Could Walt Disney Fix His Company's Problems Today?

At the end of his life, Walt designed the most ambitious plan in the history of Hollywood. What happened to it?

Walt Disney was a gosh darn fool. He had no clue how to make a brand franchise film.

When he started releasing feature-length movies, he relied on stories in the public domain—drawn from fairy tales and old books with expired copyrights. So he couldn’t prevent other studios from telling the exact same tales with the same characters.

And Mr. Disney was even dopier than Dopey when it came to extending the brand. He would get laughed out of film school today. Hedge funds would buy up shares in his studio just to get him fired.

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Consider his first feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. This was a huge success—the top grossing movie of 1938. If that happened today, the studio would immediately start work on sequels, prequels, and spinoffs.

In a flash, we would get Snow White Returns, or a dwarf origins tale, or at least a Prince Charming dating app. But Walt Disney did something different—and so bizarre that nobody would consider imitating it today.