Anyone who has been paying attention to the pop-culture marketplace during 2023 knows that even the most secular business analyst would be tempted to think that the Walt Disney Company has done something to provoke the wrath of whatever Supreme Being the Mouse lords are willing to acknowledge.

Marvel at this Inside the Magic headline, if you will: “Disney Chief Predicts Total Disaster for Studio Before End of Year.”

That’s a take that will awaken even the most woke studio boss.

This brings is the the latest Disney box-office flop — “Wish.” At the time I wrote this post, I could not even get any of the “Wish” links to work at the Rotten Tomatoes website — which is never a good sign. If you’re interested in the tomato-past details, see this story at Screen Rant: “7 Reasons Wish's Rotten Tomatoes Score Is So Divisive.”

Is there a “religion ghost” in this drama? Not if you read Variety. This latest Disney nightmare is simply another example of Disney+ being overextended and the American movie audience suffering from lingering COVID-19 fears. Here’s that headline: “Disney’s Bleak Box Office Streak: ‘Wish’ Is the Latest Crack in the Studio’s Once-Invincible Armor.”

Hold that “religion ghost” thought for a moment. Here is the stunning overture of the Variety piece, showing the wider context of the “Wish” crash:

“Wish” misfired in its opening weekend, extending Disney‘s bleak box office fortunes.

The animated musical fable, about the Wishing Star that so many Disney characters have wished upon over the studio’s century-long history, failed to become the de facto choice for families around Thanksgiving. “Wish” opened in third place with a dull $31.7 million over the five-day holiday, a far cry from Disney’s past Turkey Day feasts. Perhaps King Magnifico, the movie’s villain (voiced by Chris Pine), is holding hostage the wishes of Disney executives?

Instead of recapturing the studio’s magic, “Wish” joins a long list of its underperforming 2023 tentpoles, such as “The Marvels,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “The Haunted Mansion,” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”

Back up a few years and it’s easy to see the heights from which the great Mouse has fallen:

It’s an unthinkable reality for Disney after one of the most remarkable stretches of sheer box office domination. It reached its zenith in 2019 when seven (!) of the studio’s releases, including “Avengers: Endgame” and “The Lion King,” hit $1 billion globally. With its repertoire of Marvel, Pixar and Lucasfilm, Disney was minting money with anything it put in theaters. But this year has hinted that Disney no longer has the Midas touch at the box office.

If you want more ink on that topic — including a perfect summary of the Disney public-relations talking points — check out The Hollywood Reporter: “Early Holiday Box Office Unwraps Lump of Coal.”

This passage does include a reference to a “family” audience, which is dangerous territory in the current moral, cultural and political context:

David Herrin of box office tracking firm the The Quorum says the underwhelming performance of Wish is nothing short of startling, considering that family films — and particularly Disney titles — have always dominated Thanksgiving. “It’s becoming increasingly apparent that post-pandemic behaviors toward animated films are more entrenched than we would have liked. We always knew there would be some residual damage done by releasing multiple Pixar films on Disney+ during COVID, but we had hoped that behaviors would revert back once theaters reopened,” Herrin says. “But the fact that not a single original IP animated film has opened above $30 million [in a three-day weekend; Wish’s three-day total was $19.7 million] since the pandemic shows that this audience is willing to wait to see these films at home.”

What happened with “Wish”?

Is this simply another case of right-wing parents rejecting a strong heroine of color who is battling with a powerful white male? What is #TheMessage in this cartoon epic?

At this point, I have to state that I have not seen the movie. However, the screenwriter and professor Barbara Nicolosi Harrington has seen it and has a review coming out at mid-week at The Catholic Register. Here is a big bite of that review, via the “friends” feed from her Facebook page. This contains all kinds of names from the movie script, of course:

The biggest problem of Wish, from a Christian standpoint, is its theme. The story asserts that everyone is responsible to realize their own dreams and that no outside force can make your wishes come true. There is a lot of time spent showing how pathetic and naïve the people of Rosas are for trusting their king with their hopes and dreams. They plead and implore the king to grant their wishes – kind of like, you know, people who pray to God, or even just trust for stuff from parents. Glutted with his power, evil Magnifico spins his own version of Psalm 62 and proclaims to Asha, “I am the one who decides what is good for them.” This whole subtext in Wish is an overt slap to those who build their lives around trust in God. It’s one thing to encourage children to take responsibility for their choices. It’s quite another to assert that there is no help for us “out there” somewhere; that basically we “stars” are on our own to make of our lives what we will.

Disney’s Wish is startlingly unfulfilling as entertainment, and just as vacuous in terms of having any real wisdom to share. It only makes sense when regarded as a stylish 92-minute catechism of progressive ideology. Even the majority of mainstream critics who agree with the movie’s messages couldn’t swallow the relentless sacrificing of good narrative choices on the altar of painfully earnest propagandizing. Wish is the worst reviewed Disney film in a generation with a 49% “rotten rating on the critical aggregate site, Rottentomatoes.com and it deserves all the derision it’s getting.

Writing at Religion Unplugged, New York City filmmaker Joseph Holmes — co-host of “The Overthinkers” podcast — wasn’t quite that blunt, but still blasted the film. The headline: “Disney’s New Movie ‘Wish’ And Its Anti-Christian Messages.”

… There are still certain things that “Wish” says explicitly that are indeed profoundly anti-Christian. One is that, in one of its cringy attempts-to-be-inspiring songs, it claims that the reason we wish upon stars is that we are all stardust and that we feel connected to them. Because we are also stardust, and therefore — as later plot points reveal — we have the magical power of stardust, too, so wishing on them is a way of empowering us.

It’s simply not true. People wish on stars, or send up prayers to a higher power, because they recognize that there are things in life out of their control and that they need outside help that transcends the world. This is a profoundly human experience that transcends, but includes Christianity, and it’s silly to gaslight those who are wishing or praying to a higher power into thinking that’s not what they’re doing. 

Now, people purchasing movie tickets are free to make up their own minds.

However, I will state this: Journalists are going to have to face the moral and religious elements of the wider Disney story. It might be time to pull a religion-beat professional into the team assigned to this story, which involves billions and billions of dollars in the marketplace of ideas.

True or false?

FIRST IMAGE: Disney Rainbow Friends puzzle for sale at the CEACO.com website.