Don't Let Disney Kill the Magic of Cinema (Op-Ed)

This Sunday, the final season of Game of Thrones will heir on HBO. Much like the ever encroaching white walkers, with their eternal winter in tow, another unstoppable force, this one within the entertainment industry, marches forward, desperate to consume as many licenses as it can and change the world of filmmaking and streaming landscape forever.

With its acquirement of 20th Century Fox, Disney now possesses 4 major studios and the hundreds of licenses that each of those studios hold the rights to. These include Pixar Animation Studios, Lucasfilm, Marvel Entertainment, and now 20th Century Fox. On top of this, Disney’s own Disney Animation Studios possesses hundreds of intellectual properties itself. Disney is now, arguably, the largest license conglomerate in the entertainment industry in terms of profitability potential.

Disney’s accumulation of Lucasfilm, Marvel, and now 20th Century Fox, over the last several years, has led the company to join the streaming services game. Disney has confirmed the launch of their own streaming service later this year, called Disney+(DisneyPlus). This service will no doubt be a large rival to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, and other top streaming services. With all of the licenses and production and studio resources Disney now owns, the company not only has ample material to prove themselves a worthy opponent to these other streaming companies, it has the potential to knock the other services from the market completely.

Disney has already begun to pull their properties from other streaming services that, until now, have licensed those properties from Disney to show on their sites. Just last week, Disney pulled the animated series Star Wars Clone Wars from Netflix. For years, Netflix had been the only streaming service to watch the entire series on. One could even argue that being able to watch the entire series was a marketing tool used by Netflix itself to attract younger viewers. If companies like Netflix and Hulu are not able and willing to explore expansions and pivots for their services, they will most definitely suffer and potentially fall as customers gravitate toward the sheer volume of content Disney now has baked into their brand.

I grew up loving movies and television of all kinds. From the sci-fantasy and awe of Star Wars to the hilarious and zany adventures of Spongebob Squarepants, I loved how diverse the media I consumed was. As a student at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, I have come to learn that this is a major reason that most people continue to attend movie theaters and tune into tv channels everyday - cinema allows us to experience all aspects of being a human, from virtually infinite points of view. This experience is what is at risk if Disney is successful in knocking out the other streaming sites while continuing to collect licenses. Much of the content we draw that experience from would eventually come from a single source and the diversity of that content would absolutely suffer as Disney would move to preserve their unique brand identity.

One only needs to look toward countries governed by military dictatorships to see what centralized media looks like. These countries have a centralized, government owned media outlet that is often times the only source of information that the public has access to. Obviously it's ludicrous to call Disney a tyrannical dictatorship but the parallels between a media outlet in a tyrannical dictatorship and a Disney streaming service wherein Disney owns and produces most, if not all, of the content being released on streaming services are clear and frightening. The death of diverse and multifaceted content within the filmmaking world is at stake.

There is hope. Foreseeing the potential threat of a Disney-owned streaming service, Amazon Video and Netflix have both pivoted and become more involved in producing critically acclaimed, original content. Each company has backed at least one project that ran the award show circuit within the last few years. For Amazon it was Manchester By The Sea and for Netflix it was Roma, which was a huge winner at the Oscars earlier this year. This revived interest in classic, theatrically released projects affirms both companies’ respect and desire to protect artistic expression and diverse content within the filmmaking community.



As customers and as viewers we are the most important component to any service. Without us, a company like Disney would not be able to exist. In this way, we have the power to control what kinds of stories are being told within the film industry. Therefore, we have the responsibility to protect the availability of diverse content that people from all walks of life can relate to. If we allow what has transpired so far to continue unchecked, our relationship with film and the experiences we receive from film will germinate from a single source and the art form itself will inevitably die. It falls to us to advocate for and support diverse streaming content.

Daggers From Space!

In fantasy and sci-fi movies, artifacts from space often hold special powers or give people special abilities. While there is no evidence that the dagger mentioned in this post gave King Tutankhamun, it does sound like a story straight from the movies.

“King Tut's Dagger was Made from a Meteorite”, published by CNN, explores the origin of the stones and metals that made up a dagger buried alongside King Tutankhamen of Egypt. Using a method known as X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, Italian and Egyptian researchers were able to identify traces of iron, nickel, and cobalt, which matched meteoric compositions in a global database.

This article was very interesting, however as someone who appreciates the wow factor of discovers like this while also demanding of extensive details behind said discoveries, I felt that the article presented information of the find in a mostly well-condensed manor but lost itself in the wow factor and failed to delve deeply into the methodology behind the identification of the blade material or the implications of the find.

The discovery, if confirmed completely (the article concludes the description of the analysis by mentioning that the results of the x-ray fluorescence “strongly suggests its meteorite origin”), speaks volumes about ancient Egyptian hierarchical structures. 

Reserving the materials found in these meteorites for construction of daggers meant for royalty highlights how truly powerful rulers like King Tutankhamun were and how sacredly they were viewed. 

The article also mentions that a relatively recent hieroglyph in Egyptian history translates to “iron of the sky” and now, with this find, indicates that the Egyptians new exactly what they had. This furthers the aforementioned concept for, of course, the sacred and god-like king deserved the “iron of the sky.” Moreover, The ability to identify, locate, analyze, and manipulate the meteorites themselves suggests an advanced intellectualism as well as an advanced crafting ability within Ancient Egyptian society. The notion that ancient Egyptians in the 13th century B.C. were able to refine meteorite into daggers also provides cultural context to the situation. For no Western culture would interact with meteorites in a similar fashion for two more millennia.