Disney is walking an arrogant and bizarre path to destroying its own intellectual properties using the farcical premise that they were somehow outmoded and flawed.

Hypothetical: You run a business that is not only based on, but reliant upon creative entertainment and the mindshare it captures. Not satisfied with simply producing your own classic content, something your business did before you with great regularity, you use the hard-won capital from those successes to acquire the creative efforts of numerous other intellectual properties, or IPs in the jargon.

These IPs should create value for your company, bring in huge sums of money, and add luster to your stellar, decades-old reputation as a family-friendly, entertainment juggernaut.

The farce awakens

However, displaying the arrogance that can only be brought to bear by mediocre minds imagining themselves great, you then fire, retire, or marginalize everyone who produced this beloved, well-respected entertainment. (If they don’t move along willingly, just accuse them of some sort of harassment, or any ‘ism.)

To replace them, you hire inexperienced people based not on what they’ve produced or are capable of producing, but their race, sexual orientation, and sociopolitical views–they must align with your fashionably warped ideas.

You find that your new hires are young and enthusiastic about said views, but you’re as of yet not fully aware that they lack the knowledge and talent to produce the entertainment your customers desire. As such, you give their limited and pliable minds free reign–under your inarguably brilliant stewardship of course.

Sadly, but predictably, the results are lackluster at best, insulting at worst, out-of-step with previous material, devoid of reason, and most importantly to your company’s bottom line–not something the majority of your customers will buy. Even when they’re simple remakes.

Even worse, in an ham-fisted attempt to guarantee the future of your IPs, you replace the most popular elements with poorly-realized counterfeits meant to appeal to the next generation, aka modern audience.

Forgetting of course, that the next generation/modern audience has the same basic human needs, wants, dreams, and hungers of generations past–not the corrupted, deviant, Hollywood versions of such.

Doubling down, you make sure you tarnish the previously popular elements so that people no longer associate them positively, both devaluing the legacy material that those IPs brought with them, and painting yourself into a corner when your counterfeits fail to engage the audience.

Far from home

You’re slow to realize the damage you’ve done, as out of sheer momentum and previous popularity, your intellectual properties continue to generate income for a while, albeit, less with each successive, decidedly inferior rendition.

Ignoring this financial trend, and with no member of Hollywood’s cult of disingenuous ass-kissery willing or able to disturb your haughty naïveté, you green-light dozens of projects of the same ilk.

You’ve already started bleeding customers, but what was at first only a trickle, has become a steady stream. Your ego says it can’t be anything you did–you’re incapable of mistakes. You instead blame the customers for not recognizing the saintly genius of your efforts, all the while ignoring their criticisms and warnings. They’re just a few fan boys and right-wing kooks anyway. Right?

Then that stream of lost customers becomes a torrent and before you can say “bait and switch” or “intersectional feminism” five times, you’re losing money by the truckload. As the other facets of your business are dependent upon the perception generated by your IPs, they start to suffer as well.

You still don’t recognize your predicament. You refuse to believe that you’re not actually the righteous mastermind of your self-image. Your once successful business is rapidly morphing into a vast cauldron of money-losers, yet still you can’t see what’s in front of your nose.

End Game

Then it’s too late. You’ve been weighed, measured, and found wanting. Your reputation is shot, and the good will towards the brand you were hired to shepherd has disappeared. Yes, thanks to you, the cordiality and affection created over the better part of a century by the far more capable predecessors has evaporated.

Your company is no longer perceived as a friendly social partner that entertains, but as a corrupt institution full of incompetents trying to push fringe ideas onto people who know better. You’ve taken a thriving business and run it into the ground. No one trusts you anymore. Game over.

Ragnarok

A huge portion of your customer base wants you gone, and don’t want the door hitting you on the way out. Say goodbye. Now.

Most importantly. After your ignominious exit, don’t ever forget who ruined the legacy of Lucasfilm, Marvel Entertainment, Pixar, and the House of Mouse–you did. Chew on it. Stew in it. Clowns. And yeah–so much for hypothetical!

Credit for the “weighed, measured…” to the writers of A Knight’s Tale.