Disney Is Making a Fortune and Safeguarding Its Future By Buying Childhood (economist.com) 207
An anonymous reader writes: Disney has been successful for the better part of a century. But they haven't always had to work as hard to do it. Over the past couple of decades, they've been facing more and better competition than ever before, and they've had to change their business strategy in response. An article at The Economist details this strategy, which seems to have a central theme: buy up things people loved as kids, and commercialize the hell out of them. The recent Star Wars film is the latest example — the marketing blitz around it (and its related merchandise) was a sight to behold. Disney is hoping that focusing investment on great content will protect them from the massive transitions underway in the content delivery part of the entertainment industry. "The biggest doubt is the durability of the model. It is not clear for how long such franchises can be stretched. And introducing new ones is a risk. John Carter, a film based on one of a series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, flopped. Cinema-goers will also have far more choice as other firms try to establish or add to their franchises."
star wars has marketing? (Score:5, Informative)
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The irony is that Fox practically gave Lucas most of the marketing rights for the first movie thinking Lucas was a sucker for giving them bigger box office take.
I practically drove my mother into the madhouse trying to get the original 12 figures plus tie fighter and x-wing (with laser light LED on the nose! vreeee-vreeee!)
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Who modded this up?
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Re:star wars has marketing? (Score:4, Informative)
The post was this new thing called "sarcasm". It was just invented last week which is why you've probably not heard of it yet.
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Merchant sells product people want (Score:2)
Merchant sells exactly what people want, people purchase this, merchant does well. News at 11.
Star wars is something people loved, and giving them more is not a crime. Purchasing the rights to sell it would be a very good idea if you can do it. Letting people know it's for sale seems logical. I don't feel like star wars is forced on me. I certainly love it because things like the cantina band and all the swashbuckling fun of the old serial cliff hangers was made new again in my youth. I just saw the ne
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Do you know what irony means at all?
It's the opposite of "wrinkly"; everybody knows that!
Re:star wars has marketing? (Score:5, Funny)
I know what the "Informative" tag means.
Informative irony.
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The Power of Disney (Score:2)
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Here you go! [amazon.com] Thank me later. Or maybe not at all; I've done you no favors here.
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Gah, unavailable! You lucked out, phantomfive!
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Well then, how about this one [rifftrax.com]?
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2.7 BILLYUN... (Score:2)
That's how much Avatar made at the box office and it's a good bet TFA will meet or surpass that (which I continuously read as The F***** Article...)
When they bought Lucasfilm for 4 billion I thought they'd be hard pressed to make that money back. I knew they would but I thought it'd be several years and movies before they could recoup the cost.
But... they're going to practically do it with the first movie!
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TFA? What does the A stand for? Anleashed?
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It's a pun on TFA meaning both The Featured Article, a term used on Slashdot, and The Force Awakens, the title of the Star Wars film in theaters.
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TFA: The Force Awakens. Star Wars Episode 7.
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That's how much Avatar made at the box office and it's a good bet TFA will meet or surpass that (which I continuously read as The F***** Article...)
When they bought Lucasfilm for 4 billion I thought they'd be hard pressed to make that money back. I knew they would but I thought it'd be several years and movies before they could recoup the cost.
But... they're going to practically do it with the first movie!
Just have to ask, why did you think a company worth 8 billion in net income last year would have trouble monetizing one of the profitable franchises of all time? 4 billion for Lucasfilms was a steal in my (unexpert) opinion.
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Really? You're surprised by this?
When Disney bought Pixar, the licensing revenue from Cars alone was something ridiculous like over $1 billion annually.
The Marvel properties have generated massive amounts of box-office and licensing revenue as well. Again, billions of dollars in box-office and merchandise.
A full-court press by the Disney marketing folks for Star Wars? I fully expected them to be able to milk
How to defend yourself: (Score:2)
Grow up.
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Problem with that strategy is: there is always a new crop of kids.
John Carter (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to clarify, John Carter flopped only because it had dismal marketing. It was not a masterpiece, but it was certainly better than many other recent blockbusters and with any sort of semi-competent marketing it would have been a (minor or major I don't know) success. I mean (at least until close to release) they had some boring trailers that didn't even tell you obvious things like "from the author of Tarzan" "from the director of Wall E / Finding Nemo" etc.
Re:John Carter (Score:5, Insightful)
The title didn't help either. John Carter. Who?
They should have used the actual title, A Princess of Mars, or at the very least the working title they had which was John Carter of Mars.
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You're absolutely right about the title. "Princess of Mars" definitely would have been a better marketing title.
I actually _liked_ the movie. Compared to most of the crap out there, while it was just a dumb action flick, it had its moments.
Even if you don't like the movie CinemaSins did a great job pointing out all the stupidity of the movie:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K2yDm-yvcQ [slashdot.org]
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Some of it was marketing but it seemed to almost suffer the same problem as The Rocketeer. Another good (not great) movie that was put together pretty well, decent writing and acting and such but just didn't resonate with most of the movie goers.
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Yeah, it was a nice little action movie with some magical sci-fi time travel. I have seen much worse in the name of science (fiction).
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Agreed. I actually enjoyed the John Carter movie.
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I'm glad a number of us are stepping forward to say this.
Viewed through the lens of post-Y2K, yeah, it seems silly. But if you're willing to not worry about realism and enjoy the fantasy, it was a perfectly fine movie that deserved better marketing and less derision.
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Agreed. I actually enjoyed the John Carter movie.
And I like "Howard the Duck."
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Marketing people tend to do this. "You might think that [X] would be successful. But we tried [X] once, and it didn't work, so obviously [X] doesn't work."
In fairness, it's not just marketing people, but stupid people in general do this. It's just that marketing people (and this author) are stupid.
Re:The John Carter movie was badly written (Score:3)
Pay Model Flop? (Score:2)
Yeah, I'm no avengbusters:sharkgedon fan and i thought John Carter was an ok (not amazing) film that would be happily received by most sci-fi fans.
I guess this is the problem with pay up front model - it mostly rewards marketing... what about all of those terrible films that did great at the box office and pretty much nobody thought was good?
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Curiously, I'd *literally* (and mostly by accident) just read the first book when I happened to see it on cable or in a hotel somewhere, I was actually rather quite impressed with their fidelity to the story.
It wasn't perfect, of course, but it was pretty good by Hollywood standards (and a quintillion times better than the Hobbit standard).
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" people who went to it didn't recommend it to others"
And how do you get the recommenders to go to the movie?
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Seconded. I saw the preview a dozen times, and thought it looked like it was going to be terrible. I would have gone if a single person had suggested to me it was actually good. It also wasn't until later that I realized it was related to the old books. I haven't read them, but I certainly know of them, and that might have also made me curious. Not having read the books, I did not know the name John Carter at all.
John Carter failed on epically bad marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell just a better title would have gone a long ways towards bringing in customers. Even Borat had enough of an extended title to give people some idea what they were getting in to or why they might want to see it.
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Oh come on... you mean the fact that this took place on Mars didn't interest you at all? You have to know who the main character is before you see a movie?
It takes place on Mars? The movie title just talks about someone named "John Carter".
Re:John Carter failed on epically bad marketing (Score:4, Interesting)
The movie was titled "John Carter", not "John Carter of Mars". You're not going to know that it takes place on Mars.
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Oh come on... you mean the fact that this took place on Mars didn't interest you at all? You have to know who the main character is before you see a movie?
If the title of the movie is the name of a character from said movie - and I have never heard of that character before - then I'm going to need the movie studio to at least give me some useful information in the trailers and commercials. There was nothing particularly Martian or Martian-esque in those to suggest that it was happening in any interesting location. If they had called it "John Carter stranded on Mars" it may have caught my eye - and the eyes of others as well I suspect - enough to get me to
Fuck Disney (Score:2, Troll)
It's about avoiding copyright infringement (Score:2)
Tell me, why do you have to go on such a contrived path of logic
Because it resembles the contrived paths that I've seen copyright owners' counsel use successfully to convince a federal judge to find an alleged infringer liable.
A copyright owner seeks to control not only its own works but other works substantially similar [wikipedia.org] to it. To prove copyright infringement in a U.S. court, a copyright owner must prove three things: ownership of copyright, the infringer's access to the original work, and substantial similarity of the works. This means avoiding infringement requires av
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Farce will be with you... Always.
Alternate reading: Buy boyhood (Score:5, Insightful)
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Obligatory Mel Brooks (Score:3)
Yogurt: Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made. Spaceballs-the T-shirt, Spaceballs-the Coloring Book, Spaceballs-the Lunch box, Spaceballs-the Breakfast Cereal, Spaceballs-the Flame Thrower.
[turns it on]
Dink, Dink, Dink, Dink, Dink, Dink: Ooooh!
Yogurt: [reacts to dinks] The kids love this one.
[a dink hands him a doll that looks likes Yogurt]
Yogurt: And last but not least, Spaceballs the doll, me.
[pulls string]
Doll: May the schwartz be with you!
Yogurt: [kisses the doll] Adorable.
Agreed, but try telling kids this (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm an "old" dad of 2 little kids. They're both Disney fanatics as well as big fans of other "corporate media" properties. I think some perspective is required here. Of course it makes sense for Disney to buy up things like the Star Wars franchise, LEGO (perhaps) and other 80s-kid favorites. Why? Because people who were kids in the 80s and 90s are now in their 30s and 40s, and have a lot of discretionary income to spend. I was born in '75, so I do remember my childhood being filled with a lot of true innovations in technology -- personal computers, all sorts of "new" electronic toys, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc. These days, the innovation is focused mainly on getting that computer in your pocket to do cool new things, but this era was a little different in that everything "computery" in the kid space was totally new. So, Disney is targeting the older parents for 2 reasons -- first, people are waiting longer to have kids, and second, those who do are having fewer and are in a better position to buy stuff from Disney. I'm sure they go after younger parents too, but younger parents are usually stretched pretty thin compared to someone who's had time to acquire some stability in their lives.
I think the key is to make sure your kids understand that even though they love their media properties, they need to remain skeptical of marketing. I'm completely unaffected by advertising, but I am seeing that my 5 year old is now starting to inquire about add-ons to "free to play" apps. I don't love the fact that the marketers are manipulating his brain, but it's a fact of life. I've explained to him (in 5 year old terms) that things cost money, that parents have to work for money, that advertisers are only trying to get you to spend more money on their product and that he shouldn't believe everything they say. It's semi-effective. We don't let them sit in front of the TV, computer or iPad forever, and don't expose them to a million commercials.
It's fine to let kids and adults enjoy Disney or whatever -- they're an entertainment business, it makes sense that people enjoy their output. The problem comes when people shut off their brains and let the advertisers in.
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This is made worse by the fact that kids, often, lose interest in their new toys by the next day.
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Yup, definitely agree on this, have seen it several times.
I'm by no means a model parent, but one of the things we've been pretty good about is not succumbing to every single demand. You'd be surprised how many parents have trouble with this; it's easier to agree than say no. I've seen lots of workaholic families who replace their kid time with stuff, parents going through divorces and other major crap just buying off their kids, etc. Advertisers/marketers love this because they don't even have to try too h
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This is made worse by the fact that kids, often, lose interest in their new toys by the next day.
As a parent of a 5 and 7-year-old this is somewhat true, yes. The exception that causes parenting stress is apps on tablets. My kids *never* grow tired of them. They would play them day after day after day if I let them. My son has been playing Angry Birds for two years and would play tomorrow if I would let him.
We buy them all this physical stuff, when all they want is a tablet and apps.
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We buy them all this physical stuff, when all they want is a tablet and apps.
And more smurfberries [slashdot.org] or other consumable "energy" IAPs to feed to the "free" apps.
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Re:Agreed, but try telling kids this (Score:4, Informative)
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It's easy if you don't expose yourself to advertising. That's far harder with kids.
I don't watch TV in the ways that come with ads, I don't listen to radio with ads (I listen to public radio, but the kind that plays music, not the kind that's mostly NPR and discussions, which are their own form of ads), I run adblock on my browser. I do see the occasional billboard, I guess.
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I think the key is to make sure your kids understand that even though they love their media properties, they need to remain skeptical of marketing. I'm completely unaffected by advertising, but I am seeing that my 5 year old is now starting to inquire about add-ons to "free to play" apps. I don't love the fact that the marketers are manipulating his brain, but it's a fact of life. I've explained to him (in 5 year old terms) that things cost money, that parents have to work for money, that advertisers are only trying to get you to spend more money on their product and that he shouldn't believe everything they say. It's semi-effective. We don't let them sit in front of the TV, computer or iPad forever, and don't expose them to a million commercials.
It's fine to let kids and adults enjoy Disney or whatever -- they're an entertainment business, it makes sense that people enjoy their output. The problem comes when people shut off their brains and let the advertisers in.
When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s (I'm two years younger than you), my parents got me a subscription to Penny Power (later Zillions) magazine, which was published by Consumers Union as a kid-focused Consumer Reports, and taught pretty much exactly what you're talking about. I think that's mainly responsible for turning me into the anti-marketing cynic I am today. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of anything similar currently avialable (Zillions went online-only in 2000, I think). That's assuming you coul
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I'm completely unaffected by advertising
Ad agencies love people who think this.
John Carter was awsome (Score:3)
Disney was too stupid and released it on a busy weekend in the US, it did quite well internationally.
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That ain't than half of it. This was epically bad timing not because of its placement on a specific weekend, but because Disney tanked an opportunity for a 100-year anniversary of one of the seminal pieces of science fiction.
The original John Carter story, "A Princess of Mars" was published in 1912.
The "John Carter" movie was released in 2012.
The utter morons who marketed this thought "Ooo, old = bad. Give it a new name, and pretend it's some fantasy epic we thought up."
So instead of marketing something
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More than anything else, this is why i watched this movie. The story is the genesis of many things.
Disney must continually renw itself (Score:2)
Musical cartoon (1920s)
Feature length cartoon. (1930s)
Color TV show (1950s)
Family friendly theme park (1950s)
Family movies (1960s)
Revived cartoon musical (1990s)
Pixar, Marvel and LucasFilms (2000s)
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Their biggest challenge now, IMHO, is keeping the theme parks usable.
IIRC, the Disneyworld property alone currently has more hotel rooms than Orlando had people when Disneyworld opened.
They've expanded the Magic Kingdom park itself a small amount, and of course added 3 other parks, but current ride paradigm they have (and most of the rides) just can't accommodate the number of people they can actually pack into the parks.
FastPass helps, kind of, but even then you often have long-ish waits and you end up on
ESPN is killing Disney (Score:5, Interesting)
In spite of Star Wars success, Disney is down hard. DIS in now around $108, it was over $122 a few months back.
ESPN is a huge part of Disney's revenue, and profits, and ESPN has been losing subscribers since 2010.
Whenever a stock analyst wants Disney cheaper, they just trumpet the "news" that ESPN is losing subscribers, and Disney gets trounced. This usually happens about two months.
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"ESPN is a huge part of Disney's revenue, and profits, and ESPN has been losing subscribers since 2010."
That, and content for ESPN costs a bundle to acquire. Paying for the rights to a major sport's broadcasts requires astronomical sums, so they have to be sure profit is there. They've been losing subscribers, in my opinion, because there just aren't as many sports-crazed people as there once were. There's so many other entertainment choices, many of them having nothing to do with athletic activity. Earlier
I can give them a hint (Score:2)
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It isn't because John Carter is a new franchise. It's because the movie sucked and it wasn't that popular of subject matter in the first place.
sucked, agreed. Not popular... I dunno, maybe these days. There was talk of Disney acquiring the franchise back in the eighties (where we were discussing it on this thing called Usenet. (get off my lawn...)) so John Carter must have been in some form of development hell for a very long time -- long enough for the original fan base to die off or, I dunno, get interested in other things. I'm writing this as a big fan of the novels. I would really like to see a more print-accurate, or at least, a more wat
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If the movie had been an amazing piece of work on it's own and popularized enough it might have worked regardless but if you want a guaranteed winner you need to pick something popular enough for it to have it's own major con at the least.
LOTR was a no brainer. Anyone who made LOTR movies that didn't suck entirely had a license to print money and even one tha
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I don't think you have to depend on the fan base for a movie to be popular. Movies scale differently from novels. I think that a large fan base is an indication that there is material that might make a popular movie, not the bare numbers thing that print fans = movie fans, $profit$.
The problem with going with material that has a proven track record in a different medium, is that (1) there is the issue of translation into a different medium, and (2) let's face it, if the implementation sucks, the very best
John Carter (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's get something clear: John Carter didn't flop because of the source material. John Carter flopped because it was a terrible movie. From the music choices, the casting, the horribly stilted dialog, the mishmash story, unimpressive sets, this film was Doomed. It pissed off the source material's fan base and left everyone else going "wait, what?" Disney knew ahead of time that they had a stinker, so they didn't waste much money promoting it, adding to its demise at the box office. (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing -- it let the film disappear relatively quietly.) Yeah, that was a really unpleasant experience.
TFA implies something that we all know will happen -- when Disney has a hit, they milk it until we're all highly sick of it. (Except, for some bizarre reason, The Incredibles, but that's another story.) The Golden Age of a Disney franchise is the first few entries, (sometimes only the first entry -cough-liloandstitch-cough- ) before the Calculated Excess kicks in.
Bitch bitch bitch, nag nag nag... (Score:2)
There is room in the world for more Star Wars movies like the new one.
I swear, if someone actually solves the energy crisis with cold fusion there will be a crusade to conserve the hydrogen as pure...
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The last original character that Disney created was Mickey Mouse.
Does this include the Terries and Fermies from the Uncle Scrooge comic books? Or do you file them under Mickey Mouse because of the link through Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck?
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Re:This is nothing new (Score:4, Informative)
Also, kinda interesting story, Oswald was the antagonist of the game Epic Mickey. On the Idle Thumbs podcast, Sean Vanaman told the story about how he and some others were handed the Epic Mickey project because no one at Disney Interactive Studios knew what to do with Mickey. They came up with the idea to have Oswald be in the game but Disney didn't own it, NBC Universal did. They pitched it to Bob Iger who liked the idea so much that he put the wheels in motion to trade Al Michaels from Disney-owned ESPN to NBC (something Michaels had wanted to do) in exchange for Oswald and a few other things.
Vanaman tells the story that he had no idea any of this was going on until he read in the sports section "AL MICHAELS TRADED FOR CARTOON RABBIT"
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This is interesting. So here is the initial Oswald:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And here is the initial Mickey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Note how Mickey has the two buttons on top of his pants.
To me, Mickey is not overly derived from Oswald. Mickey has more detail and a different style. Now of course these cartoons were black and white, and captured on grainy film, so you were limited to black and white and bold strokes, so that part of course would be similar.
But here's what I find interesting.
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That's Oswald the Lucky Rabbit... [wikipedia.org] and he was stolen by Mintz, and later Walter Lanz.
Disney didn't get Oswald back until 2006.
Criticism of copyright in The LEGO Movie (Score:2)
From the featured article:
That would certainly be a clash of corporate culture. The Walt Disney Company's history of banning fan works and lobbying for copyright maximalism wouldn't mesh so well with the criticism of copyrigh [cracked.com]
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This is what Disney has been doing all along... from Snow White to The LIttle Mermaid, pretty much everything Disney has ever had success with has been bought, borrowed or stolen. The last original character that Disney created was Mickey Mouse.
I'm really, really sick of hearing this ridiculous argument about Disney films. Did Disney steal all those Little Mermaid songs from the original fairy tale from 150 years ago? Or the animations? Or the voice actors?
No, none of that existed before Disney. The only thing that existed was the short story by Hans Christian Anderson, published in 1837. Guess what? Many films are made based on previously-published stores. 150 years later, Disney comes along and turns it into an animated musical feature fi
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One could argue that Disney destroyed the value of The Little Mermaid by changing the ending and the whole moral of the story...
Pinocchio as example of Disney's hypocrisy (Score:2)
Many films are made based on previously-published [stories].
Under the original Berne Convention, copyright lasted 50 years after the death of the author. Disney's film Pinocchio, a loose adaptation of a serial novel by Carlo Collodi, was released very soon after Collodi's copyrights expired. Years later, the Gershwin estate and Disney successfully lobbied to have the term extended to life plus 70 years. Had the present copyright term been in place in the early 1940s, Disney's film would have infringed.
Hypocrites.
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You picked Pinocchio on purpose because it's probably the closest one you can find. Many other Disney movies are based on material whose copyrights either never existed, or have definitely expired even under current law. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Mulan, Hercules, Rapunzel, Frozen - all either multi-generational folklore with no actual copyright on the characters or story, or fairy tales published in the 18th and 19th centuries whose copyrights have long
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What kind of stupid argument is that? You are making the rather enormous assumption that had the present copyright term been in place they still would have made the movie and they would have not obtained permission. What evidence do you have of that?
Of course, you do have a point. Disney completely stopped making new movies after the copyright was extended. This was necessary because there is no old material that is out of copyright, and it is impossible to make a new work that doesn't infringe on a cop
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If you don't like it, you can ignore it.
No I can't. Say I successfully ignore a work, and then I end up getting an original idea and developing it into my own work. If the work turns out too similar in some way to some element of a Disney work, then Disney lawyers can argue that a reasonable person would have had access to its work.
As for Star Wars: That is the franchise that literally invented "marketing the hell out of it", so why complain now that Star Wars is used to marketing the hell out of it?
That depends on whether a Disney-controlled Lucasfilm would have immediately shut down the "Star Wars Kid" meme with DMCA complaints.
Ability to throw its lobbying weight around (Score:3)
It may not be tech, but Disney's acquisitions bolster its clout in the market. And with its history of copyright maximalist lobbying, a bigger Disney is certainly YRO.
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Did some SJW have deadlines and no ideas?
Now, I'm an ornery son of a bitch with no patience for SJWs, but, really, what the fuck does this story have to do with SJWs?
Re:Old News (Score:5, Funny)
The only way The Economist can be "interesting" is putting camel sex on their cover.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U1Unbf6HVBw/SCGIVVLtVpI/AAAAAAAABOA/jhBPGg_mvbU/s400/camel-hump.jpg [blogspot.com]
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Why single out Disney?
Disney laid off a few hundred. Companies like Microsoft, and IBM, have replaced US workers with H1B by the tens of thousands, and it has been going on for decades.
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the term princess is a microagression of the manocentric maleocracy as a feminine "derivative" of a male title
You have won the internets.
All of congress, not just Ryan (Score:2)
You say "Paul Ryan" but it was all of congress, including almost every Democrat, that sold us all down the river.
The harmonization excuse (Score:2)
Copyright terms get extended every time Micky Mouse or Snow White approach the public domain.
I wouldn't be so certain of that. The Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft was careful to draw a distinction between harmonization to the copyright term of another economically significant market and what has since come to be called "perpetual copyright on the installment plan". In the case of the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, that market was the European Union, which a few years earlier had harmonized to the life plus 70 year copyright term of Germany. As of 2015, life plus 70 is still the standard,
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Untrue. In his day, Burroughs was a best seller. Conservative estimates are that he sold 30 million books [nytimes.com], while more generous estimates range up to 60 million. John Carter was popular but never his biggest seller--that, of course, was Tarzan. I note that Disney's animated Tarzan movie did quite well for itself.