4. Anastasia
Okay, okay… Now this one is definitely born straight from The Twilight Zone. In short, in 1979, a talented (but divisive) animator named Don Bluth quit his job at Disney, fed with up with studio’s “stifling bureaucracy,” lack of innovation, and the rejection of one too many pitches. Bluth and a cadre of nearly a dozen animators defected to created Don Bluth Productions. The studio’s first film was a concept Disney executives had rejected: 1982’s The Secret of NIHM. Bluth’s studio would gain major prominence when Steven Spielberg signed on, lending his name to An American Tail and The Land Before Time, each intentionally and spitefully released opposite Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective and Oliver & Company.
But despite Bluth’s best efforts, all other animation was washed away in the flood of the ’90s Disney Renaissance. Beginning with 1989’s The Little Mermaid, Disney could do no wrong. The studios’ unbroken series of hit animated fairy tale adaptations was an unstoppable force, shattering pop office records, reviving the art of animation, and bringing Disney the kind of pop culture clout it hadn’t had in decades. Bluth might not have been able to stop the wave, but he sure could ride it. In 1994, Bluth joined 20th Century Fox to guide the launch of its own in-house animation studio, beginning with an adaptation of a classic film from its century of favorites.
Loosely based on 1956’s live action Anastasia, Bluth’s 1997 fairytale retelling certainly took a lead from the Broadway-style structure and leading royal heroine archetype established by the Disney Renaissance. Released right between Hercules and Mulan, you can see why the casual moviegoer might believe that the musical film about an orphaned Russian princess battling a villainous mystic as she rediscovers her lost lineage (and love) pretty well fits the formula.
Here’s where it gets crazy: the week before Anastasia‘s 1997 premier, Disney re-released The Little Mermaid in theaters across the country – what Fox CEO Bill Mechanic called at the time “a deliberate attempt to be a bully, to kick sand in our face,” noting “the amount they’re spending on advertising is ridiculous… It’s a concentrated effort to keep our film from fulfilling its potential.” Though Disney denied the move had been done out of spite or sabotage, the result was the same: Anastasia earned just $140 million – the highest gross of Bluth’s films, but lower than any film in the Disney Renaissance.
Disney fans have spent decades kindly but sternly reminding friends and family that Anastasia isn’t a Disney movie even though it might look, sound, and feel like it. That’s part of what makes the alternate-reality of a post-20th-Century-acquisition seem so, so, so weird. Seriously:
Yep, Anastasia is pretty infamous for being confused for a Disney film. And now, in some ways, it is. Or at least, it’s part of Disney’s IP and content portfolio. The film Disney maybe-possibly once tried to sabotage is now its own. So will Anastasia join the Disney Princess franchise? Meet-and-greet in Fantasyland’s Fairytale Hall? Earn her own Disney+ Original Series? Well… probably not. But this is one film whose roundabout journey into the Disney catalogue is pretty noteworthy.Â
5. Night at the Museum
If there’s one thing Disney is associated with, it’s family. But technically, Disney hasn’t had many home runs in the “family” movie category in the last few decades… In fact, Disney’s catalogue is somewhat overburdened with a unique genre you might call “overly-produced, CGI-heavy family adventure films that underperform:” Wrinkle in Time, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Oz The Great and Powerful, Prince of Persia, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, Tomorrowland, The Lone Ranger… Disney’s obvious quest to find “the next Pirates” keeps getting shipwrecked.
Meanwhile, Fox found a happy place with 2005’s Night at the Museum. Directed by Shawn Levy and produced by Chris Columbus (director of the first few Harry Potters), the film follows a night watchman (Ben Stiller) at New York’s American Museum of Natural History who discovers that after dark, the museum’s collection comes to life. The film received mixed reviews (but plenty of praise for its Jumanji-esque excitement, action, and humor), earning $600 million at the box office and spawning two $400 million-earning sequels. Night at the Museum is far from a perfect family film, but it did land with audiences unlike Disney’s contemporary outings…
And of course, you know Disney loves a franchise… especially one that’s already established for them. A reboot of Night at the Museum was among the first projects whose development was announced after the closure of the Disney-Fox deal. Now, we know that it’ll be a Disney+ exclusive. But that’s not all… Legendary songwriter Alan Menken (behind the music in nearly all of the Disney Renaissance films) announced that he’d been put to work on a potential stage adaptation of Night at the Museum.
With or without it, the franchise feels so right for an animated Disney+ series or more. And with Disney’s writing team on board, we have no doubt that a Mouse-led Night at the Museum could sincerely be a hit… as long as they don’t make the same mistakes again.
6. X-Men, Daredevil, Elektra, Deadpool, and Fantastic 4
Though it’s nearly impossible to imagine today, Marvel wasn’t always a $25 billion brand. In fact, in 1996, a number of takeovers, splits, divisions, and ownership changes led to the comic and merchandising company filing for bankruptcy. Given that, it’s no surprise that – in the midst of financial turmoil – 1990s-Marvel was willing to make a lot of deals to keep cash flowing. Yes, the same era that would provide Universal with ironclad, perpetual use of the Marvel superheroes in Orlando also saw Marvel auction off its heroes to film studios: Iron Man and the Avengers to Paramount; Hulk to Universal; Spider-Man to Sony; Fantastic 4 to Fox…
But of course, it was 2000’s X-Men that finally landed, propelling Hollywood into a still-ongoing twenty-plus-year stream of superhero flicks with no end in sight. Fox quickly produced 2003’s Daredevil and its spin-off Jennifer Garner-vehicle, Elektra. Likewise, 2005’s Fantastic 4 was a tongue-in-cheek experiment with just how saturated, goofy, and absurd the new hero genre could be. It was a critical disaster, but practically looked like an awards-darling compared to Fox’s 2015 reboot of the hero team’s origin story – a colorless, humorless, depressing, and blatant attempt to meet contractual obligations to keep the Fantastic 4 film rights.
Through it all, X-Men remained not only Fox’s superhero standard, but the central franchise of the expanding superhero genre… (That is, until the Avengers came along…) X-Men alone spawned a core trilogy, a prequel trilogy, a trilogy of Wolverine films, and two spin-off movies in the R-rated Deadpool franchise.
A dozen timeline-jumping, cast-swapping, celebrity-ensemble entries over two decades will tire even the most fervent fans, and Fox’s ret-conned second attempt at telling the celestial “Dark Phoenix” arc crashed and burned in 2019, officially ending Fox’s run with the heroes with a whimper.
Regaining control of the X-Men, Daredevil and Elektra, Deadpool, and the Fantastic 4 returns a gargantuan chunk of well-known characters to Disney’s Marvel, and already, they’ve indicated that they’ll be activating on them. Disney’s committed to reviving Fantastic 4 (again!) though this time, they’ll no doubt skip the oft-told origin story in favor of a more natural entry to the MCU (see also, the MCU’s treatment of Spider-Man). Likewise, though Disney killed off the Netflix-exclusive Daredevil series, its version of the hero (played by Charlie Cox) appeared in Spider-Man: No Way Home, ret-conning that version of the character into the MCU for further use… and his own Disney-approved series.
Any who doubted that Disney was ready to add the X-Men and Fantastic 4 back into the MCU sandbox so soon after Fox’s most recent outings were proven wrong with 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which included high profile cameos by Sir Patrick Stewart (reprising his role as X-Men’s Professor Charles Xavier – or at least, “Earth-813’s” version of him; perhaps more closely related to the Professor X seen in 1992’s X-Men animated series) and John Krasinski (as a new version of Fantastic 4′s Mr. Fantastic).
The beauty of depicting distant multiversal variants of the characters is that neither actor is necessarily tied to playing the role in any future, MCU-canon X-Men or Fantastic 4 films, instead merely expanding the universe and adding layers of lore and connectivity for fans. But with hype at an all-time high and Marvel’s cinematic universe expanding exponentially, there’s no doubt that the (re)acquired heroes will make more permanent entries into the studio… in one form or another…