When you 'Wish' upon a sermon: Is there a religion ghost in the latest Disney flop?

Anyone who has been paying attention to the pop-culture marketplace during 2023 knows that even the most secular business analyst would be tempted to think that the Walt Disney Company has done something to provoke the wrath of whatever Supreme Being the Mouse lords are willing to acknowledge.

Marvel at this Inside the Magic headline, if you will: “Disney Chief Predicts Total Disaster for Studio Before End of Year.”

That’s a take that will awaken even the most woke studio boss.

This brings is the the latest Disney box-office flop — “Wish.” At the time I wrote this post, I could not even get any of the “Wish” links to work at the Rotten Tomatoes website — which is never a good sign. If you’re interested in the tomato-past details, see this story at Screen Rant: “7 Reasons Wish's Rotten Tomatoes Score Is So Divisive.”

Is there a “religion ghost” in this drama? Not if you read Variety. This latest Disney nightmare is simply another example of Disney+ being overextended and the American movie audience suffering from lingering COVID-19 fears. Here’s that headline: “Disney’s Bleak Box Office Streak: ‘Wish’ Is the Latest Crack in the Studio’s Once-Invincible Armor.”

Hold that “religion ghost” thought for a moment. Here is the stunning overture of the Variety piece, showing the wider context of the “Wish” crash:

“Wish” misfired in its opening weekend, extending Disney‘s bleak box office fortunes.
The animated musical fable, about the Wishing Star that so many Disney characters have wished upon over the studio’s century-long history, failed to become the de facto choice for families around Thanksgiving. “Wish” opened in third place with a dull $31.7 million over the five-day holiday, a far cry from Disney’s past Turkey Day feasts. Perhaps King Magnifico, the movie’s villain (voiced by Chris Pine), is holding hostage the wishes of Disney executives?
Instead of recapturing the studio’s magic, “Wish” joins a long list of its underperforming 2023 tentpoles, such as “The Marvels,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “The Haunted Mansion,” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”

What's the 'A Wrinkle In Time' news story? Flashback to wisdom from Madeleine L'Engle

So what is the story with the new Disney version of the classic, Newbery Award winning novel "A Wrinkle In Time" by the late, great Madeleine L'Engle?

I'm talking about a news story here.

I'm talking about the attempt -- another one -- to make this beloved youth-fiction classic into a blockbuster movie. Why is it is causing discussion, debate and even controversy? Yes, I'm asking this because that's what we talked about this week in the GetReligion "Crossroads" podcast. Click here to tune that in.

Is it news because it appears, to one degree or another, to be a box-office flop? Is it news because, at Rotten Tomatoes, only 40 percent of critics like it? That's bad, but the score from ordinary people in theaters was even lower, to the tune of only 34 percent positive reactions.

Director Ava DuVernay was not amused and argued that race may have had something to do with it, since she -- as a star African-American director -- changed the racial mix of the cast.

It's clear that some of the movie's supporters thought race was a crucial part of the mix, as seen in this NBC commentary: " 'A Wrinkle in Time' isn't a film for critics. It's Ava DuVernay's love letter to black girls." And over at CNN there was this: "Watching 'A Wrinkle in Time' is a political act."

So one more question: Why write a religion column about this book and its author?

That's what I did this past week, for the Universal syndicate. It did that because, nearly two decades ago, I had a chance to spend two hours talking to L'Engle about the crucial themes woven into her book. In particular, I asked her if there were concepts and even quotations from her novel that needed to be in a film adaption of it. Here is a key piece of that column:

It would be hard, explained L'Engle, to grasp this book's cosmic war between life and death, good and evil, darkness and light without two crucial passages.