking, this seemingly drab, two-story office building in the center of Los Angeles is the headquarters of Lin Pictures, where the man for whom the company is named tries to package and sell movie and television ideas, as so many other former studio executives before him have done in the second act of their careers. But the Bricksburg Chamber of Commerce, another catchy name for the building, is something Hollywood has never quite seen before. It’s a combination production company and animation studio built around a single toy and movie brand: Legos.