Does the failure of Disney’s ‘solarpunk movie’ mean our genre is doomed to remain niche?
With its strong environmental message, diverse representation and multimillion-dollar budget, many thought Disney’s 2022 film Strange World would take solarpunk mainstream. That hope was short-lived.
This film did so poorly it is estimated to have lost Disney $197 million. This made it the worst performing film of 2022 and one of the biggest box office flops of all time.
Does this disastrous commercial performance mean that solarpunk will never reach a wider audience? Will it always be fringe? We explore the film and look at some of the explanations for why it did so badly to find out.
If anyone is disappointed about Strange World turning out awful and looking for a good movie with that solarpunk feel, try The Wild Robot. Not an ad, I just liked it a lot. If you liked The Iron Giant you will definitely like this too.
I just saw the title and assumed it was talking about The Wild Robot and was confused, the movie did really well.
The plot point that listening to animal sounds will decode a generative grammar is obviously fantastical, and it’s a relatively basic fish out of water/found family story. But the world hinted at taking place in the background is absolutely fascinating. Extreme weather events on a disrupted planet, large-scale rewilding, advanced robotics in the service of agriculture, and geodesic biospheres drop into the story without exposition or explanation. Perhaps it gets away with its radical messaging because it remains in the subtext.
I might be reading into the subtext a bit too much, but I got the impression that the human society shown in the background was ecofascist. Hear me out, starting with the large-scale rewilding. That is a process that would require the displacement of millions (perhaps billions) of people from their homes. Whether that was driven by climate change or forced migration we don’t know, but the implications are fairly grim. In addition, the geodesic dome we see doesn’t contain a biosphere, but a monoculture carefully maintained by robots complete with over-the-top security robots for dealing with “pests,” and the helper robot commercial we see (which heavily implies a capitalist society) shows a city with well-mowed grass lawns and trimmed hedges. From this it seems that humans didn’t engage in regenerative practices, but rather allowed nature to reclaim parts of the world on its’ own. This shows a humanity that has not embraced nature, but rather fully separated themselves from it.
This is a valid reading of the subtext. It puts the amoral and implacable collector bot in a more appropriate context as well.
It still has the solarpunk message that the modern world is headed for disaster and we will be forced to change whether we are prepared for it or not, and it doesn’t celebrate the authoritarian aspects of the human society that serves as the underlying antagonist.