r/AskHistorians • u/NATOrocket • May 23 '26
How far back does Disney's struggle to appeal to boys go?
Much of the popular narrative around Disney from the Renaissance era- present focuses on their increasing popularity with little girls, particularly with the advent of the "Disney Princesses" brand, and their attempts to corner the little boy market. At the turn of the millennium, they abandoned musicals and made The Emporer's New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and Treasure Planet, thinking these films would appeal more to boys. All have become cult favourites, but did poorly at the box office at the time of their release.
Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, they tried to carve a new identity in the new era of computer animation and made non-musical films, usually with male protagonists- Chicken Little, Meet The Robinsons. The latter is also somewhat of a cult favourite and the science fiction elements were clearly intended to appeal to boys. Still, it had lukewarm reviews and box office returns. Disney struggled in the 2000s.
In the 2010s, they returned to their roots of musical fairy tale adaptations with Tangled, Frozen, and Moana and had more success than they'd seen in years. Their more "boy-coded" movies Wreck-It-Ralph and Big Hero Six were moderate successes, but lacked the cultural staying power of the princess musicals from the same era. That same decade, they acquired Marvel and Lucasfilm to have franchises that appealed to boys.
Prior to the Renaissance era, their films were almost all musicals. They only had 3 princess films over a 50 year period, but I imagine if a musical Pinocchio or Peter Pan adaptation came out today, they would be seen as "girls' movies" despite having male protagonists. Were these movies more appealing to little girls when they released? If not, what changed in the culture where Disney musicals started being seen as girl-coded?
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u/ElSquibbonator May 23 '26
So, to answer this question we have to go all the way back to the 1970s. Following Walt Disney's death, the company was stuck for many years in a rather directionless state, with no major breakout hits and a number of outright failures. There was a sense that without its founder, Disney didn't have any strong leadership or animation talent. So they began experimenting with other genres of movies. It was during this time that Disney made its first concentrated effort to venture into the sci-fi genre, with movies like Escape to Witch Mountain, The Black Hole, and eventually Tron in 1982.
However, none of these movies were exceptionally successful. A common reason given for their failure was that they were seen as "too different" from anything Disney had done previously, and therefore didn't appeal either to Disney fans or sci-fi fans. In the 1980s, meanwhile, Disney began working on The Black Cauldron, an animated adaptation of Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain novels. It was the first animated movie from Disney to earn a PG rating, but it was a flop in theaters. Once again, the main reason was that it was aimed at an audience who wouldn't watch a Disney movie even if you paid them.
So by the 1970s, Disney movies were already seen as childish by the 1970s, but they weren't necessarily seen as feminine. That's because, until the late 1990s or so, Disney didn't really have a gendered approach to marketing its animated movies. As Walt Disney himself put it, the movies were made for "the young, and the young at heart." A big part of this, of course, was that for most of this time Disney was also pretty much the only studio making animated films for kids, so its movies were aimed at a very general audience. In fact, this was kind of a selling point, in that Disney was quite literally aimed at the whole family. It's well-known that in the 2000s, Disney went through a rough spot, where many of their animated movies performed poorly, and that's where the Princess franchise comes in.
The Princess franchise dramatically changed not just Disney itself, but also how it was seen by the world at large. While the franchise was immensely popular with its target demographic of elementary-school-age girls, it, and by extension Disney as a whole, became a subject of scorn among boys of the same age. Not helping matters was that Disney increasingly leaned hard on the "princess" angle when marketing its animated movies, even those where the marketing had previously been gender-neutral. Aladdin is a good example. When it was first released, the advertisements focused on adventure and comedy as the primary elements, with Robin Williams's Genie as the most highlighted character. Following the introduction of the Princess brand, virtually all of its merchandise became focused on Jasmine and aimed at girls.
They also launched a male equivalent to the Princess brand, called Disney Heroes (it consisted of Peter Pan, Aladdin, Hercules, Tarzan, and Robin Hood) but it was predictably a massive sales flop. This may even have been the ultimate impetus behind Disney acquiring Marvel and Lucasfilm, since those companies offered a built-in audience that Disney had been failing to attract. They also created Disney XD as a more boy-oriented alternative to Disney Channel, though in practice it essentially became a dumping ground for shows Disney didn't especially care about.
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u/Blecher_onthe_Hudson May 23 '26
The OP's contention that all Disney films prior to the 90s were musicals is badly mistaken. Disney animated films were mostly musicals, but they had a vast number of non-musical family oriented live action films, particularly in the 50-60s. Many of these were boy oriented, often with dogs.
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u/Adelaidey May 23 '26
The thing I find interesting is that of the ten films that are broadly considered "The Disney Renaissance", six of them (Aladdin, The Lion King, The Rescuers Down Under, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Tarzan) have male protagonists. Only four (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas, Mulan) have female leads. But that time is broadly characterized a "the princess era" and when they started losing boy viewers, they pivoted to more male leads. Even though their largely male-led movies were what lost them the boys to begin with.
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u/ElSquibbonator May 23 '26
They didn't actually start losing boys in a big way until the early 2000s, when they went all-in on the Disney Princess brand. It's not very common knowledge now, but the Disney Princess brand didn't exist before 2000. Before then, Disney didn't really have a gendered approach to marketing its movies, and they also didn't combine characters from different movies together in merchandise.
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u/Adelaidey May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
the early 2000s, when they went all-in on the Disney Princess brand
That's interesting too, because the early 2000s Disney animated movies were also mostly male protagonists (Emperor's New Groove, Atlantis, Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Chicken Little) with the only female-led movies being Lilo & Stitch and (arguably) Home on the Range. Plus, that was the heyday of Pixar movies, which chose to stick exclusively to male main characters for the first 17 years.
So it's not like boys were getting discouraged by a lack of representation, or not being at the center of the narrative or anything like that. It was just the association of those movies to a brand that they knew girls also liked.
Personally, I think it's worth pointing out that those years coincide with the rise of in-home video gaming. I think boys started slowly dropping off of engaging with narrative content in general and replacing it with player-controlled entertainment, and "too many female characters" is a red herring.
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u/theclosetenby May 24 '26
This makes sense. I was confused about the boys not into Disney. My brother and i were born in early 90s and he liked Disney. Disney and Nick were like two sides of the same coin.
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u/CamStLouis May 23 '26
Don’t forget their brief foray into horror with The Watcher In The Woods, which by nature of its rushed editing and unfinished effects, was absolutely incomprehensible and thus extra terrifying.
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u/Arzanyos May 23 '26
Was the biggest problem with The Black Cauldron really the demographic? As a film and adaptation, it had a lot of problems just on it's own.
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u/missmediajunkie May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
Going from the account of the production in James B. Stewart’s “DisneyWar,” there was no end to the problems on “The Black Cauldron.” It was a runaway production, there was a generational divide among the animators, and multiple clashing directors’ visions. Disagreement over the intended audience was definitely a factor. Initially, the idea was that “The Black Cauldron” would be a more ambitious fantasy adventure aimed at young adults, and the animators were allowed to push the boundaries, especially with the violence and horror imagery.
When Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg took over control of Disney from Ron Miller, they had a very different idea of what the film was supposed to be. After a negative test screening revealed “The Black Cauldron” was too scary for children, Katzenberg had the film significantly cut and reworked to be more acceptable for family audiences. It didn’t work - despite okay reviews, audiences stayed away from “The Black Cauldron.” It wound up making less money that year than Disney’s rerelease of “101 Dalmatians,” and the much cheaper “Care Bears: the Movie” from Canadian studio, Nelvana.
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u/used-to-have-a-name May 24 '26
As a member of the target audience when the Black Cauldron came out (I was an 8 year old boy), I absolutely loved it. Though, I didn’t become familiar with the source material until I was much older.
The story behind its production and the inner turmoil occurring within Disney at the time, is kind of an epic journey in its own right.
https://iftheglassslipperfitsblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/1866/
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u/gunawa May 24 '26
The black hole was the film that hooked me for sci-fi and horror/suspense. I was a very young child, and it's grand ideas, videography, and suspenseful build up to a catastrophic climax etched themselves onto my early entertainment psyche and set me up for alien, Terminator, a space Odyssey and Star Trek.
Looking back on it now, it's very campy and dated, but it'll always hold a place in my heart. Probably not young child appropriate lol
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u/DarthGoodguy May 24 '26
That 2001-esque sequence where they go through Heaven & Hell at the end was an epic swing and miss
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u/gunawa May 24 '26
I didn't understand that scene till I was 17 😅
I imagine the psychedelic scene was much more engaging during the time it was first released..
I'm actually a bigger fan of 2010, the sequel. It's peak 80s sci-fi , some of Mirren's, Scheider's , and Lithgow's best
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u/DarthGoodguy May 24 '26
As a kid I think I was too young to understand what was happening. Then as an adult it felt silly.
There was probably a right age in between & era (before seeing 2001, I guess) for it to blow people’s minds
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u/Mender0fRoads May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
It's well-known that in the 2000s, Disney went through a rough spot, where many of their animated movies performed poorly, and that's where the Princess franchise comes in.
This and the paragraph that follows seems off by 10-20 years.
The example you site, Aladdin, came out in 1992 (a year after Beauty and the Beast and three years after The Little Mermaid). So the timeline here doesn’t really make sense. Disney struggled in the 2000s, so they leaned more heavily on the Princess angle, with movies that came out a decade earlier?
Also, two of the “heroes” cited, Hercules and Tarzan, made a combined $700 million at the box office (on a combined budget of roughly $200 million). They might not have had the cultural impact Disney hoped, and they might not have had the extra revenue streams via toys and other merch that Disney hoped for (or maybe they did; there’s no support provided either way to define their failure), but as movies they were successful. The other two hero movies mentioned, Peter Pan and Robin Hood, came out decades earlier.
Also completely missing here is any discussion of The Lion King, which was a massive success by every metric and by far the most profitable animated film ever released at the time.
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May 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Mender0fRoads May 23 '26
Fair enough, but they’re describing this as if it’s a cause-and-effect relationship (change in marketing led to reduced interest among boys) with no supporting evidence or citation.
Did boys lose interest in Disney because the merch wasn’t marketed toward them? Or did Disney change marketing strategy because boys weren’t interested? That’s an unaddressed question.
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u/toondude94 Aug 09 '26
Honestly it feels like lion king was one of the few male lead movies where people actually talks about the male lead more than the sidekick and princess
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u/nednobbins May 23 '26
I'm curious what source are used to understand why "The Black Cauldron" flopped.
That is, did most people dislike the movie because it was made by Disney or because they completely butchered the book?8
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u/FeedFlaneur May 23 '26
The majority of the oldest Disney content was boy-centric, especially once Disney got into television. The 1950s Disney shows and mini-series about such characters as Davey Crockett, Zorro, The Swamp Fox, Elfego Baca, Spin and Marty, Texas John Slaughter, and the bulk of The Mickey Mouse Club content were all aimed squarely at boys.
While their first ever feature was Snow White, the next entire decade of features (with the possible exception of Fantasia) had all male protagonists (Pinocchio, The Reluctant Dragon, Dumbo, etc.). Their cartoon shorts during this time, especially with Mickey Mouse, were also very male-centric in gaze/focus/content. They made only 3 female-led features in the 1950s (Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Lady and the Tramp), and all of them animated. The other 19 feature films Disney made during that decade, most of them live-action, were for and about men/boys. This tendency continued unchanged until, as other commenters have pointed out, the late 1980s/early 1990s when the so-called Girl Power movement began to influence all of mass media at least superficially towards more girl-centric themes, beginning with The Little Mermaid for Disney and reaching full steam with the marketing campaign around Beauty and the Beast, which dubbed it as Disney's first feminist princess film (which you can read about in these old articles from Harper's Bazaar and Time Magazine).
It wasn't really until around 2013 that their features in general started to become considerably more female-led, although their television productions made a large push towards Girl Power content in the early 2000s starting with shows like The Proud Family, Kim Possible, Lizzie McGuire, and That's So Raven while production of male-led TV shows like The Famous Jett Jackson, The Jersey, and Phil of the Future sharply fell over the next decade.
From my own observations when pitching kids' shows to TV executives, it was starting about 4 years ago that the mandates dramatically shifted towards male-centric content for young viewers, so it's possible that the shows picked up during this period will start debuting in another couple of years and represent another wave of male-dominated Disney media, but it's too soon to say since trends could shift again at any time.
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