Disney vs its vassal companies

Disney+ rushed content into production and this is blamed for the low-quality on the screen

Story at Gamespot – July 2023

Some Disney fans have no complaints about the fall in quality for the Disney brand, they don't detect a change. If it's got a Disney logo, its "good."

But elsewhere in America, the general feeling, not really addressed in this article (which focuses on chief of Disney Bob Iger's recent explanations for Disney's bad financial news), is that Disney buys up other companies (Marvel, Pixar, etc) and then degrades them over time. I remember when the Pixar film Brave came out not too long after Disney acquired Pixar, a perfectly fine animated offering from that studio, but it already showed the imprint of Disney on it not because of a specific quality loss, but because it was providing Disney-style animated humor in the story versus the more carefully curated humor of previous Pixar films. Since then, in effect, over time, the differences between Pixar and Disney have blurred a great deal.

As for Marvel, Disney money has made the comic book characters internationally famous in a way the print comics could never do, but at the same time has been progressively severing the characters from their comic book roots, and the result is that, like with Pixar, the overall Disney philosophy of entertainment is replacing the comic book-based entertainment flavor of Marvel.

This begs the question, why would Disney buy up a company only to destroy whatever it is that makes it valuable? There are two obvious answers (among many) to that, and a person can go either way and end up at the same result: (1) Disney is buying a competitor and will destroy the competitor over time, absorbing it into the Disney-whole, so that in the end the Disney brand stands triumphant and the former competitor, who was essentially bought-off, is forgotten. Disney has survived the glories of a long list of competitor animation brands that stretches across the 20th and into the 21st century, most forgotten; or (2) Disney doesn't really know how to do stuff except the Disney-way, so of course it flavors everything it controls with Disney-way-of-doing-things, and in the end, completely without planning to do so, Pixar, Marvel, etc., become Disney.

Like Indiana Jones and Star Wars, the worst possible result could be all these Disney sub-brands fizzle-out as emptied husks. Looking off into the future, how many people will populate the coterie of fans that will still pledge allegiance to Luke and Leia, Captain America and Toy Story

Disney must know that there are thousands of formerly valuable and massively popular characters (or as people call them now, intellectual properties) that have slid into obsolescence. If the past is any indicator, characters and stories (and ideas) that are not-Disney will eclipse all this left-over mania for late 20th century I.P's.

Related: The List of Disney Assets - it's pretty long (Wikipedia)