With the rise of Disney’s recent work, it’s not hard to see that the company is struggling with its politics, biases, and obvious prejudice. When it comes to Character representation, and tossing the blame, Disney is your company! Especially when discussing “Lightyear“, its failure, and what they decided to blame.
Lightyear came out in Late 2024 on June 17th, and, due to the horrible vague marketing, film-making decisions, and its obvious cash grab for Disney+ destroyed the movie at the box office and led it not to do as well as other 2024 films from Disney like “Luca”, “Encanto” or even non-Disney movies like “Vivo”. It just flopped which is a normal thing that happens to all film studios, even big ones. Disney just had to have a scapegoat for the film, But instead of reflecting on the points made above, and thus improving for the future. Chose to blame the most minor thing in the movie… The character Alisha Hawthorne.
Alisha Hawthorne is Buzz Lightyear’s space ranger partner who has 20 minutes of screen time throughout the film; and is a lesbian who, for 7 seconds shares a kiss with her wife in the film. While Disney saw all the other flaws with Lightyear the movies decided to blame the 7 seconds of LGBTQ representation in the film entirely on the demise of the film. This slip caused Disney to go on a total anti-woke campaign/Purging in future films, which is obvious with the talk of the most recent film success “Inside Out 2”.
According to reports from Disney and other film media, Disney entirely blames the Failure of Lightyear on the one kiss from “Lightyear”, according to the tweet from DisscussingFilm. Continuous notes were passed to ensure Riley in “Inside Out 2” came off as less gay. Inside Out 2 is a film about dealing with and bottling up your emotions, Dealing with anxiety, and coping with the loss of friends. It had nothing to do with Riley’s Romantic interest, Disney was so scared of “going woke” that they found a non-existent problem and “fixed” it.
Disney’s tendency to use its failures to nitpick said failure and push certain Reasonings and unbased opinions is typical of the place known for its gilded and glittery history. To see this come from Disney may not be surprising but infuriating, Disney’s stance and adamancy could hurt representation chances for future animated and children’s films. Disney has the power to set trends for animation films. Other beloved studios can legitimately think that allowing LGBTQ+ characters in film and media can tank revenue for future feature films. This is very harmful to the future of representation in media, while Disney’s stance may do very little, it may do a lot as well. Disney recently has had a lot of issues in their offices, especially with their recent movies and film projects like “Elemental” and “Wish”. Hopefully, Disney will grow into a better company able to accept their losses and roll with the punches; but, with their behavior during the 2020s, it may be a while.
Sources: Forbes, Twitter “X”
