News: Disney buys Fox

That said, there's nothing stopping someone from creating their own crude hand drawn animation and uploading it to Youtube, as a sort of new age Bill Plimpton. It's remarkably easy.

It is a cool movie.  I missed out on it, since I was deployed at the time.  I only recently discovered it, since I have kids now.

So that's why I saw a joke thread on reddit the other day saying Disney is closer to becoming a god!
Well, I think it's fine... But I have to say that I consider productions from Disney to be weaker than others overall, so I hope they don't force their wimpness on any of FOX's properties.

I think it's not about their "serious" competition (like Warner). It's more about them buying a lot of promising smaller studios and their talent and put them to work in those miserables direct-to-video sequels and then closing them - which gives a feeling that they weren't buying studios to vary their portfolio; they were buying them to avoid future competition.

To give a proper example: Princess Mononoke is, IMHO, one of the best animations from the 90s. The movie is everything that Disney's animations were trying to be, while having arguably an even better animation, no musical scenes to pad the movie (while still being longer than the usual Disney ones), a legitimately intelligent plot and dialogue. So, what Disney did? They bought the rights to the distribution of Studio Ghibli's films in the US, but not to get their profits: what they actually did was only release Ghibli's films in a very limited fashion, distributing them in as few cinemas as they could get away with without breaking contract (the video releases were also limited). They only bought the rights to kill what could've been a very strong competition.

That's the idea of a monopoly: you are in such a high position that you can kill your competition with your already vast money instead of bettering your product; the consequence to consumers is having only very few products to choose. But, as I said, I think this is only really valid when we think of 2d animation in the 90s/early 2000s; before and after that, Disney always had a lot of competition.

Huh. So you think... Let me run your example back to you so I'm sure I understand it correctly.

Disney paid money for the distribution rights of a Japanese film which was highly profitable in its home country. They paid for it to be translated and dubbed in English by American actors and they secured for it to be shown in  (limited) theaters, but they did all of this not because they wanted it to be successful (and therefore get a return on the investment), but actually because they secretly wanted it to flop! They would thereby force a 2D-animated-film starved public onto the only alternative place to spend their cash - Disney's own direct-to-video budget titles! Oh, it's the perfect plan! And they would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for... something. DreamWorks? Idk.

And let's not forget that one can't just walk into a store to buy distribution rights, they are agreed upon by both parties. Interesting, then, that Studio Ghibli agreed with Disney to distribute their next film, Spirited Away. If they got such a bad deal, it seems they didn't notice. Equally interesting that, despite their plot to bury the film, Disney has rereleased it to BluRay. Weird.

Joking aside, I find it hard to believe that Disney'd sabotage a movie that they stood to profit from as a part of some kind of Master Plan to make us watch The Little Mermaid 2. Maybe that's just me. 

Long post ahead, ahoy!

Their contract was not per movie; it was for an exclusivity of distribution for X years (don't know how many, but it has recently ceased). I bet it was just naivety from Ghibli, thinking that their movies would be well treated: a mistake they had already suffered with their last movie in the US, Nausicaa, which was completely butchered. So it's not improbable that a studio would get into a terrible deal without knowing it.

I know it sounds strange that they would spend money to sabotage it, but that's not unusual at all. Want a more obvious example? Darren Aronofsky bought the filming rights to Perfect Blue, one of my favourite animations ever. So, he did it to adapt the film, right? Wrong: he never adapted it, except for a single scene in Requiem for a Dream (without acknowledging the original source). Instead, what he did was Black Swan, which is an entire movie plagiarizing Perfect Blue without acknowledging it; while Black Swan got Oscars and was hailed as this innovative and creative masterpiece, Perfect Blue was put under the rug with no acknowledgement from Aronofsky, who denied any influence. Even though he had the f****** rights to adapt it.

For more examples of rights shenanigans, think of how some terrible movies like the 1990s Fantastic Four are made. The contract had a clause that the studio had to produce something based on the property until some specific date; if they didn't they would lose the rights to the characters. What they did was throw together any shitty movie in a rush just so they could keep the rights for more time. The same was actually done by Fox with Spiderman, if I'm remembering right; what prompted them to make the reboot a few years ago was less a legitimate interest in making a good film and more a problem of "if you don't, the rights go back to Marvel". Of course, they still tried to make a passable movie out of it, but the main impulse given to make the movie was just to not lose the rights.

For another Disney specific example: they used Miramax to buy the rights to "The Thief and the Cobbler", an animation that could compete with Alladin's success (actually, Alladin was very probably inspired by The Thief itself, which had an unfortunately long production). Then they butchered the movie (which already had a terrible production cycle) and gave it a very limited release. So yes, Mononoke was not an isolated case.

But it's not out of spite that they do those things. Think of a company like Valve: Valve sees a very interesting indie team working on something, then they buy the rights to the game being worked on and hire the team - that's how they got Counter Strike, Team Fortress, Portal, DotA 2 and Left 4 Dead. And then what they do next? Leave the team sitting there, with no games to work on. It's a waste of talent, so much that, after almost a decade not working on any story based games, the most important Valve writers finally decided to leave the company. So, for years, we had some of the best gaming writers (like Laidlaw and Wolpaw) not producing anything.

I mean, it's not like Valve hired those guys just to kill their careers; it's just that they tend to hire a lot of talent and don't know what to do with it. That was Disney in 90s/2000s, except on a much bigger scale - to the point that it turned almost the entirety of the 2d animation industry in the US stale.

Edit: fixed a few typos.