How Does Disney Stay Disney in the Future?
According to the Wall Street Journal, employees at Epic Games have grown weary of their new alliance.
The Walt Disney Company purchased an ownership interest in Epic as part of a broader initiative.
Walt Disney Company
One day soon, a Fortnite-adjacent game world will debut and unlock a new digital Disney frontier.
The process…isn’t going well for reasons I’m about to explain, but it also raises a bigger question. How does Disney stay Disney in the future, which appears unforgiving of conventional branding?
Making Sense of What Comes Next
I’ll start with this YouTube video, which I’ve used three times now.
All you need to do is watch two minutes of it and decide how much of it makes sense to you.
After the 2024 D23 Expo, I posted this article discussing the thing nobody understood.
This video isn’t particularly popular, earning less than 6,000 views thus far, but the streamer has more than 115,000 subscribers.
Disney
So, whether you can follow anything happening in the clip, your kids can, and that’s Disney’s chief problem.
To sustain its status for more than a century, Disney has modernized and reinvented itself repeatedly.
The idea has always been to persuade the next generation of kids to love Disney.
Please take a moment to consider how you would market various Disney brands to Fortnite players.
Photo: GeekTyrant
In the one above clip, Wolverine and Cyclops are dancing at the same club as Death Eaters, Batman, and Master Chief.
Those characters come from entirely different corporations! Kids these days have zero respect for intellectual property.
Walt Disney Company
No, I’m not being serious, but that’s the crisis Disney faces as it navigates an entirely new, utterly unpredictable frontier.
Disney famously controls its character usage to an almost laughable extent.As proof, here’s a quote from a recent Wall Street Journal article:
“When princesses like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are featured on the same product, like a lunchbox or poster, designers must ensure their gazes are fixed in different directions, so that the characters are all plausibly living in their own ‘universe.’”
That sounds ludicrous, yet it exemplifies how carefully Disney has handled its intellectual property (IP) over the years.
Now, contrast that philosophy to the nonsense you saw in the above Fortnite video.
Photo: Marvel
Is Doctor Doom facing the right way? I think not.
Standing Apart in a Merged Realm
Photo: Disney
Therein lies Disney’s problem. Its management teams have historically called all the shots with IP.
Since other businesses remain so desperate to use Disney characters, they agree to anything.
Photo: Disney
If Disney says that Tiana must stare a certain way, that’s how the licensing business will have her appear.
Well, that’s been the case in the past. Now, the lines are blurring, and Disney seems wholly unprepared.
In the company’s defense, the current digital disruption of all brands is a black swan of the highest order.
Nobody could have seen Fortnite coming or anticipated a world where gamers would wear Brian from Family Guy as a digital backpack.
Baby Bender
Like, the future is strange. We’re all dealing with the ramifications of this nonsense by not thinking about it.
I’ve never even played Fortnite, yet the instant I saw that there was a Baby Bender backpack, I downloaded it.
Photo: EPIC Games
Cosmetics are just a part of gaming now, and weird licensed DLC is even harder to explain.
I played Destiny for years, yet even I cannot explain why it’s getting a Star Wars crossover later in 2025.
Well, the answer is money, but from a logical perspective, it’s indefensible. Stormtroopers, tho!!!
Since CEO Bob Iger understands nothing at all about video games, his executives are mainly on a cash grab right now.
Creating the gaming experiences has proven comically challenging, though.
Walt Disney Company
Since Disney still hasn’t adapted to the times, executives at Epic Games have grown frustrated.
Here’s a quote about Disney’s intransigence:
Walt Disney
“Some Epic executives have complained about the slow pace of the decision-making at Disney, with signoffs needed from so many different divisions.”
So, that one Baby Bender backpack probably had to go through several Disney executives first. Why?
Disney’s existing brand-focused business practices bottleneck its digital future.
Bad Times for Control Freaks
Photo: Wikimedia
The Epic/Disney relationship has gotten off to a strong start financially.
In terms of branding, well, “apocalyptic” springs to mind. I’ll warn you that there’s swearing in this link.
The Walt Disney Company
Yes, I know that made you more likely to click the link, as it’s human nature. And that’s Disney’s problem, too.
The company happily added Darth Vader as an AI interaction in Fortnite. So, what happened?
Photo: Fortnite
In a matter of minutes, the entire gaming community had the late James Earl Jones cussing nonstop.
An embarrassed Epic Games quickly patched the matter, adding an adorable admonishment for would-be pottymouths.
Still, Disney doesn’t want the legendary Star Wars villain reduced to brief joke behavior in Fortnite.
But Disney does want to monetize Darth Vader as much as physically (well, digitally) possible.
Photo: Comicbook.com
So, here we are with Disney reaching an inflection point in its history.
As the AI generation advances in age, they’ll have no concerns about who owns a digital character.
Computer World
None of these kids will care whether a Disney Princess is facing the right way, either.
So, Disney executives are currently rewriting century-old rules on the fly to account for a digital future.
Credit: Disney
The good news for Disney is that their characters remain ever-popular, with Darth Vader an excellent example.
Star Wars turns 50 in 2017. The average Fortnite player is somewhere in the range of 18 to 24 years old.
Darth Vader Fortnite
It’s a miracle any of these people even know who Darth Vader is, yet that Fortnite engagement worked.
More than ten million Fortnite players happily forced the Sith Lord to swear.
Disney’s Struggling with This Generation
The Walt Disney Company
Similarly, the Pinata Brian (Griffin) backpack is currently a fringe top 100 option on Fortnite.
Disney should be alarmed to know that literally none of their IP is currently in the top ten, though.
Only one Disney IP, The Child, aka Baby Yoda, falls in that range, meaning Among Us has as much representation.
Currently, Disney claims about ten percent of the top 100, although that will change soon.
(Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)
At some point, Disney’s Fortnite-adjacent realm will debut, unlocking a cornucopia of digital treasures.
An open question remains about whether standard Fortnite characters can use their non-Disney gear here.
Photo: Pexel.com
That’s another part of Disney’s branding issue. How much control can it claim in the digital landscape?
Disney doesn’t want its characters hanging out with Batman, Lara Croft, and Harry Potter.
(Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Hamleys)
The next generation of kids couldn’t care less, though. They’re used to having it all digitally.
That’s what they’ve learned from day one, and it raises fundamental questions about Disney branding.
The Walt Disney Company
Can Disney protect its meticulously crafted characters in a world where kids can make Darth Vader swear?
Just as importantly, when all of these digital purveyors like Epic put up with Disney’s outdated business practices?
Photo: Playbuzz.com
We’re in a new age of digital gold rush, with Disney’s standard brand protections looking creaky.
For Disney to maintain its identity in the future, it’s going to need to become a LOT more agile with its business practices.
Fortnite
These irritated Fortnite developers are just the tip of the spear of a digital future for which Disney appears unprepared.
Photo: MickeyBlog
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Feature Photo: Photo: Disney, Epic Games
