Did Disney intentionally botch the marketing strategy for its new film with a gay lead?

Perhaps the biggest story to come out of what was by all accounts a disastrous Thanksgiving Weekend at the box office was the failure of Disney Animation’s Strange World.

To recap: The family sci-fi adventure film premiered on what is traditionally a stellar weekend for Disney’s animated fare. But according to Variety, Strange World brought in just $18.6 million over the five-day holiday weekend. Given its reported $180 million production cost, plus marketing costs, the film is projected to lose around $100 million.

Notably, Strange World is the first Disney animated film to feature a gay lead character. Out comedian and actor Jaboukie Young-White voices out teen Ethan, the youngest member of the film’s family of adventurers. Ahead of its release, right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro railed against Disney’s supposed “gay agenda” on Twitter, while anti-LGBTQ groups like One Million Moms demanded one of their typical boycotts.

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Right-wing outlets like The National Review have been quick to note the film’s inclusion of an openly gay character in their coverage of its failure at the box office, while some film critics and fans have fretted that Disney would blame the flop on the character.

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Disney is 100% going to blame STRANGE WORLD's inevitable bad box office on the fact that there's an openly gay character in the movie when in reality, it's going to flop because they didn't market it at all. They'll use this as an excuse to not have queer rep ever again. pic.twitter.com/diD7It4Bk4

— Jordan Woodson #GlassOnionSweep (@jordanjwoodson) November 17, 2022

Calling it now that #StrangeWorld vastly underperforms and the blame falls on queer representation and not the near total lack of marketing. Disney didn’t even try to help this one. pic.twitter.com/4RwNlgBCfk

— Council of Geeks (@councilofgeeks) November 24, 2022

Disney sabotaged Strange World just like they did Treasure Planet. Release a summer movie in the winter, sandwich it between two much bigger movies, barely market it, and use its box office failure as an excuse to not do hand-drawn animation- I mean diversity anymore.

— Nick Anderson, creator of Planet Ripple (@NickOnRipple) November 30, 2022

But did Strange World really flop because it featured a gay lead? No doubt some conservative and anti-LGBTQ parents refused to take their kids to see the film, which received mostly positive reviews. But industry coverage of its disappointing box office returns tells a different story.

First of all, as pretty much all of the trade publications have reported, this was a particularly bad Thanksgiving weekend for movie theaters. As AV Club notes, “over the three-day weekend, general box-office numbers only hit $95 million—an abysmal plummet from the same weekend’s 2019 and 2018 numbers ($181 million and $216 million, respectively).”

Disney also seems to have fumbled the film’s promotion. Despite speculation about the film’s marketing costs, as Vulture points out, there were no Happy Meal toys, no pop song from the film’s soundtrack to gin up enthusiasm, and few if any subway ads. According to Screen Rant, much of the marketing didn’t even take place until shortly before the film’s release, while Slash Film and others have noted that Disney failed to convey what Strange World was actually about.

Many fans on Twitter have questioned whether those missteps were intentional.

There is no way that Disney – one of the biggest companies on earth, with all the marketing resources at their disposal – forgot to market #StrangeWorld, a film with a prominent gay character.

They knew exactly what they were doing.

— Rachael Eyre (@Alrightpunk) November 28, 2022

It really shows Disney's true colors that they would do everything in their power to promote cash grab remakes of their old movies but not promote Strange World until a week before release and then claim "Oh we tried to make a gay movie but nobody watched it. :( " pic.twitter.com/R93fFIY7OD

— Dark Brandon