Does the failure of Disney’s ‘solarpunk movie’ mean our genre is doomed to remain niche?
With its strong environmental message, diverse representation and multimillion-dollar budget, many thought Disney’s 2022 film Strange World would take solarpunk mainstream. That hope was short-lived.
This film did so poorly it is estimated to have lost Disney $197 million. This made it the worst performing film of 2022 and one of the biggest box office flops of all time.
Does this disastrous commercial performance mean that solarpunk will never reach a wider audience? Will it always be fringe? We explore the film and look at some of the explanations for why it did so badly to find out.
If anyone is disappointed about Strange World turning out awful and looking for a good movie with that solarpunk feel, try The Wild Robot. Not an ad, I just liked it a lot. If you liked The Iron Giant you will definitely like this too.
I just saw the title and assumed it was talking about The Wild Robot and was confused, the movie did really well.
The plot point that listening to animal sounds will decode a generative grammar is obviously fantastical, and it’s a relatively basic fish out of water/found family story. But the world hinted at taking place in the background is absolutely fascinating. Extreme weather events on a disrupted planet, large-scale rewilding, advanced robotics in the service of agriculture, and geodesic biospheres drop into the story without exposition or explanation. Perhaps it gets away with its radical messaging because it remains in the subtext.
I might be reading into the subtext a bit too much, but I got the impression that the human society shown in the background was ecofascist. Hear me out, starting with the large-scale rewilding. That is a process that would require the displacement of millions (perhaps billions) of people from their homes. Whether that was driven by climate change or forced migration we don’t know, but the implications are fairly grim. In addition, the geodesic dome we see doesn’t contain a biosphere, but a monoculture carefully maintained by robots complete with over-the-top security robots for dealing with “pests,” and the helper robot commercial we see (which heavily implies a capitalist society) shows a city with well-mowed grass lawns and trimmed hedges. From this it seems that humans didn’t engage in regenerative practices, but rather allowed nature to reclaim parts of the world on its’ own. This shows a humanity that has not embraced nature, but rather fully separated themselves from it.
This is a valid reading of the subtext. It puts the amoral and implacable collector bot in a more appropriate context as well.
It still has the solarpunk message that the modern world is headed for disaster and we will be forced to change whether we are prepared for it or not, and it doesn’t celebrate the authoritarian aspects of the human society that serves as the underlying antagonist.
If the Solarpunk movement would depend on the success of a Disney movie, it would not be punk or worth supporting 🤷♂️
I was thinking the same thing. Going “mainstream” would rob it of its meaning and subversion in a way that punk isn’t supposed to be mainstream so much as an ideal working to counteract “mainstream” values
So the thing about punk is that it’s values shouldn’t go mainstream so that it can continue to be punk? What?
If your punk ideology stops being a counter-ideology and becomes mainstream, that’s called winning son. That’s called fairness and common sense won.
The process of going “mainstream” is typically when the political ambitions of the movement are stripped away while the aesthetics become defanged and made ‘appropriate’ for popular consumption. This isn’t a victory for a counter culture movement, it’s capitalism wearing a corpse of another ideology as a fashion statement.
For example, wearing an Indian warrior costume to a dress-up party doesn’t get first nations any closer to getting their land back.
I don’t think it’ll make much of a difference, though I suppose an exec could point to it as a reason not to fund something similar. Certainly Disney is unlikely to try again.
But I don’t really foresee hollywood being the main vector of solarpunk media even if Strange World wasn’t a flop, exactly because of those fickle execs.
I think instead it will reach a wider audience through indie games, since the barrier to entry is so much lower than a movie, while still accessing a massive audience.
Yeah I agree. Maybe Solarpunk is meant to be a “niche” genre . It was definitely not meant to be defined by executives at Disney. Much like Anarchism it works as an ideal that can’t be rushed into the “mainstream”. I do agree smaller indie projects are the way to bring the ideas and genre codifications to a wider audience and more fitting with decentralization. There’s definitely a demand for those stories and projects or we wouldn’t be here
I don’t know anything about the film. Just chiming in that it’s not because a film does poorly—or anything else for that matter—that it necessarily means it’s a bad film, or that the philosophy behind it is bad. Likewise, something being popular or someone being famous is just that, popular or famous. It’s not synonymous with good or virtuous. Whether Strange World is or isn’t a bad movie, it has no decisive influence on the course of Solarpunk.
I don’t know how well remembered this is but big media execs latched on to the aesthetic of cyberpunk in the 90s and overused it so clumsily they killed the entire genre for over a decade. They stripped any punk message and turned it into another extreeeeem joke of the era.
Solarpunk needs more time to find it’s feet and build a body of work that embodies it’s values. So I’d much rather the big companies piss off for now rather than successfully define what it’s about for mass audiences.
This was the first movie I ever took my kids to see at the cinema (out of two movies ever). I thought it was good but the re-watch-ability is low. It’s not a genre thing, it’s just that Disney hasn’t really put out anything good since Moana. Frozen 2 is a terrible movie. The one in Colombia was a terrible movie. Raya was insulting.
There’s a reason that Iger was brought back.
Also, mentioned many times, Disney doesn’t get to define or legitimize solarpunk any more than they get to define Southeast Asian culture with their generic “age of empires” music score.
