Now That Disney Owns All of Entertainment, They’re Trying to Ruin It

After successfully merging with Fox, Disney is basically the largest entertainment company in the world, they have a virtual monopoly on television and movies. So what does the world look like with Disney in control of most of what we watch?

Well, first of all, Disney doesn’t let repertory theaters play their movies. The “Disney Vault” doesn’t just apply to home video, there are no public screenings of any of their old films, either. And it looks like this policy now applies to the Fox library as well.

Someone just told me that Fox has stopped accepting repertory screening bookings. Just like Disney, they will flat out refuse to return calls to people that want to pay them money to play their films. Goodbye screenings of HOME ALONE, DIE HARD, and all the ALIEN movies. pic.twitter.com/uwintnF13J

— Justin Decloux (@DeclouxJ) April 22, 2019

UPDATE: Some folks have reached out to me and clarified that Fox is not taking any bookings, at the moment, but no permanent policy has been set in place.

Read into that what you will.

— Justin Decloux (@DeclouxJ) April 22, 2019

Repertory theaters have a big place in our culture. Just as an example, Rocky Horror Picture Show is probably best known for being a staple of midnight matinees where people went in costume and sang along at theaters that had weekly screenings for years or even decades.

the ice-cold wave of terror that just coursed through my body as I realized "Disney owns The Rocky Horror Picture Show now"

— Sean T. Collins is seantcollins.bsky.social now (@theseantcollins) April 23, 2019

Sean, who is a great journalist, also brings up another really good point in the tweet directly after this one.

On behalf of multiple generations of people to whom this film meant finding recognition and community for the first time, please take your ahistorical “RHPS is problematic” takes right on down the road

— Sean T. Collins is seantcollins.bsky.social now (@theseantcollins) April 23, 2019

Sometimes things are “problematic” or dated because movies and television are products of their time. They show us the world the way people saw it, and they’re basically historical artifacts. Sometimes that look might make us uncomfortable, but it’s an important window and it’s important to have art that challenges us and makes us uncomfortable.

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you? Via The Hollywood Reporter:

But even some of those green lights are being met with scrutiny. One source says Horn is questioning the apparent plan to have young characters smoking onscreen in West Side Story. “With Fox, we can make movies that right now I say no to. … We always have to think about the smoking policy. The audience for a Disney movie may not know what they are going to see, but they know what they aren’t going to see,” the exec said in a recent interview with THR. “There are certain things we just can’t include because we’ll get letters.”

Awesome, we can’t show gang members smoking in the 50s, people might get the wrong idea. There’s also this:

There are no plans to make Song of the South available on the $7-per-month offering.

Disney really has it in for Song of the South. It’s because they’re making a bold, moral stance, right Bob Iger?

it wouldn’t be in the best interest of our shareholders to bring it back

Yeah, I thought so. But at least you and the shareholders are taking care of your employees, right? Let’s ask Abigail Disney, daughter of Walt Disney’s brother and partner Roy Disney. Here’s what she said in the Washington Post.

I had to speak out about the naked indecency of chief executive Robert Iger’s pay. According to Equilar, Iger took home more than $65 million in 2018. That’s 1,424 times the median pay of a Disney worker. To put that gap in context, in 1978, the average CEO made about 30 times a typical worker’s salary. Since 1978, CEO pay has grown by 937 percent, while the pay of an average worker grew just 11.2 percent.

I mean, that’s not great, but it’s not like they were spending money that could have gone to employee salaries to keep employee salaries low, right?

Disney has pushed back by noting that it pays more than the $7.25 federal minimum wage. This argument fails to acknowledge that the cost of living varies from place to place and few can make do on that, no matter where they live. It also fails to recognize that the company worked quietly to try to defeat a ballot initiative to lift the minimum wage paid by certain employers to $15 an hour in Anaheim, Calif., which passed this past November.

Okay then. Disney owns roughly 50% of movies made in the US and almost all the content on two of the four major broadcast networks. They use that power to keep theaters from showing classic films, something that could very well mean the end of repertory theaters, because they want people to see their new movies instead. They’re censoring old and new movies to meet some “family friendly” standard that maximizes profits. They’ve fought to make copyright law in this country a draconian nightmare and now they’re campaigning to make income inequality worse.

But hey, maybe Wolverine will be in the next Avengers movie and that will make all of this worth it.