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Why Disney Struggle with Gen Z Men | The Backdrop (Patreon)

Published:
2025-09-09 15:06:40
Imported:
2026-06

Content

This week's episode of The Backdrop is now available!

Files

Why Disney Struggle with Gen Z Men | The Backdrop

Disney has a history of repeated behavior that never turns out well for the company. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup Second Wind Merch: https://store.dftba.com/collections/second-wind https://sharkrobot.com/collections/second-wind

Comments

Ryallen

The funny thing is that Disney did, in fact, appeal to young men (among others) when they bought Marvel, they made more money than ever and created the MCU which shaped the cinematic landscape we now exist in, for better or worse. They don't need to keep trying to appeal to the young male demographic, they already are. They just need to do it better, not that they're going to stop making Marvel movies. As for their desire to appeal to the male demographic specifically, I don't really think they can. In theory, Marvel was the answer to that but the appeal of those films is a lot broader than one could really describe on paper. Sure, super heroes are more masculine than princesses are, but I wouldn't say that superheroes are only for boys. Marvel certainly courted the male demographic a lot more towards the beginning of the MCU but that's not really the case anymore, there are a good number of female superheroes now that I think it's a lot more mixed. Star Wars is the same way, it started out with only a couple of female characters then they added more and more and now some of their biggest names in the franchise are female. It's still biased towards men but there's plenty of appeal for women too. Tron would probably end up the same way, appealing to males starting out then broaden its horizons as it gets further along

Darren Mooney

A lot of puns. This was a fun one to record, because it was very information-dense, but I could count on Jesse to have fun with it.

Darren Mooney

I think it's also just an age thing. If you were a fan of the MCU when it launched, you're in your thirties now. You're not going to the cinema. And if you weren't? Well, why would you want your parents' hand-me-down leftovers? Same thing with "Star Wars." When the prequels came out, older fans complained they were "too different", in style, in tone, in content. The most prominent returning actor was Ian McDiarmid. But that allowed the kids to make those movies their own, which isn't the case with the sequels, when grandpa Luke or Han is always gonna show up and remind you that this franchise always belonged to your dad - or even his dad. You have to grow new properties. There's a sweet spot around ten years into a franchise for a nostalgic conclusion - "Endgame" hit it, "Guardians 3" hit it, "Minions: Rise of Gru" hit it, "The Conjuring 4" hit it, "John Wick 4" hit it - where you have an audience who were young enough to see the early films and are now in a place where they want to say goodbye and move on. The key is to have crop rotation, so that there's another batch of franchises that are only six or seven years old, and a few more that are three or four years old, so you can cycle through them. As opposed to always returning to the same well.

Ryallen

That is exactly how I feel about all these nostalgic throwback movies like Star Wars, Alien, Indiana Jones, and the like. Blade Runner 2049 was the only one I was interested in and that was mostly because people told me it was good regardless, everything else seems like I'd have to have grown up on their predecessors to enjoy them and the only thing I was raised on was Disney thanks to my mom

Empo

The trouble with appealing to a demographic spesifically, is that the appeal is in direct competition to everything else that is appealing to that demographic. Going to the movies takes time out of ones day, same as every other distraction. So it needs to be worth going there instead of elsewhere. And this is spesifically in relation to toys and merch sold based upon the products. the boys that Disney is trying to appeal to probably won't go out of their way to buy toys from the movies they see if they spend their time on video games or with friends. Especially not in the age group they have aimed for before. And if they are aiming to sell toys to children, then they need to make movies where they are not in direct competition on whom have the right to sell those toys. Like Nintendo. (And thankfully, Moomins are still not up for sale for Disney to exploit).

Swift Justice

There's a lot to be said about the inherent problems with Disney's approach, but the mention of crop rotation does remind me; all the reboots and restarts of superhero franchises at least meant that they'd have a clean slate every few years, but now with the MCU being almost two decades old, it has the similar problem where they end up with more nostalgic throwbacks than actual new things, and nearly all the popular characters are dead or retired. And attempts to introduce newer characters struggle to answer the audience's question 'Why should we care?'

Swift Justice

That Disney's big attempts to reach the young male demographic nearly always involve IP that's literally almost a hundred years old and considered a footnote in the history of the genre (Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, The Lone Ranger) feels like an indication that despite all their efforts they seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how to do what they're trying to do. Yeah, they were famous and influential in their day, but that was a long goddamn time ago and the names carry no real weight with anyone under 50. Maybe the line of thinking is that Disney's gotten success out of fairy tales and old stories and myths (see again Hercules) that are hundreds to thousands of years old, but those are ones that actually have name recognition because people never stopped reading them to their kids. I suppose looking at it that way, buying out Marvel and Star Wars seems like a logical solution there; acquire an IP that's still active and relevant and just do that. Though then they seem to be running into the problem of not really knowing what to do with it, as the MCU seems to have stagnated and the Star Wars sequels became a clusterfuck to the point where the most successful Disney Star Wars stuff is all completely unrelated to them and does not actively acknowledge them. It's almost like Disney simply doesn't understand how this whole genre is supposed to work, it's not in their existing library of formulas and marketing tactics. ...except, they HAVE done it before! The whole Disney Afternoon, DuckTales, Gargoyles, Kim Possible, Gravity Falls, they spent years making a bunch of shows that appealed to exactly the demographic they say they want so bad, and all but actively refuse to acknowledge it! There seems to be some incredible internal snobbery between the movie and TV divisions in the company, which is some incredibly arbitrary blinkers, even if it's not exactly uncommon for Hollywood. Anime is a completely different story, though. In short, Disney seems to be actively refusing to learn any lessons from their successes as well as their failures. Also on the note of new-to-cinemas franchises like Mario and Minecraft, the Sonic the Hedgehog movies probably shouldn't be discounted either, I don't think they're on the same level of blockbuster success but they're clearly doing quite well and apparently extremely popular with kids.

Swift Justice

Though that hasn't stopped entire industries from deciding to appeal almost exclusively to a single demographic for years on end, mind. Like the 00s and 10s where 90% of the video game industry seemed to decide the only audience worth acknowledging was the male 18-25 'Spike TV demographic' and everything else was relegated to the fringes, where every single game had to be a brown shooter.

jombilywobbily

To think it's called "Star Wars", a franchise that spans thousands of years if you cherry pick from the EU, where the prequels and OT established a GALACTIC EMPIRE and yet they come back to the same last names. Obviously, "Skeleton Crew" doesn't, but it's a throwback to "Goonies" and things like that so the style and nostalgia used by the graverobbers also plays a pivotal role. As I understand it, galaxies are pretty big. Even in-universe, "Andor", Kathleen Kennedy's pet project that somehow got past everyone else in the boardroom, digs deeper in the places we are familiar with and most of the people watching it not doing so for their nostalgia for "The Battle of Algiers"...that is a curve ball that was very much worth it and pure creativity within the constraints of having to move this dude to become part of a movement against a giant ball in space.

Tim Wilson

I know exactly one person who even recognises the new Tron movie was announced, and it’s because she’s inexplicably still attracted to Jared Leto. Also thinks the first suicide squad wasn’t awful as well so my hopes for a fourth tron film (considering that I didn’t remember there was a third) are… low.

William Alexander

This may be my favorite episode of the Backdrop. I love the big picture concept and analysis applied to a broader, relevant, and underdiscussed topic.

Daniel

I think you hit it on the head. I think a deeper part of it has something to do with the human psyche. I'm 40 now, and with day to day adult responsibilities. I'm careful when it comes to what media I consume. I like to rewatch movies that I enjoyed in my formative years. I may watch Empire Strikes Back, or Lethal Weapon, or Aliens, or maybe one of the low budget Lundgren films. It's part nostalgia, but I like to think of it more as comfort food. These are the movies I enjoy, and I always get a kick out of seeing them again. It's the same with music, and video games. I still enjoy new stuff, but not as often as the older things. I still replay the Mass Effect trilogy at least every 2 years, and often revisit the old PSX Resident Evils. If we take your John Wick example, you are right. It's a franchise that is over. If they release a new one I may see it eventually, but I'd be fine with just rewatching the first one. Same if they start a ballerina series spinoff. I'm not very interested, and I doubt younger generations will be excited to have to watch 5 movies their dad always talks about before going into it. I'd still love to see new franchises take hold. I think sometimes writers forget you can tell the same story, just do it in a different way with interesting characters.

Darren Mooney

Thank you. I want to shout out Jesse's fantastic edit.

JR

This seems to be how a video editor passive-agressively tells the script editor their annoyance with the writer... Let's hope he gets the former to make the latter pivot! (Not really saying it was like this here - I get the joke have smiled at it and feel in on it.)