The Magical Work of Brand Futurity: The Mythmaking of Disney+

Abstract

The Walt Disney Company has maintained an aggressive approach to brand management for nearly a century. With the acquisition of a number of highly reputable companies, this aggression has become unignorable within the media industry. At the same time, Disney has embraced digital expansionism, culminating with the launch of its own on-demand streaming service, Disney+, in late 2019. The platform’s documentary series offer a unique window into this new era of the Disney empire, usefully demonstrating the careful navigation of corporate legacy and history in the creation and maintenance of what I term brand futurity. Thinking critically about the concept of collective imaginaries in the context of the digital and streaming economies, this article argues that these docuseries illustrate Disney’s digital corporate strategy as a narrativization of wonderful work and ever-expanding value.

Introduction

One Day at Disney is a Disney+ original series that spotlights a different Disney employee in each brief episode, released exclusively on the platform. In the fifth episode, we visit then-CEO and chairman Bob Iger. Seated in a nondescript movie theater set-up, Iger avoids discussing what he actually does, as employees in other episodes do, and instead speaks about the legacy of Walt Disney and, interestingly enough, what it’s like to work for The Walt Disney Company today, regardless of one’s position. “We’re all, in many ways, not only in the same business but doing the same thing, which is trying to reach people all over the world in very compelling ways, trying to touch people’s hearts.” To help accomplish this goal, the company has invested heavily in its streaming platform as the driving force in furthering the Disney narrative, or myth, of its rightful place as the once and future leader in the media industry. It is this tying together of legacy and futurity that defines Disney’s position within the marketplace and global media culture.

Disney’s public pronouncements, here and elsewhere, aim to narrativize the synergy between the company’s past and future, and the documentary content developed for Disney+ has become an ideal place to advance this story. One Day at Disney, alongside other Disney+ originals such as The Imagineering Story, Disney Insider, Prop Culture, Behind the Attraction, Inside Pixar, Marvel Studios: Assembled, and more, suggest that Disney understands its streaming platform as a way to build and maintain brand loyalty by giving users a behind-the-scenes perspective on what goes into “manufacturing happiness,” as Iger puts it. These series are useful for analysis because they continue and update a long-held aspect of Disney strategization whereby the company is narrativized as the arbiter of a better future.

At the same time, the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox, BAMTech (a video streaming tech company), and more have been lucrative for Disney, not least in the competitive cultural advantage that having them all housed in one platform affords to Disney+. I argue that these two parallel corporate strategies—depictions of the wonder of labor at Disney, and organizing these depictions according to the company’s library of intellectual property—are the driving force behind Disney’s approach to online streaming, reflecting a uniquely dynamic, if rapacious, position within the streaming economy. The Disney+ landing interface, for instance, showcases the title cards of its various brands alongside one another, foregrounding its acquisitional power for the user, with an implicit promise of a future of ever-expanding content. Using concepts of critical future studies, I situate Disney’s strategy and promotion of it as part of the company’s investment in brand futurity, which I define as an imperious instance of brand management for a digital era structured by financialization, which organizes corporate strategy according to moral-economic visions of that which does not yet, or may never, exist.

Disney has often been at the center of analyses of media brands. As yet, little work has been devoted to Disney’s digital expansionism, particularly in light of the launch of its streaming platform. In the case of One Day at Disney and other Disney+ series, corporate strategy is applied according to Griffin et al.’s (2017, 871) concept of “organizational readiness,” which for them “explores the cultural products (Disney animations) consumed by the future workforce” and the “ways in which they might influence – exert power over – taken-for-granted images, ideals and expectations of work.” This paper, in part, examines how Disney’s interest in portraying itself as a wonderful place to work parallels and reinforces the longstanding, legacy-making storytelling of brand management by the company, from the behind-the-scenes trailers for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 to the Disneyland TV series in the mid-1950s to the great investment into bonus materials on DVD releases in the 2000s, a continuity tying together technological, cultural, and financial axes of brand futurity. The organizational readiness to be found within the behind-the-scenes work on Disney+ demonstrates the company’s digital strategy, setting up a fantastical image of the future that is inextricable from historical conceptions of brand loyalty and happiness. Thinking through what the company says about itself now, and the narratives and mythologies it enacts, is an important endeavor for scholars of corporate histories and media industries to comprehend the realities and imaginaries manufactured by the platform economy.

This article uses an analysis of Disney+ and its mode of address as evidential means of accessing these issues and tying them to a temporal, future-oriented framework of cultural imaginaries. The core characteristics of a corporation engaged in brand futurity are: business aligned with the mechanisms of financialization; expansion into new technologies and digital markets; benevolent rhetoric and promotional discourse; and a brand identity tied to legacy—all of which, then, build a speculative narrative of the future with the brand as guiding principle and center of control. The company’s laborers may also be called upon as key cultural representatives of this futurity, as we will see with Disney. These characteristics will be expanded on in more detail throughout this paper to understand how brand futurity transforms previous conceptions of brand value. Disney is positioned here as an “innovator” of brand futurity, marking historical shifts in corporate strategy and contributing to the digital rhetoric of legacy, but another prominent example could be Apple, not only by fulfilling the characteristics of the concept but by enacting arguably even greater feats of control over bringing their story of the future into existence. This analysis is utilized as a means to better understand the operation and practice of brand futurity in the streaming age, tying the company’s future to articulations of its own past, and why this form of temporal analysis is significant for media industries and platform studies as a useful framework for situating corporate narratives of value and ownership over the future. In doing so, it argues for a critical futurist approach to media corporations, particularly important for the streaming era, outlining some methodological considerations for what this would look like along the way.

Futures Past

Futurities and Imaginaries

I align myself with recent calls for a cultural and media studies that is critically futurist in its approach (though not futurological, à la Toffler [1970]). Powers (2020, 453) calls for a futurist cultural studies, with the understanding that cultural studies is “praxis aimed at refashioning society toward progressive goals,” and so “futurism can increase our efficacy; cultural studies can increase futurism’s humanity.” As such, cultural studies and futurity are linked as concepts and as a temporality, so that ultimately, the future becomes “more than a zone of capitalist strategy, but rather one of democratic possibility” (Powers 2020, 455). This paper brings these methodological concerns to bear on a site marked by futurity: Disney and its digital streaming platform. Contextualizing Disney in relation to its orientation to futurity helps make the case for a futurist cultural studies, as the imposed corporate arbiter of the future of media must be critiqued according to a method that holds these possible futures and cultural hegemonies in conjunction.

This places us within a theoretical framework of future imaginaries, recalling what Haupt (2021, 239) has outlined as a critical perspective on the strategic use of corporate imaginaries: “In a society strongly oriented by such [corporate] imaginaries of the future, various actors inevitably seek to strengthen their specific visions, and turn them into a collective imaginary, to gain legitimacy and increase their impact. [. . .] Such a perspective deals with the questions of how specific actors construct visions of the future, provide them with collective meaning, and convey their universal desirability.” In Disney’s case, it is the creation and maintenance of this universal desirability that manifests in its strategic brand futurity, whereby a future as defined by the company is not only narrativized to be naturally anticipated by consumers and investors alike, but these imaginaries also “disguise the company’s aspiration for profit and power as a necessity on the path to a better world” (Haupt 2021, 239).

This imaginary is not simply discursive, it is also grounded on certain promises around technological shifts—or sociotechnical imaginaries. As Jasanoff and Kim (2015, 4, emphasis added) argue, sociotechnical imaginaries are “collectively held, institutionally stabilized and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology.” It is often not state actors but corporations that wield this power. Jasanoff and Kim (2015, 27) explains:

Multinational corporations increasingly act upon imagined understandings of how the world is and ought to be, playing upon the perceived hopes and fears of their customers and clients and thereby propagating notions of technological progress and benefit that cut across geopolitical boundaries. . .Coalitions between corporate interests and the media, through advertising and outright control, are increasingly likely to play a pivotal role in making and unmaking global sociotechnical imaginaries.

The benefit of using these imaginaries as a way to understand Disney’s digital expansionism becomes clearer when placed into the context of platform capitalism and the shift in how corporate firm valuation is determined (Coveri et al. 2021; Srnicek 2016). Some, including Lianos and McLean (2021, 8–9), have further emphasized the impact of financialization, whereby companies are now evermore intent to “engage in ‘futurity-led’ competition. . .futurity denoting the reorientation of economic activity towards the future and firm valuation coming to rest on expected future profits.” Nowhere is this more apparent, they argue, than in the digital economy. This reflects a longstanding critical attitude toward Disney, as Schickel (1968 [1997], 17–8) memorably put it: “In essence, Disney’s machine was designed to. . .forc[e] everyone to share the same formative dreams. . .As capitalism, it is a work of genius; as culture, it is mostly a horror.”

Branding has always had an element of futurity built in. Lury (2004, 6) argued that the brand is like a “platform for action” that anticipates the attachments of its consumer, and Arvidsson (2006, 15) argued that contemporary brand management “aims at anticipating and programming the productivity of consumers and guiding it in particular directions.” However, Arvidsson (2006, 13) also notes that brands are “an example of capital socialized to the extent of transpiring the minute relations of everyday life, to the point of becoming a context for life.” This is accomplished, Arvidsson suggests, through “programming” consumers in a way that is enabling, or even empowering. The restrictive subscribers-only space of Disney+ would suggest a break with this approach, but more significantly, Arvidsson (2006, 135) states that the culture industries have long “based the valorization of their products upon a measure of the value of viewer attention,” mostly in terms of viewing time, but “what has vanished is rather the very possibility of using time as a measure.” This is obviously a problem for brands, and I argue that Disney has pivoted in the platform era to a new temporal strategy of brand futurity as a solution to this vanishing—this concept, then, provides a way of understanding how the everyday life context of socialized capital Arvidsson points to has been rejiggered to a future-oriented strategy that “measures” value according to the logic of financialization, which describes how banks, hedge funds, stock exchanges, and corporations hoard economic power by gutting worker power and focusing on financial engineering (Epstein 2005), wherein “a logic of extraction has been replaced by a logic of speculation” (Adkins 2018, 17). In Disney’s case, as we will see, this narrative is caught up in the Disney+ docuseries that focus on employees as spokespeople for the corporation’s power and its future.

Streaming Disney

It is useful to consider the streaming market in relation to theories of futurity. In what larger context does this concept exist and operate? In a financialized market of streaming competition, the very viability of each enterprise depends on a future-oriented analysis, which invariably impresses upon the content and reception of what is created.

The streaming age, with the growth of competition between countless platforms and the increasing presence of legacy media corporations, has been thoroughly theorized as a volatile space of market contention and consumer choice—often referred to as the “streaming wars.” Lobato and Lotz (2021) argue that this discursive shorthand has only confused matters, stuck with an insufficient story about direct competition for eyeballs, and data capital and attention value as the means of accumulation (Sadowski 2020; Wu 2016). Sanson and Steirer (2019, 1224) similarly suggest that streaming is “a multi-sited, quasi-iterative, and rapidly evolving marketplace, in which legacy practices persist alongside and often in competition with new modes of production, dissemination, and consumption.” The streaming wars are, in fact, more like a series of battles, internal and external; emphasizing the overarching distribution technology of streaming alone obscures important factors including content, revenue source, business model, geographic scale, and value to each particular corporation.

Lotz (2017) has theorized the streaming ecosystem as one of portals, describing Netflix and other platforms as “intermediary services that collect, curate, and distribute television programming via internet distribution.” Portals have a longer history, however. Jeffrey Layne Blevins wrote for this journal in 2004 about the notion of introducing internet portals for sharing media content, which Disney attempted with the Go Network, launched in 1999 and closed in 2001. Go was intended as a way to cross-promote the company’s content, and Blevins argued that it was Disney’s failure to create a prominent brand for Go that ensured its fate. In Blevins’s estimation, it was “Disney’s unwillingness to capitalize on its already recognized brands” that hampered Go’s potential success, as “the Disney empire has learned that synergy and cross-promotion were not enough to ensure success in this highly concentrated market” (p. 266, 268). This leads Blevins (p. 268) to an intriguing conclusion: “Perhaps the biggest lesson for new media proprietors is that brand dominance via a walled-garden internet portal is just not good business.” It is helpful to think of Disney’s early failure in contrast with the massive success of Disney+, which certainly capitalizes on recognized brands (particularly with Disney’s acquisitions in the years following Blevins’ article) and makes use of the format’s walled-garden function to its strategic advantage. More recently, Kidman (2021) has argued that Disney has led the franchise era through the use of “corporate auteurism,” whereby brands and their associated executives (Kevin Feige for Marvel, Kathleen Kennedy for Star Wars) not only promote brand value but also rationalize and justify labor practices, management structures, and compensation. As Kidman (2021, 5) cautions, “Accounts that reproduce Disney’s corporate auteur discourse are likely to lead the public to embrace Disney for its consistent market dominance and its reliable output of likable content in tough times.” This article, like Kidman’s, proposes a different path that instead “hold[s] the studio accountable for setting the conditions” of intertwined labor and media futures.

It is equally pertinent to pay close attention to how boundaries of platform competition are narrativized by corporations, a practice that Crawford (2021, 4) describes as investor lore, “the emergent discourses among investing actors about what kinds of user experiences are and are not valuable, and which users those experiences will and will not engage.” While Crawford (2021, 106) compellingly suggests that Disney, like HBO, AT&T, and others, has been forced to “become Netflix” due to that company’s persuasive “speculative fictions,” I argue instead that, keeping in mind Lobato and Lotz’s points on differentiation, Disney is not competing with Netflix but is building something singular and all-encompassing, a separate mode of address that enacts a separate mode of futurity, a paternalistic exclusivity that trades on magic and nostalgia to imagine a fully-Disneyfied media future. Where I agree with Crawford (2021, 107) is his emphasis that “today’s temporalities of value generation mobilize ever greater debts and ever faster exchanges, channeling profits into the hands of a shrinking few, and casting value ever further into the future.” These “shrinking few,” the executives, shareholders, investors, and top talent, design narratives that turn this into a desirable mode of futurity for the many, a corporate campaign of cultural indoctrination that intimately ties brand futurity to consumer happiness.

The Wonderful World of Work

Disney Drudgery

Developed and released exclusively for Disney+, the documentary series One Day at Disney was released less than a month after the platform’s launch. Spun off from a feature-length documentary of the same name released just days earlier on the platform, the episodes last only five to seven minutes, seemingly intended to be binge-watched. Across fifty-one episodes, One Day at Disney showcases a diverse workforce for the company (Iger uses the word “diverse” three times in his episode), from ride show technician Pablo Tufino to storybook artist Grace Lee. An instructive example would be Lupe de Santiago, a seamstress at Disneyland for over thirty years. Voicing the typical talking point of the series, she says, speaking in Spanish, “This work for me is not a job, for me it is something satisfying.” Then, switching to English, she adds, “My work is not my work. It is my passion.” And later, “Disneyland is like family to me.” This short episode fully encapsulates the brand message: working at Disney isn’t work, it’s passion (Duffy 2017). Moreover, workers at Disney parks are not called employees but cast members, reflecting an intentional symbolism that they are part of the creative process, instrumental to the flow of branded storytelling regardless of one’s position: they are ambassadors of happiness.

The intention here is not to invalidate the experiences of these workers. Instead, it is to draw purposeful connections between the stories that Disney tells about itself, and how these stories become culturally, socially, and economically embedded, establishing a continuity that aims to affirm the company’s position in/as the future of media. Disney’s long and conflictual history with labor is well-documented, including by Wasko (2001 [2020]) in her landmark book Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Wasko (2001 [2020], 19–20) recounts that by the end of the 1930s, many workers were deeply dissatisfied with their working conditions, “especially due to the inconsistent wage scales, the erratic distribution of bonuses and other forms of compensation.” In 1941, the Screen Cartoonists Guild (SCG) was recognized by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as the bargaining unit for workers at Disney studios, and subsequently charged the company with unfair labor practices. The SCG voted to strike in May, and it lasted for nine weeks as Walt Disney himself nearly got into a fistfight with strikers (Wasko 2001 [2020], 20). For a short time, the 1941 strike harmed the company’s reputation as a wonderful workplace.

For most of the twentieth century following the SCG strike, Disney developed a much more glowing respectability in the market, and it became easy for the general public to believe that it really was the happiest place on Earth to be an employee. More recently, some of this veneer has faded. For example, an anonymous former cast member recounted (Meltzer 2016), “When you go to work at Disney, your most important job is to keep the illusion of Disney alive.” She describes taking a “Disney indoctrination course,” wherein they are manipulated due to their emotional attachments to Disney so that “you pretty much sign your life away, agreeing to work whenever and however long Disney wants – and you’re happy about it. Like somehow getting to work 80 hours a week in a 120-degree costume for $6.90 an hour is the greatest thing you could possibly be doing for humanity.” In 2017, Disney World workers rallied in Orlando for pay increases. This followed the Department of Labor finding Disney guilty in March 2017 of forcing employees to pay for costumes out of their own pockets, and that the company failed to properly compensate workers for overtime (Calfas 2017). Disney was ordered to provide back pay totaling $3.8 million to 16,000 impacted workers—a win, but a paltry sum for the company. In fall 2018, the union drive was successful, with a plan to implement a $15 minimum wage by 2021, which was reportedly finally reached in October of that year.

In recent years, media coverage has sat along these divided lines. In 2020, The Nation published an article by Dreier Peter called “Disney Is Not the Greatest Place on Earth to Work,” which argues that while ticket prices have sky-rocketed at Disney’s resorts and executives’ bonuses have ballooned, workers’ wages have stayed stagnant. Further, multiple human rights groups beginning in the 1990s have reported on Disney’s use of sweatshops in the Global South, including findings by the National Labor Committee in 1996 that workers in Haiti were being paid as little as 12 cents an hour. Reports came out into the 2000s about horrific conditions in Bangladesh, China, and elsewhere, from unpaid overtime and unsafe conditions to child labor and sexual harassment. Dreier then refers to a 2018 survey he conducted with Disneyland employees called “Working for the Mouse,” which found that 11 percent of workers reported having been homeless at some point in the last two years, and three-quarters of respondents said they couldn’t afford basic expenses every month.

Even Abigail Disney, grand-daughter of company co-founder Roy Disney, wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post in 2019 titled, “It’s time to call out Disney — and anyone else rich off their workers’ backs.” Still, other mainstream outlets like NPR and The Associated Press (2021) remain happy to publish pieces that read like Disney ad copy, such as “Some Original Staffers Say They’re Still Happy To Work At Disney World After 50 Years,” which highlights some longtime workers. Recounting Disney World’s growth over the years to 77,000 cast members in 2021, the piece adds, “What never changed was the original employees’ devotion to the pixie dust, the dream machine created by Walt Disney and his Imagineers.”

Disney Stories

Disney+ is the culmination of a decades-long campaign, largely initiated by Iger, to dominate the media industry through aggressive acquisitions and, eventually, digital expansion. As Wasko (2001 [2020], 44, emphasis added) argues, these acquisitions “represent a significant investment in content that expanded the corporation’s scope and established Disney as not just a universe but as a multiverse.” In part, the multiverse concept recognizes that as Disney forcefully diversifies its holdings, such as by expanding more explicitly into adult-targeted entertainment through its purchase of Fox, there are not only increased opportunities for synergistic projects but also for segmented worlds that deliberately exist outside of the traditional Disney brand but nevertheless add to the company’s profits and longevity. When sports fans sit down to watch ESPN, it is unlikely they think about Mickey Mouse, but sure enough their subscription to ESPN+ adds to Disney’s revenue stream! The multiverse also illustrates the need to examine Disney according to a political economic analysis, “emphasizing the economic as well as the ideological, or production as well as consumption” (Wasko 2001 [2020], 5). Disney is a natural arbiter of this corporate-media coalition, controlling its empire through consolidation and technological infrastructure, a legacy institution seeking to dominate using its structural and historical weight to impose itself and make it seem eminently desirable for all, the window to a better world. Similarly, while Disney has often been future-oriented in terms of spaces like EPCOT and Tomorrowland, these were physically-situated explorations of modern technologies. At the very least, this describes how Disney has been popularly theorized, and my intent here is to bring this understanding forward in time, emphasizing the temporal element when Disney has tended to be thought of as spatially dominant by the press and scholars like Wasko.

One benefit of thinking through the corporate use of brand futurity is that, without abandoning spatial considerations, Disney’s digital strategy comes into clearer focus. A strategy structured by brand futurity seeks to bring together conceptions of future economic returns with an approach of corporate and cultural hegemony defined by benevolent ideals and values. The overall meaning is simple, however: especially within the context of the platform economy, assumptions about corporate behavior and storytelling are reassembled according to a logic of future-oriented worldbuilding, a temporal technopolitics tinged by moral, cultural, and economic progressivism. For example, and to make a brand-unfriendly but effective comparison, think of how common it is for professional porn productions to feature behind-the-scenes footage of the performers enjoying their jobs, often included as part of the product itself (Berg 2021). As a result, a consumer feels they can enjoy the content guilt-free. The Disney docuseries, giving behind-the-scenes looks at what certain workers do and how magical it is, serve a similar function, ensuring the future strength of the brand through a platformized representation of corporate benevolence, whereby Disney continues to be understood in the public consciousness as the world’s happiest place to work. Recalling Griffin et al.’s concept of organizational readiness, Disney+ subscribers are then essentially understood as possible future employees, and these series and this overall brand strategy are the first steps to training for Disney work expectations.

Regimes of Anticipation

Bob Chapek took over as Disney’s CEO on February 25, 2020, and with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, he soon focused on the one asset that remained relatively untouched by the public health situation: Disney+. By fall of 2020, Chapek announced a major reorganization of the company, giving streaming pride of place by focusing on developing productions intended for the platform, alongside a new distribution arm intended to emphasize the platform’s content pipeline (Flint 2020). Chapek joined Disney in 1993 in the home-entertainment division, eventually becoming a key architect behind the “Disney vault,” a highly successful business strategy that kept certain films off store shelves to create demand through artificial scarcity. This strategy counted on the temporal imperative to buy while you can, a creative corporate maneuver that wielded the psychological persuasion of the limited-time-only offer to the benefit of a company defined by making children happy—your child knows that failing to purchase The Jungle Book now, while out of the vault, will mean they won’t get to watch it for an unknown period of time.

Iger appointing Chapek as his successor surprised some, for Kevin Mayer, Chairman of the Direct-to-Consumer & International branch, was believed to be the frontrunner thanks to his role in spearheading the launch of Disney+ and in the acquisitions of Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox. Iger, though, saw something of value in Chapek’s effective business strategy over twenty-seven years with Disney, saying (The Walt Disney Company 2020a), “Throughout his career, Bob has led with integrity and conviction, always respecting Disney’s rich legacy while at the same time taking smart, innovative risks for the future.”

At Investor Day 2020, Chapek and other speakers repeatedly referenced how Disney+ is the only streaming platform that can offer the massively popular suite of content it contains. In addition to Marvel, Chapek said, “our other studios, with their own prolific collection of intellectual property, are developing new storylines and characters that will expand our popular franchises well into the future - and all of it will inevitably become part of Disney+, further enriching the unmatched offering of content available on the service,” (The Walt Disney Company 2020b, 7). As Iger puts it in the One Day at Disney episode:

What I want for everyone that works for us is not just success, but I want them to experience what I’ve experienced over the years and what people who have worked for The Walt Disney Company, including Walt Disney, have experienced over 96 years, and that is the impact of telling a great story on people all over the world. We know what the essence of a good story is, and what a good Disney story, and a good Marvel story, and Pixar, and Star Wars, I could go on and on.

“I could go on and on,” reads like a portentous statement that reveals the ongoing and perhaps neverending bench of properties that Disney has ownership of, and will surely continue to collect. The success of investing in the creation of this multiverse and maintaining its complex relationality appears to be paying off thus far as Disney+ hit 130 million worldwide subscribers by the end of 2021 (Weprin 2022), only two years after its launch, and the company projects to hit between 230 million and 260 million by late 2024 (for context, Netflix currently sits at around 220 million subscribers). As Ball (2021), a venture capitalist and former global Head of Strategy with Amazon Studios, has written, “By bringing all of its franchises and titles together into a single platform, Disney can better tell its stories and build love.” This monetization of love—much discussed in analyses of internet labor (Duffy 2017; Tokumitsu 2015)—can in the Disney case be better theorized, I argue, as a strong instance of brand futurity, whereby workers and consumers alike are brought into Disney’s capital-intensive mirage of a brighter tomorrow. These docuseries usefully demonstrate how this manifests for Disney as it increasingly funnels its strategy to Disney+.

Disney’s 2024 subscriber claim is a case of corporate “hot air,” which Hockenhull and Cohn (2021, 306) conceptualize “to denote the dynamic of hype as a performative phenomenon that is simultaneously vacuous and productive.” While these announcements may be based on little or no data, they not only impact shareholder perception but can also materially impact jobs at the company or other aspects of its multifarious business. This is related to other discourses around Disney and the production of sociotechnical imaginaries more generally. In 2021, Disney announced a new project called “Storyliving by Disney,” planned communities for Disney diehards offering housing, dining, shopping, and other curated experiences designed by Disney Imagineers. Regardless of whether these communities actually come to fruition, it is a reminder of Disney’s broad commitment to imagining new ways to provide a fully-Disneyfied life experience for its fans, recalling (but not mentioning) the failure of its previous attempt at this in Celebration, Florida in the 1990s (Ross 1999). This cyclical yet confident vision demonstrates a continuing brand strategy of future Disney cities. As Hockenhull and Cohn (316, emphasis added) argue, these financialized “futures position subjects temporally, through regimes of anticipation, hope, and speculation.” Adams et al. (2009, 254) argue that these regimes determine our relationship to the future in the present, creating a “moral imperative” to orient toward a particular future. This imperative is key, and characterizes Disney’s strategic approach to maintaining an “all-encompassing consumer environment,” (Anderson 1994, 18) its working goal since at least the 1950s made new once more in the digital era. On an annual basis to tie in with Disney+ Day, the company releases ads that showcase their upcoming slate of content, with titles like “The Future is Limitless” (2020) and “The Future is Bright” (2021)—to put it crudely, the company ties a limitless and bright future to the future consumption of their content. Disney, like other streaming platforms, makes speculative claims about its future success, but with a uniquely powerful notion of the presumed goodwill nature of wonder and awe perpetuated by its original programming on Disney+. Domination as reward.

Manufacturing Happiness

The Disney+ docuseries can be separated into two groups: overarching brand stories, and those focused on specific branches such as Pixar or Marvel. The former group, including One Day at Disney and Disney Insider, is focused on reinforcing a larger Disney mythology that brings forward the company’s nearly century-long tradition. In this way, they recall the beginning of Disney’s efforts in television, with the launch of the Disneyland series in 1954, hosted by Walt himself. As recounted by Anderson (1994), the show’s purpose was to promote the opening of the Disneyland park in Anaheim with behind-the-scenes footage of its development. Moreover, Walt Disney envisioned the series as “a vast, commercial web, a tangle of advertising and entertainment in which each Disney product—from the movie Snow White to a ride on Disneyland’s Matterhorn—promoted all Disney products. And television was the beacon that would draw the American public to the domain of Disney” (Anderson 1994, 18). Mirroring Walt’s ambitions of the 1950s television market as the medium for establishing a burgeoning media empire, these Disney+ series likewise give “recognizable symbolic form to Disney’s elaborate economic transformation,” (p. 19) only in this case reflecting the company’s digital expansionism. As with Disneyland, these series are a mishmash of sneak peeks, parks footage, and behind-the-scenes looks at various projects. Now, with an expanded library of intellectual property, the shows are able to make even more stops from across the corporation, from bringing the Muppets to the Haunted Mansion to a look at Pixar’s Onward followed by a sneak peek at the Hulu production of Little Fires Everywhere. Just as Disneyland “[made] it possible for the first time to unite the disparate realms of the Disney empire,” (p. 19) the Disney+ series seek to promote brand continuity across all corporate products and divisions.

In addition, despite the interest both eras have in depicting behind-the-scenes work, there remains no real engagement with labor conditions or relations at the company, despite the lavish attention paid to what the workers create and their supposed indispensability to the smiles put on consumer faces, only given voice when it is to share in the happiness of their employment. My analysis here is indebted to Caldwell’s (2008) landmark book Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television, which describes the importance for scholars to learn from the entertainment industry’s habitual self-scrutiny through behind-the-scenes content and how below-the-line workers understand what they do. As such, Anderson (1994, 24) writes, “Disney’s depiction of the production process was selective; it ignored the economics of filmmaking in favor of focusing on the studio’s technical accomplishments.” Instead, the window given into the production process is intended to highlight the ingenuity of Disney’s craftspeople, which, over all else, encourages viewers to ultimately see the finished film, park ride, or other product to complete the experience introduced in the series. Wasko (2001 [2020], 104) explains how Disney’s employees are kept under tight control and, “despite the techniques that some employees use to find their own pleasures and satisfaction in their work, the company usually gets what it wants.” The more specific docuseries, including Inside Pixar, Behind the Attraction, and Marvel Studios: Assembled, serve to further the reach of this brand continuity, showcasing the technical abilities of each property branch (in animation, theme park design, visual effects, etc.) while obscuring the actual labor of the workers involved and guiding viewers toward further passive consumption. By focusing on worker ebullience and the resulting spectacles, these shows delimit the brand’s overall willingness to acknowledge that the behind-the-scenes sneak peeks they valorize and promote are nevertheless beholden to numerous below-the-line employees working for Disney simply because they’re one of the largest employers in states like Florida and California. As the aforementioned “Working for the Mouse” employee survey notes, 68 percent reported being food insecure and over half of those who rent their housing called it “overcrowded” (Dreier). This erasure of labor and the lived realities of tens of thousands of Disney employees, then, helps make the futurity of Disney possible by mythologizing “Disney work” in ways that befit a speculative fantasy of a branded lifeworld experience without acknowledging labor as a potential exploitative wrinkle in the fabric—Disney’s goodness seems inevitable and eternal, then, as people will always want to work for the world’s happiness factory.

Meanwhile, One Day at Disney’s visits with various Disney employees, or cast members, ostensibly put a spotlight on the workers, giving viewers a brief window into their lives as laborers. It is simple enough to point out the self-serving quality of this exercise, tying employment with Disney to a diversity of identity and experience and an overarching social responsibility that the company fulfills through the satisfaction it gives its workers. Beyond this, it qualifies as a savvy strategic method of using brand futurity to align the happiness within what is created and who creates it, and therefore with the company and the platform itself. These slippages matter, as the technology of the streaming platform allows for and encourages these rhetorical and affective synergies across properties and company branches. Brand futurity, then, is a way to make sense of a digital repository of consumable content with a shared core goal of communicating Disney’s assured positive placement in the future of media. To be clear, this is distinct from a more traditional and presentist understanding of branding, based on drawing in customers now. Instead, a strategy of brand futurity, befitting the demands of a platform economy, imagines the future as the primary site of meaning-making and corporate legacy.

Like most streaming platforms, Disney+ does not release viewership data, so it is unclear how popular its docuseries are. My argument is not based on an assumption that Disney fans are watching these shows en masse—they very well may be unpopular, but they serve a separate function as subjects of analysis for how the company sees itself and what it offers to the future. Telotte (2008, 18) convincingly argues that Disney documentaries and other content showing behind-the-scenes technology show “Disney’s corporate attitude towards the technological and even celebrate its technological achievements, rather uncritically suggesting what our own attitudes towards the technological might be.” Work and labor matter here, as depicted in these brand-managing documentaries, as a nexus between the ongoing production of the Disney legacy in the present, and into the future. For this journal, Levine (2005, 72) wrote about the synergistic power of Disney, with the Lifetime Television documentary series Weddings of a Lifetime as a case study, a show which “not only typifies media industry strategies in an age of conglomeration but also evidences the complex textual meanings produced through such institutional practices.” For Levine (2005, 72, 86), this blurs any “pretensions to ‘reality’” which become further fractured, and indeed “the fantasy images are so compelling because they are supposed to be real.”

Disney’s brand concerns extend to its digital interface, as Disney+ is organized, as of summer 2022, according to sectors, as you’re invited from the home page (Figure 1) to explore tabs devoted to Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, or Star (which holds 20th Century Fox content).¹ Perusing these offerings, the platform encourages engaging with particular Disney products according to prominence and repetition, often with the same program showing up in different segments (New to Disney+, Recommended For You, etc.). There are original Simpsons shorts that pay tribute to Disney marquee brands, including Maggie Simpson in The Force Awakens From Its Nap and The Simpsons in Plusaversary, the latter released on #DisneyPlusDay in 2021 and featuring the Simpson family alongside characters from throughout the Disney roster. Maleficent, for instance, bars Homer’s entry to Moe’s Tavern and says, “I’m sorry, you don’t seem to be one of us,” holding up a tablet with the logos for Disney, Pixar, ABC, FX, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Hulu, National Geographic, 20th Century Fox, and ESPN. Later, Lisa sings, “Streaming’s a dream for Disney, all content in one place.” There are other shorts featuring Olaf, the snowman in the Frozen films, called Olaf Presents, retelling a variety of classic Disney stories like The Lion King. The opening animation for Disney Insider is a good example of this brand synergy, beginning at a cartoonist’s table, careening through a Disneyland-style theme park with icons for the company’s many properties, from the Avengers tower to the Millennium Falcon, from Pixar Studios to the ABC building, from the Disney Animation Studios building to the National Geographic rectangular logo floating in place. At every turn, the streaming platform has found ways to combine its intellectual property to encourage cross-property engagement and to keep viewers within this world of supposedly endless wonder. As the streaming market has intensified with greater competition, Disney appears to be betting on their vast libraries of ever-expanding brands to differentiate their product for subscribers, with the iconic core brand as the vibrating nucleus.

Figure 1.

Disney+ home page, with tabs for each major brand.

The anticipatory regime of the platform, with the obfuscation of Disneyfied labor and an organizational structure around acquisitional might, exhibits a corporate commitment to brand futurity that positions Disney as the company to bring about a better world of consumption and happiness for all. Here we should again recall Disney’s first foray into television, the Disneyland series hosted by Walt in the 1950s. By paying close attention to Disney history, Anderson (1994, 23) writes, “the determination to recycle the Disney library shaped the series during its early seasons, making Disneyland an electronic museum devoted to the studio’s artistic achievements.” The Disney+ docuseries are the successors to this strategy, housed as they are in an actual “electronic museum” devoted to the Disney legacy as initiator of a future likewise defined by Disney. As variously centered on ecstatic longtime employees, upcoming brand spectacles, or the ease of cross-property travel, these shows not only build hype for Disney products across its multiverse but they also contribute to the cultivation of a collective imaginary that Disney+ seeks to impose on its subscribers and future workers. If nothing else, what has changed between the 1950s and now is this move from addressing consumers to subscribers. Considering Disney as future-oriented is inevitably tied to particular historical relationships to branding, (trans)media, intellectual property, and legacy, its building and its maintenance. With an understanding of Disney+ as the culmination of this project, the influence of this company in the collective imaginary takes clearer shape.

This imaginary, this story, is where value is located, and these docuseries serve a particular function in this process, not only inviting users to experience the achievements of the company’s happy workers, but also certifying the collective cultural memory of the company as the past and future of happiness. As The Imagineering Story explains, “Creating happiness is hard work.” As One Day at Disney and Disney Insider remind us, this is a strategy that cuts across the entire conglomerate, matching Wasko’s (2001 [2020], 262) concluding argument that the company has turned to exploiting technological development alongside the promotion of social responsibility and corporate goodness. The One Day at Disney episode featuring Lucasfilm Events senior manager Este Meza is a case-in-point, repeatedly cutting to shots of overjoyed crowds, hooting and hollering, as Meza states that seeing the effect of his work “really reaffirms the positive aspects of humanity.” Mythologized as the Happiness Factory, Disney and the curation of this imaginary is tightly controlled and expressed on Disney+, the one-stop shop for media consumers in the streaming age and beyond.

Conclusion

The corporate strategy of Disney as I’ve described it is a vision of a future that is all-Disney, all the time, and its users are trained to see this as a utopia, the utopia, that they desire. It is the gateway to happiness. In this way, legacy media articulates its adaptability to the streaming market, whereby the development of new futures nevertheless align with (or are made to align with) long-standing company values and lore, with the welcome addition of new properties and technologies. By articulating the concept of brand futurity, this article has demonstrated this form of corporate strategy as a useful framework for understanding narratives of value and ownership over the future in the digital age—in this case, a future not unlike the one imagined in Cloud Atlas (Mitchell 2004), where all films are called “disneys” by the year 2144. . .if not sooner.

It is instructive for critical cultural studies scholars to continue thinking through specific models of futurity. Media companies are invested heavily in playing a part in how the future will unfold, which makes it imperative on us to provide analysis of what they create alongside how their operations are narrativized and discursively and materially enacted. Disney may be a particularly potent example of how brand futurity wields power, influence, and cultural sovereignty, but it offers scholars a useful model for appreciating the competing strategies for owning the future.

Disney+ is the surest example yet of the dedication the company has to this strategy for a rapidly transforming digital economy and increasingly competitive media industry, a suite of content with constant reminders, including its original documentary series, of just what Disney should mean to you. As Kristina Dewberry, an Imagineering construction manager at Disneyland showcased in an episode of One Day at Disney, knocks on a spaceship crafted for the Star Wars-themed Galaxy’s Edge park project, she says with confidence, “This. . .this is forever.” That’s the idea.

Author Biography

Jake Pitre is a PhD candidate at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the lab coordinator with The Platform Lab, a research group dedicated to the study of platforms and their global impacts. He has been published in journals including Transformative Works and Cultures, New Media & Society, and Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images, as well as in the edited collection Representation in Steven Universe (2020).