Whole new world for Disney as it plans year of 100th birthday celebrations

Inside London’s art deco Banking Hall, sparkly carpet covered the grand staircase and silver foliage twisted round the marble columns as a Disney cast member manifesting as Mary Poppins gave it the full “spit spot” to arriving guests.

The venue, used to film scenes in Mary Poppins Returns, was Disneyfied on Thursday night for a preview of the Walt Disney Company’s year of centenary celebrations, with the American entertainment empire announcing a series of concerts and exhibitions for 2023 and thrilling fans with teasers of upcoming releases.

Then, of course, there was the merch: “I don’t normally do platinum,” said event host Emma Willis, the Big Brother presenter, dressed in a sheeny metallic suit and modelling a Minnie Mouse headband from the Disney Store’s new platinum product lines.

Complete with edible balloons, multicoloured popcorn and an assembly of influencers filming videos for Instagram and TikTok, this was a pre-pre-birthday party: Walt Disney and his older brother Roy O Disney, founded the company on October 16th, 1923.

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The Chicago-born brothers had Irish heritage, with ancestors from Kilkenny, while Roy’s son Roy E Disney, the last member of the family to be involved in the business, spent much of his later years in Cork.

Disney100: The Concert, a “live multimedia experience” arena tour of Europe by the Hollywood Sound Orchestra and a centrepiece of the centenary calendar officially known as Disney 100 Years of Wonder, will have no Irish date, although a local version of a musical tribute is in the works.

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Performances of When You Wish Upon a Star from Pinocchio (1940) and A Whole New World from Aladdin (1992) in the Banking Hall offered proof of Disney’s century-spanning formula, or “10 decades of storytelling and innovation” as Willis phrased it.

In a year when media giants have been searching for fresh magic, Disney is more favoured by stock analysts than many of its counterparts, despite its exposure to a consumer spending downturn across multiple categories from advertising to theme parks.

The company approaches its centenary year with a prized new asset in the form of Disney Plus, which after a fortuitously timed launch across much of western Europe in March 2020, has racked up 152 million subscribers as of the end of June 2022. If its Hulu and ESPN Plus subscribers are included, Disney’s subscriber tally is 221.1 million, a figure that was a shade higher than Netflix’s total as of the half-year point.

Disney’s next quarterly update, due on November 8th, will be closely examined for signs of recessionary clouds threatening to darken the streaming party mood for chief executive Bob Chapek.

While musical fantasy Disenchanted, filmed in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, will land on Disney Plus on November 18th and join the ever-growing list of titles to bypass cinemas, the company — which dominated the worldwide box office in 2019 with a record seven titles taking more than $1 billion — has far from abandoned the big screen.

At the London event, the cheers for an appearance by a Disneyland Paris cast member dressed as a warrior from Marvel’s Black Panther and imminent sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever were only exceeded in volume by screams greeting a clip from 2023′s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid as star Halle Bailey hit a high note. Both titles should please exhibitors battered by the pandemic.

It was Steamboat Willie (1928), the first animated short film to be released with synchronised sound, that established Walt Disney’s status as a Hollywood pioneer. He was a risk-taker, too. Known as “Disney’s Folly” during its years of production, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the first full-length traditionally animated feature film, briefly became the highest grossing sound film. He remortgaged his house to complete it.

The company remains willing to take financial bets, with the once separate timelines of major acquisitions Pixar ($7.4 billion in 2006), Marvel ($4 billion in 2009) and Star Wars creator Lucasfilm (also $4 billion in 2012) folding into its centenary extravaganzas, with the result that Buzz Lightyear, Thor and lightsaber-wielding rebels now line up alongside classic creations Goofy, Dumbo and Bambi.

Post-pandemic, the Disney conglomerate must also focus on yielding returns from its biggest outlay, completed in 2019 under former boss Bob Iger: the $71.3 billion purchase of film and television studio assets from Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.

This swoop means that December’s Avatar: The Way of Water, the 20th Century Studios sequel to the all-time box office leader, is a Disney property. So too is Homer Simpson, and so too is the Searchlight Pictures black comedy The Banshees of Inisherin.

Martin McDonagh’s island-set, Irish Civil War-era Oscar hopeful — a long way from the traditional Disney kingdom of multi-turreted castles and shooting stars — has been keeping both Disney’s Irish publicists and Tourism Ireland busy.

Whichever way the statuettes fall, Disney won’t be shy of fireworks next year as it spends big on its own fairytale.