That speaks to some serious developmental issues.
Star Wars is perfect example of it. Star Wars is now repetitive genre like police procedural or western except Disney owns it.
With few exceptions they have successfully frozen the franchise and just do the same things over and over again. Why change it as long as it makes money.The postures, scenes, phrases, characters, are done with constant repeat and minimal variation. "I've got a bad feeling about this" appears in every single Star Wars movie in some form. live action and animation series have it. They are not shy about it, they even make "I have a really good feeling about this!" jest once.
One of the ads was just a shot of the burned-out Darth Vader mask and nothing else - no tagline or logo or any other text that it was about a Star Wars movie.
It's as if the marketers were saying to their audience "you already know what we mean, right? We understand each other..."
They place an enormous trust in the cultural symbols they bought.
The amount of information that the average fan retains about Star Wars is mind boggling, compared to their, say, knowledge of world geography.
I am also in awe of sports fans in a similar way. They command large swaths of dry, boring information such as world series stats with great enthusiasm.
40 years ago, there was a dairy that made ice cream, and sold it in the summers on the side of the building. We'd go there as kids, line around the block, everyone loved it and it was a very popular and loved place.
It eventually burned down, the company stopped production, you know how it goes.
About ten years ago, someone built a clone of the old dairy's neon sign, rented a new building, and served generic hand-dipped ice cream (blue bunny brand?)
It's just regular ice cream. But they have the sign. And they can charge $8 an ice cream cone, and people line up just like they used to. Ridiculous.
The old company made a mistake by not rebuilding, there was demand for ice cream at that location and somebody met that demand. Now people can eat ice cream under an old timey sign like they want to, good for them.
Disney Adults are fucking weird and I’m not ashamed about saying it.
There's a pizza place by me called "slice of the 80's" that has tacky vaguely 80-s feeling styling.
Surprisingly its been around for over 15 years and not the flash in a pan pizza shop that tends to come and go. Heck, I dont even think its very good, yet it has survived.
Instead, they seem to have largely settled on the Pixar style for "new" IPs, while mechanically producing live-action remakes for every classic.
I don't really get the strategy.
It's no surprise they let their own brands completely languish.
They risk alienating fans (and, often, do so-alienate them) way too often to put them in this category, I think, and specifically for the reason of having failed to play it safe and target nostalgia.
Blizzard on the other end hasn't made anything that was not nostalgia farming for a decade. And besides Overwatch you have nothing new in this century. That's a lot for a company that's barely 30 years old…
The second last time Blizzard launched a new franchise, Mulan had just been released…
Coca-Cola has a much larger market cap than Disney, and the Coca-Cola brand is very intentionally a nostalgia-driven, golden age, remember the good times brand.
Of course in the current political situation I would never return to Florida, and Disneyland is much smaller.