Credit: DisneyThe Walt Disney Company has had a rough couple of years when it comes to theatrical film releases, and also streaming content, political arguments with governors, multiple major lawsuits, and dwindling attendance at Walt Disney World.
2023 is the centennial anniversary of the House of Mouse, which it had intended to celebrate with a series of special events and new releases dubbed Disney100. The crowning jewel of all of the self-congratulations was supposed to be the new animated film Wish, which stars Ariana DeBose, Chris Pine, and Alan Tudyk and features CGI visuals that pay homage to Disney’s classic hand-drawn animation style.
Wish is jam-packed with Easter Eggs referencing the century-long history of the Walt Disney Company, all the way from the very beginning, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Have you ever wondered exactly where the star that people in Disney movies wish upon comes from? Well, Wish is the movie for you!
Related: ‘Wish’ Proves Major Disney Disappointment, Reportedly Even Worse Than ‘Strange World’
Except, it turns out that audiences are not all that excited about a movie that ties every major Disney movie into an interconnected shared universe, and Wish is flopping hard in theaters. But this latest movie is far from the biggest (or weirdest) flop that Disney has ever released, and a whole bunch of those movies deserve a second look, if only to wonder exactly what was happening behind the scenes.
Let’s take a look at some of Disney’s most forgotten flops.
‘The Black Cauldron’ (1985)
Legend has it that early test screenings of The Black Cauldron, Disney’s attempt to adapt Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain fantasy series, sent children screaming out the theater during the climactic centerpiece when, uh, a horned sorcerer king with glowing eyes summons an army of undead warriors from the eponymous cauldron. It’s fair to say that the Walt Disney Company might have gone a little too dark on this one.
However, The Black Cauldron was a pioneering movie in many ways: it was the first animated Disney movie to receive a PG rating (see above: resurrected zombie warriors) and the first to use computer-generated imagery. The film received some praise for its visuals and the quality of its score, but ultimately, a movie in which an adorable cartoon pig is repeatedly threatened with beheading was simply too much for audiences. The Black Cauldron barely made half of its budget back and didn’t even get a home video release for 13 years.
Related: Op-Ed: Dumber Audiences Force Disney Into Its “Flop Era”
‘The Rocketeer’ (1991)
The Rocketeer is a good example of a weird moment in Hollywood history, when the colossal success of Tim Burton’s hyper-stylized, art-deco Batman (1989) convinced studio executives of one thing: kids across the world don’t want comic book movies, they want 1930s pulp heroes.
The Rocketeer is one of the better examples of this wave, which also included The Shadow (1994) and The Phantom (1996), in large part due to a sterling cast that includes Billy Campbell as a good-hearted barnstormer pilot who stumbles across Howard Hughes’ (Terry O’Quinn) experimental jetpack, Jennifer Connelly as a Betty Page-inspired heroine, and former 007 Timothy Dalton as an Errol Flynn stand-in who also happens to be a Nazi spy.
Unfortunately, the movie underperformed in theaters, leading the Walt Disney Company to pull the plug on a nearly complete toy line and demolish hopes for a possible franchise. There are persistent rumors of a Disney+ reboot, but we’ll have to see just how desperate Bob Iger gets in the next year.
‘Around The World In 80 Days’ (2004)
United Artists earned a box office hit in 1956 by adapting the Jules Verne novel about a guy who travels around the world in a balloon over a bet, so why not Disney? To sweeten the deal for modern audiences, the studio decided to modernize the story by turning Phileas Fogg (Steve Coogan) into a bumbling inventor, adding a female lead named Monique Laroche (Cécile de France), and deciding that Fogg’s comic relief sidekick should actually be a Chinese secret agent (Jackie Chan) who uses the balloon as a getaway vehicle.
In many ways, it’s clear that Disney intended Around The World In 80 Days to be a lighthearted riff on the original source material, as well as an homage to the overstuffed ensemble casts of its own 1960s live-action adventure movies. Where else can you see Owen and Luke Wilson as the Wright Brothers? Where else can you see Kathy Bates as Queen Victoria? Where else can you see Arnold Schwarzenegger in brownface as a Turkish Prince? Actually, maybe that last one is part of why this movie sank into obscurity.
‘The Alamo’ (2004)
The Alamo was released as a Touchstone Pictures movie, the studio imprint that Disney used for years when it wanted to put out a movie geared toward adults. Nonetheless, this new, gritty take on the Battle of the Alamo during the Texas Revolution, in which American colonists forcibly annexed a portion of Mexico, is a Disney movie and one of the worst flops the studio has ever produced.
The movie stars Billy Bob Thornton as famed frontiersman/Congressman Davy Crockett, Dennis Quaid as Sam Houston, the first president of the Republic of Texas, and Patrick Wilson as William B. Travis, who coined the term “victory or death.” Despite that, The Alamo lost the Walt Disney Company nearly $150 million and has been utterly forgotten by culture as a whole.
Related: Guest Slams Mickey’s Not-So-Scary, Calls Experience a “Flop”
‘Tomorrowland’ (2015)
Tomorrowland should have been a huge hit for Disney. It was directed and co-written (with Damon Lindelof) by Brad Bird, one of Pixar’s best and brightest. It has the name recognition of the eponymous, futuristic area of Disneyland. It had George Clooney at his salt-and-pepper best.
But despite all that, Tomorrowland lost Disney approximately $120 million at the box office and confused critics, who did not know what to make of its odd combination of 1950s-style sci-fi optimism and dark, grim, dystopian reality. If you asked ten people if they remembered that George Clooney once starred in a mega-budget movie inspired by Walt Disney, and involved the apocalypse, parallel dimensions, plucky young inventors, and butt-kicking child androids, you’d be lucky to get one that somehow remembers.
‘Mars Needs Moms’ (2011)
Mars Needs Moms might be the most memory-holed movie that has ever been produced. It is one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time, which alone should make it memorable. It’s also one of the bizarre motion capture dips into the uncanny valley favored by producer Robert Zemeckis, whose success with the Back to the Future movies, Forrest Gump (1994), and a dozen more have allowed him to do whatever he wants in Hollywood forever.
Seth Green stars as Milo, a young boy with a bad relationship with his mother (Joan Cusack) who must nonetheless rescue her from the grips of Martians who want to extract her essential maternal qualities and implant them into robots. Along the way, he teams up with a man-child and friendly aliens, and, eventually, teaches Mars the true meaning of love. It’s a movie too strange to hardly be believed, but it’s streaming on Disney+ right now if you simply have to see it yourself.
‘The Lone Ranger’ (2013)
Within a decade, both of the lead actors of The Lone Ranger would be canceled by culture at large over allegations of abusive conduct from which each man is cautiously only now beginning to emerge. That did not contribute to the huge failure of this attempt to reboot the dormant Western franchise, but, in retrospect, it feels like there was a curse on set.
The Lone Ranger must have seemed to Disney like a logical extension of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise: take a known property, give it a huge special-effects budget, hire Gore Verbinski to direct, and tell Johnny Depp to get really weird. Needless to say, the Armie Hammer-led movie did not inspire a Pirates-like franchise of films.
Instead, it lost Disney a horrific amount of money amidst complaints that the movie was overlong, dull, and visually unappealing, not to mention the controversy of Johnny Depp playing an indigenous American. There’s not going to going to be a sequel.
Disney’s ‘John Carter’ (2012)
John Carter is one of cinema’s greatest flops, a movie that bombed so hard in theaters that it singlehandedly tanked Disney’s profits for an entire fiscal quarter. That’s for the whole mega-company, not just Disney Animation, to give some idea of the scope of its failure.
The Andrew Stanton-directed film is one of history’s most expensive movies ever, which certainly didn’t help anything, but neither did the idea of anchoring an epic new science fiction rival to Star Wars around a series of books about a former Confederate soldier (Taylor Kitsch) who becomes a heroic figure on the planet Mars that had its greatest popularity in the 1920s. Also, why is “Mars” not in the title?
‘Atlantis: The Lost Empire’ (2001)
Atlantis: The Lost Empire was an attempt by Walt Disney Animation Studio to move away from the increasingly grim direction its musical features had been moving in, and try to just have a little good old-fashioned fun. Michael J Fox led an impressive cast of voice actors in what was intended to be the start of a new franchise, only for the movie to run up against the box office behemoth that was Shrek (2001) and utterly lose.
The visual style of Atlantis: The Lost Empire was heavily influenced by production designer/legendary comic book artist Mike Mignola, giving the movie a shadowy, heavily angular sheen unlike anything else that Disney has ever attempted. This is the kind of movie that involves an entirely constructed language, which shows the kind of ambition that director Gary Trousdale had.
Disney’s ‘Treasure Planet’ (2002)
Among all of Disney’s flops, there is none that inspires more passion than Treasure Planet, a science fiction retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic pirate adventure novel Treasure Island (1883). Treasure Planet was directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, who were fresh off the success of The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), and Hercules (1997), and, clearly, Disney felt the filmmaking duo could do no wrong.
However, Treasure Planet bombed in theaters, quickly becoming one of the biggest animated feature film failures of all time. Despite gorgeous, CGI-aided animation and a pair of radio hits from the Goo Goo Dolls singer John Rzeznik, the movie utterly failed to appeal to audiences and quickly became a footnote in Disney history.
That’s a pity, because Treasure Planet is quietly one of the best Disney movies of its generation, filled with impressive visuals, complex character relationships, and sci-fi concepts. It’s a movie that deserved far more than it got.
What’s your favorite Disney flop? Let us know in the comments below!