Quick! Name the last great Disney princess! Before you respond, let me tie one hand behind your back first. You can’t name Elsa or Anna from Frozen. Instead, you have to pick someone before them. The rules of this exercise are fairly simple. It has to be someone that can sell a vast amount of merchandise while appealing to a broad range of demographics. In other words, it needs to be somebody from Disney movies. That rules out recent television staples such as Sofia the First.
What’s your answer? Did you choose Merida, Rapunzel, or Tiana? All of them are viable responses yet their impact on The Walt Disney Company’s Parks and Resorts division is minimal. Sure, Meet and Greets are available, and you’ll notice them during park parades. To date, none of them has a ride named after them, which reduces their overall theme park footprint.
Enter Frozen
Even Mulan and Pocahontas lack this sort of presence. That means no Disney princess has directly impacted the Parks and Resorts part of the business since the early 1990s (!). Given this information, it’s easy to understand why the company was slow to react to an amazing turning point. The release of their latest animated masterpiece, Frozen, in November of 2013 was obviously significant to the company; however, no one involved with the project could have anticipated what happened next.
Frozen evolved from an upbeat tale of sisterly love into the signature Disney intellectual property for women, and the escalation occurred in only a year. The entire series of events started innocently enough. Walt Disney Pictures promoted Frozen the same way they’d marketed co-director Jennifer Lee’s previous film, Wreck-It Ralph. They’d already done something unusual for the company, though. Lee had only co-written the videogame-based story of her prior project.
With Frozen, Lee became the first female director for a Disney animated film. Her bosses could tell she had a uniquely female point-of-view that attracted women, who were already a bread-and-butter demographic for the company.
Still, Disney didn’t go all-in on Frozen during its early days. Sure, they slotted it during one of the most lucrative box office periods on the calendar, Thanksgiving week, but they didn’t saturate their television programs with ads the way they have more recently for titles such as Inside Out, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, or even Ant-Man. Their approach was modest, which makes the performance of Frozen all the more noteworthy. The film earned $90.6 million during its first week in wide release. For comparison, Wreck-It Ralph needed 10 days to reach that total.
An Instant Classic
Image: Disney
Disney started to appreciate that they had something special on their hands at this point. It received an 89 percent Fresh Rating at Rotten Tomatoes. More importantly, it received a Cinemascore of A+, something that fewer than five films a year manage on average. In the relatively short period of five weeks, the corporation recognized that they had badly missed the mark.
They’d anticipated a blockbuster hit on the level of Tangled, their wonderful 2010 retelling of the Rapunzel fairytale. That film grossed less than $600 million worldwide. Frozen reached $500 million by the end of 2013. It would go on to become the most popular animated film of all-time with worldwide box office of approximately $1.3 billion, more than twice what Tangled made. Disney had built their holiday merchandising program around the sales model for Brave. Oops.
Have you checked eBay?
Image: Disney
In late 2013, everyone wanted a piece of Frozen. Disney couldn’t satisfy their needs. They grew so frustrated over the way that their retailers struggled with this issue that for the first time since Disneyland opened, they’re switching Princess doll manufacturers from Mattel to Hasbro. They acknowledged customer dissatisfaction and took steps to meet the almost incomprehensible demand for Frozen.
Then, the company overcompensated in historic fashion by turning 2014 into the unofficial year of Frozen at Disney theme parks. Anyone who visited one of these places in 2014 knows what I mean. The fun actually began a week early when ABC aired their annual Disney parade. It featured a performance of Let It Go by Demi Lovato that dazzled onlookers. Amusingly, Disney filmed the concert two weeks prior to the movie’s release, yet the crowd reaction identified that this song would be a blockbuster. Seriously, you can’t even hear her due to this cheering in this clip.
It’d be easier to meet the President and LeBron James
With anecdotal and empirical evidence all supporting the conclusion that people loved everything Frozen, Disney did what they could to adapt on the fly. They’d always planned to have Anna and Elsa host a Meet and Greet at the Norway Pavilion. It was to last for two months. Seriously. By its scheduled end date of January 4th, 2014, there was no chance that the parks would let Anna and Elsa…well, you know.
Theme park tourists hoping to meet the sibling princesses faced huge obstacles. Line queues were as long as four hours. At rope drop, people weren’t sprinting to their favorite attractions. They were picking up their daughters and carrying them to the Norway Pavilion to beat the crowd. In March, Disney announced that they’d move Anna and Elsa to Magic Kingdom. On April 20, 2014, they added the Meet and Greet to the FastPass+ options for the park. It quickly became a must-choose selection for anyone hoping to meet the princesses. The lines remained impossibly long.
Finally accepting that too much Frozen wasn’t enough, Disney Debuted For the First Time in Forever: A Frozen Sing-Along Celebration at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in 2014. Intended to be a seasonal singalong show, this stage production still runs ten times a day. It exemplifies Disney’s growing awareness of the ubiquity of Frozen. No matter how much they added to the parks in terms of events and merchandise, it wasn’t enough. People bought EVERYTHING. The Walt Disney Company claimed record revenue during Frozen Summer Fun.
What started as the summer of Frozen became an entire year. Disney introduced several other events celebrating Frozen, even making the movie the centerpiece of their 2014 Christmas parade, which they named Disney Parks Frozen Christmas Celebration. They also kicked Cinderella out of her own castle over the holidays, exhibiting A Frozen Holiday Wish instead. During 2014, every American Disney theme park experienced visitor growth from 2013. Clearly, people couldn’t get enough Frozen.
I mean, sure, it was a good movie but…
Image: Disney
Well, visitors couldn’t. Many longtime Disney observers who live close to Disneyland and Walt Disney World definitely felt differently. Frozen fatigue became a very real issue to those who stopped feeling the magic after about their 30th day at the park that year. There is such a thing as too much Anna and Elsa. It was something many people realized on Halloween that year when most of the under-13 female population chose the same two outfits for trick-or-treating. Anaheim, California, and Orlando, Florida, residents were ahead of the curve on this. Even some of the people who originally loved Frozen began to turn on it.
Disney didn’t worry about these folks, though. The diehard fans will still visit the parks no matter what. It’s the casual theme park tourists Frozen was enticing into a visit. And those people were emptying their wallets on Norwegian princess merchandise. While the year of Frozen eventually ended, Disney still provided new Frozen content in early 2015. Frozen Fever, an animated short about the ramifications of Elsa’s sniffles, debuted in front of the live action remake of Cinderella. It too proved instantly popular.
And you think the line for Soarin’ is long…
Though this all might seem like Frozen overload, 2016 will bring a the culmination of Frozen mania to Walt Disney World in the form of build Frozen Ever After. With no offense toward Gran Fiesta Tour Starring The Three Caballeros, this new Frozen attraction will instantly become the most popular ride in the history of the World Showcase.
Since its inception in 1982, Epcot traffic has divided into two parts. People seeking entertainment and technological innovation hang out in the front of the park. Those who desire an education in world culture plus some fine dining and an adult beverage head back to the World Showcase. In 2016, Disney will cross the streams by introducing the most desired attraction since the Test Track reboot, and they will position it an area that historically had light traffic during daylight hours.
Frozen Ever After should have lines that rival if not surpass the Anna and Elsa Meet and Greet, the one Disney had to move to Magic Kingdom to handle the traffic flow better (and will move again back to Epcot later this year). They wouldn’t do this unless they had confidence that the new attraction will enhance the World Showcase, but it’s understandable why some people believe Disney has saturated the Frozen market. Is there such a thing as too much of a good thing? If so, didn’t Disney theme parks already reach that point with Frozen by the end of 2014? We’ll find out for sure when Frozen Ever After has been at the Norway Pavilion long enough for the initial thrill to dissipate.
