Disney Spent $15 Billion To Limit Their Audience

Over the last decade, Disney has spent $15 billion to recapture the market they once had a stranglehold on: children. Purchasing Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm allowed the company to acquire a massive mix of current popular entertainment and fervent parental nostalgia, and control the dominating forces of franchise entertainment. The empire has been rebuilt, but can it last when it continues to gender divide children and limit their audience?

When Disney bought these companies, they bought thousands of characters, from Buzz Lightyear to Luke Skywalker to Iron Man, and control over massive Hollywood franchises. Marvel has years of potential blockbuster content mapped out, and even more live action television shows from Agents of SHIELD to the upcoming Iron Fist. Though Star Wars’ prequels are reviled, the Force is brewing again with a new trilogy and a whole series of films and off-shoots.

All eyes are set to the future — so much so that Avengers: Age of Ultron barely reached screens before attention turned to Captain America: Civil War — but practices are staunchly set in the past and willfully blind to the realities of the present.

The arrival of the first Avengers movie marketed “Be a Hero” to boys and “I Need a Hero” to girls, while completely exempting Black Widow from certain merchandise. Disney’s already pushing products for the upcoming Star Wars films, but are excluding Princess Leia from action figures, and popular characters from its Star Wars: Rebels line. Gamora, likewise, was deleted from Guardians of the Galaxy products. With Age of Ultron, Black Widow is not only removed from myriad team shots and merchandise, but from her very own scenes. Instead of marketing Black Widow on her motorcycle, Hasbro offers Captain America and Iron Man.

What was once implicit is now explicit. Instead of pondering the reasoning behind creative decisions that fail to include women, fans are greeted with flagrant disinterest in the diversity these franchises already have and the money they could make from them. According to a former Marvel employee quoting her supervisor, the company’s desired demographic has no girls because “that’s not why Disney bought us. They already have the girls’ market on lockdown.” The piece goes on to explain, “Disney bought Marvel and Lucasfilm because they wanted to access the male market. To achieve this goal, they allocate less to Marvel’s female demo, and even less to a unisex one.”

Disney spent a staggering $15 billion to expand its hold on the market, only to actively narrow it, limiting their reach and angering the consumers they should be serving: almost half of the 24 million people who identify as comic fans on Facebook are female, and women make up 52% of moviegoers. These empires rely on a certain amount of good faith that diversification is on the way to serve the changing demographics of consumers — faith that’s instantly destroyed by attitudes that trump gender division over basic business sense.

Now everyone from casual consumers to celebrities starring in these vehicles publicly criticize the removal of female characters from official merchandise. Mark Ruffalo lamented the lack of Black Widow merchandise available for his daughters and nieces, while Clark Gregg linked to a petition for Black Widow to be added to a pack of Avengers action figures. This week, Colin Hanks shared a story about making his daughter a Star Wars fan for May 4, only to take her to a toy store where light sabers were only available in the boys’ section, and the only available Leia toy was “Slave Leia,” with a chain hanging from her neck.

There are, of course, many companies involved in these franchises, from Disney, to subsidiaries like Marvel, to the toy companies like Hasbro , to the toy stores that categorize and stock the merchandise. It’s a messy system that allows blame to be scattered and ultimately ignored. But the ultimate responsibilities lay with the owners of the brand and the plans they have for them. If Disney wanted to embrace the diverse fandom these franchises and characters have, they’d push for all of their consumers to be well-served. But at the very least, as a business interested in making money, they’d insist that their products accurately depict the brands they’re selling, and not let old-school gender division hurt the bottom line and anger their audience.

In 2011, Brand Driven Digital published a piece on eight innovation lessons we can learn from Walt Disney and his life. They include “turn convention on its head,” “diversify,” “keep moving forward,” and finally, “nothing matters more than the community you serve.” Modern Disney is doing the opposite. They are clinging desperately to an old marketing system that doesn’t reflect today’s numbers, while removing fan favorites from their product lines and angering the very community they’re supposed to serve.

With each new creative step, their subsidiaries’ creative content stresses diversity, from the new cast of Star Wars, to the development of a Captain Marvel movie, to the next wave of Avengers. But if they’re not prepared to offer their customers the most basic service — products that reflect the ideas and heroes on-screen — their $15 billion trek to supremacy could become $15 billion trek to destruction.