Mythic Messenger #19 - Special report! Disney rules the multiverse
BREAKING, BREAKING, MYTHIC NEWS FLASH!!
Ladies and gentlemen, we at the newsdesk have been forced to interrupt your regularly scheduled Mythic Messenger to bring you a special report! The Disney Investor Day was a new kind of landmark in pop-culture newsmaking -- it’s taken us all week to compile the big announcements that it sent crashing over the internet like an awesome wave.
It’s staggering just how broad the House of Mouse’s portfolio has become, and how quickly it has embraced the potential of its in-house streaming service. Many, many classic franchises and ideas seem to have been released from the infamous Disney Vault and handed to bright new stars to revive on Disney+ in 2021. On top of that nostalgia-fest, the Star Wars and Marvel Cinematic Universe teams seem to have already bounced back from the sudden death of summer blockbusters with their own slews of streaming series on the way!
However many of these announcements you already got excited for, we guarantee there’s just as many that probably snuck by you -- with over 50 original series announced! We'll catch you up on the trailers you missed.
More stars, less wars
It really is incredible how significant the success of The Mandalorian has turned out to be for Star Wars under Disney and Kathleen Kennedy. When Disney first took the reins for its sequel trilogy, it would have been absurd to suggest a streaming TV spin-off about space mercenaries would actually end up deciding the fate of the franchise!
But thanks to Grogu (Baby Yoda to his fans) and his unusually stoic babysitter, most of these new Star Wars announcements have nothing to do with Death Stars and Skywalkers. Instead, we’re finally seeing what goes on in the rest of the Galaxy Far, Far Away - stories which are often more human, nuanced and grittier than the heroic journeys George Lucas built his empire on.
It seems The Mandalorian has also cemented the trend of telling individual stories in Star Wars shows, with multiple shows announced simply under the name of the character they will be following. Andor will revisit Diego Luna’s charismatic but morally ambiguous Rebel saboteur from Rogue One, showing the grittier side of what it means to resist a galactic empire. Meanwhile, Rosario Dawson’s much-feted debut as Ahsoka Tano in season 2 of The Mandalorian will predictably spin off into her own series, Ahsoka.
If you’re not sure why this bright-orange Jedi is getting so much attention, it’s probably because you never watched the cult-hit Clone Wars animated series. Ahsoka was the star of that show and also has the dubious honor of being Anakin Skywalker’s own padawan during his immediate pre-Vader years -- which makes her pretty important to the overall canon!
Speaking of Clone Wars, LucasFilm will continue its legacy of strong animated Star Wars content with a new show, The Bad Batch. The trailer makes it look like the titular characters are Imperial Stormtroopers, albeit ones whose “defective” status makes them likely candidates to turn on their Sith masters. It should be interesting to see the galaxy from an Imperial point of view for once!
Another new flavor of Star Wars story will be offered by The Acolyte, which seems to be a political/spy thriller set on Coruscant during the scheming pre-Empire years. While fans complained about the amount of time the prequel movies spent on senate proceedings and space diplomacy, that same kind of intrigue sounds like great fodder for Russian Doll writer Leslye Headland to work with here.
We’re also getting a Star Wars debut from Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins, who reminisced about her experiences as the daughter of a fighter pilot... and then announced she’d be helming a Rogue One movie!
But the most exciting stars announced for Disney+ are far from new to this franchise. The big coup? Ewan McGregor AND Hayden Christensen will pick up where they left off in a new Obi-Wan Kenobi series! It’s hard not to get excited about the idea; McGregor’s Obi-Wan was by far the best thing in those movies, and Christensen will get a chance to be remembered for something other than hating sand.
Remaining announcements were more vague or farther off, but we can look forward to at some point seeing C3PO and R2D2 guide a new generation of robots in A Droid Story, the anime industry’s take on the franchise in Star Wars: Visions, as well as stories about Lando Calrissian and directed by Taika Waititi -- which may or may not be the same feature.
Suffice it to say that Star Wars fans will be getting more than their money’s worth out of a Disney+ subscription in the years to come!
Marvel's long road back starts here
It’s easy to forget we’ve already seen 18 months pass since Avengers: Endgame brought the first grand arc of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to a definitive close. Disney cleverly decided to take their foot off the gas with superhero movies after that point, reasoning that audiences would need some time to come down from the massive scope of that final battle before they started revving up the next storyline.
But nobody has really done a cinematic universe like this before, and bridging the gap from the first cast of stars and heroes to a theoretical second generation is going to be a huge task. In 2021 that rebuild begins in earnest, with shows like Loki and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (one show, two guys) focused around those characters still with the MCU post-Endgame.
Loki in particular seems like an interesting premise, tracking Tom Hiddleston’s gregarious villain on some sort of time-heist. Add that to the sitcom-like teasers for WandaVision and we can see how, like Star Wars, these MCU shows are looking to branch out and tell different stories to what we normally expect from the genre.
It’s not all going to be returning characters though! Kevin Feige’s team also announced the upcoming debut of fan-favorite heroes Kamala Khan (played by Iman Vellani) and She-Hulk (Tatiana Maslany), who will each have their own streaming series as a lead-up to their first MCU movie credits. And in June, we’ll finally get to see Simu Liu star in Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which should make an interesting complement to the COVID-delayed Black Widow prequel.
Finally, there’s the much-discussed What If? animated series, in which the MCU will dabble with non-canon storytelling in the grand tradition of comic one-shots like Marvel Zombies. And while not strictly announced as being Marvel-related at all, new comic-centric family film Flora & Ulysses seems like it might be a way to sort-of do the Squirrel Girl story many fans have clamored for, without her zany antics undermining the delicate MCU canon!
But wait, there's more?
Like we said, the announcements from Disney’s various brands have been practically endless, even if not all of them are strictly within our purview as a pop-culture newsletter. Still, a few stood out from the pack as being particularly newsworthy; although it’s unclear whether they show more potential as blockbusters or train wrecks.
The first number called in “Disney remake bingo” was for a new Willow streaming series. Yes, it’s that Willow! And yes, they did at least make sure to sign up Warwick Davis to try and recapture the charm (haha) of the original fantasy flick. What is definitely new to this version of Willow is director Jon M. Chu, whose connection to this film runs against any expectations set by his last hit, Crazy Rich Asians.
Audiences will be more excited to hear about some of the other sequels Disney has coming down the pipe, including a new Hocus Pocus movie and the long-awaited Indiana Jones 5. The latter should still come with an asterisk though; while the project still has James Mangold and Harrison Ford attached as it did when the film was first teased in 2018, this latest announcement softened its description to “the next installment of Indiana Jones”, in which Ford will “continue his character’s iconic journey”.
We try not to be cynical at the Messenger, but that sounds more like a streaming series where Ford shows up in the first episode to quickly hand over his hat and whip to someone younger who can carry the series into a brighter future. They could always try Shia LeBeouf again!
Passing the torch would certainly be a divisive move regardless of who steps into Indy’s shoes. Fan opinion splits sharply between those who want Indiana Jones to become eternal in the manner of James Bond, and others who can only imagine Ford in the role. But it feels inevitable that Disney will figure out some way to continue and even expand the Indiana Jones franchise, even if it means paying millions for the right to digitize Ford’s likeness onto some luckless double.
Nostalgia and remakes are safe bets in an industry rocked by the pandemic, and the legacy of those beloved original films is the kind of foundation on which the studio could build its third huge cinematic universe. Those universes themselves represent a new high bar for stability in Hollywood, with their regular release schedules and ability to retain audiences across decades of films. And so does the move to distributing its own content exclusively through Disney+.
This Disney Investor Day was an awesome show of force from the most powerful entertainment company on the planet -- and with the stock price reaching record highs the next day, you can expect the parade to be even more insane for 2022.