Does Disney Mean Anything to Movies Anymore?
‘Moana’ is the latest Disney live-action remake to fail to connect with audiences. What was once a den of creativity has become a house of wax.
Welcome back to Projections, a newsletter for Disney Adults, adults who dislike Disney, and everyone in between. (Except fascists. Fuck those guys.)
Speaking of, it’s been 10 years since Disney released a movie for adults. On September 2, 2016, Derek Cianfrance’s adaptation of The Light Between Oceans was released under the Touchstone Pictures label, a pseudonymous studio that Disney operated in various forms from 1984 until then. Touchstone is a fascinating story of a major conglomerate trying to keep up with the times—after several botched “grown-up” PG-rated releases in the early 1980s (among them Tron and Carroll Ballard’s fascinating Never Cry Wolf), Disney decided to launch a sub-brand to distinguish the child-focused fare it had been defined by from a more mature strain of movie storytelling.
The first film under the Touchstone banner was Ron Howard’s Splash, a fizzy spin on a mermaid’s tale that launched Tom Hanks as a film star and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It was an auspicious debut for the shingle. Eventually, Touchstone became synonymous with polished, accessible but lightly sophisticated Movies for Adults, and its library includes such personal favorites as The Color of Money, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Dick Tracy, Sister Act, Ed Wood, Rushmore, The Insider, Unbreakable, and The Prestige. It’s also the home of Michael Bay’s Armageddon and Coyote Ugly. So, multitudes. The Coens and Tim Burton and Spike Lee and John Woo made movies for the studio. It wasn’t consistently a prestige factory but it signified something considered; professional entertainments that represent a mainstream moviegoing moment I tend to over-celebrate.
Touchstone slowly began to fade from view after the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl under the Walt Disney Pictures flagship, which was rated PG-13 and ostensibly more aligned with Touchstone’s identity but stuck to the Disney imprimatur, presumably for amusement park ride reasons. After an agreement with DreamWorks to produce films with Touchstone lapsed in 2016, it was quietly closed for good a decade ago.
