We know that Disney acquired Fox for $52.4 billion. We also know that Disney payed $4 billion to acquire Marvel.
They certainly picked up a lot of intellectual property for their $56 billion… But, to those who think those purchases were simply to fill Disney+ with content, you might have another think coming… Disney is too much of a forward-thinking company to be so caught up in the past!
Sure, the Disney of yesteryear might have loved to have all of those story lines in their arsenal, since Disney Imagineers of the past based theme park attractions and assorted campaigns on linear storytelling – essentially, book reports of films that were popular in the past. The classic Fantasyland rides are prime examples of this – in which the guest sits in a small buggy and drives through life-sized dioramas that tell the exact story of Peter Pan, Snow White and Pinocchio.
But when was the last time Disney created a ride using linear story telling? Today’s attractions are based on immersive storytelling that doesn’t use any past storylines. Visit the Star Wars or Marvel lands in Disney theme parks and tell me whether you recognize any storylines from your favorite films. Rather, today’s attractions use the immersive settings of these pieces of intellectual property, but tell a completely new story! That story, often doesn’t exist until the visitor enters the attraction. The story changes with each interaction.
Disney certainly filled the Disney+ app with tv shows and movies from the Fox and Marvel past, but how will that help them in the future, when rides don’t tell past stories? How will that help them when the Metaverse is here (whatever that means…)? How will it help them with the next generation of story consumers who want to make their own story rather than watch someone else’s?
Ironically, Disney didn’t acquire Fox and Marvel for their stories – it acquired them for those stories yet to be written!
We have a bright future to look forward to in which “movies” will function more like video games than like films of the 20th century. Exciting, right?
We know that storytelling is key to effective nonprofit fundraising. There are plenty of books on the topic. But what story are we really supposed to be telling? And how can we do that when we know that the future of storytelling isn’t that a writer will sit in their office deciding what happens, but rather, a video game designer creates a world for us to interact in?
As a nonprofit Imagineer, this is the question you need to ask yourself.
This is the time to get ahead of the curve and start mapping out your immersive universes for your supporters to build their own stories! What does that mean? I don’t know. Do you?
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