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.
I don’t know how well remembered this is but big media execs latched on to the aesthetic of cyberpunk in the 90s and overused it so clumsily they killed the entire genre for over a decade. They stripped any punk message and turned it into another extreeeeem joke of the era.
Solarpunk needs more time to find it’s feet and build a body of work that embodies it’s values. So I’d much rather the big companies piss off for now rather than successfully define what it’s about for mass audiences.