To no one’s surprise, this past week Disney announced it will soon begin producing even more sequels. In a quarterly earnings call, the company’s one true ruler, CEO Bob Iger, announced Disney Studios will soon start production on “Zootopia 2,” “Frozen 3,” and “Toy Story 5.”
Along with “Inside Out 2,” a fifth “Indiana Jones” movie, an absurd amount of superhero movies, and more live-action remakes of beloved animated films, Disney will be busy repeating the same stories over and over again for the next couple of years, if not decades.
To be fair, making sequels and creating sprawling franchises with multiple installments has proven to be an incredibly lucrative business model for Disney. After all, they’ve already been doing it for decades. And if every sequel were of the same caliber “The Empire Strikes Back” or “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” there would likely not be an issue.
But with ideologically charged and uninspired writing, Disney is degrading their films’ artistic integrity and nullifying the cultural utility of once beloved stories by never allowing them to experience an organic end. The hero’s journey is irrelevant if he is never allowed to return home.
Ironically, the aforementioned “Star Wars” — owned by Disney — has suffered the same effect. Sure, independent storylines within the “universe” wrap up, but there is no finality to its overall premise. Because of this, audiences are left adrift in a multi-media universe of pop culture content with no sense of proper orientation other than the belief systems
