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.
The process of going “mainstream” is typically when the political ambitions of the movement are stripped away while the aesthetics become defanged and made ‘appropriate’ for popular consumption. This isn’t a victory for a counter culture movement, it’s capitalism wearing a corpse of another ideology as a fashion statement.
For example, wearing an Indian warrior costume to a dress-up party doesn’t get first nations any closer to getting their land back.