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.
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