Disney+ is going to be a huge hit, despite its generic name. It’s going to be a smash and is sure to create content that people love and talk about a lot. Disney is just so damn good at, well, everything lately.
But its assured success doesn’t mean Disney+ won’t have its fair share of issues and growing pains. In fact, it seems like it’s already having some. Deadline is reporting that Disney+ is scraping Book of Enchantment, a planned original series all about Disney villains. The show was going to be based on the series of books by Serena Valentino but now it won’t be based on anything because it isn’t happening! And this comes after Disney spent months of work and money had already been spent. The production was 13 weeks into writing, with an entire writing room creating scripts. But Disney says no more and the show is officially dead.
Apparently Disney was uncomfortable with the tone of the series. It’ll come as no surprise that Disney sees its Disney+ service as a family-friendly alternative to Netflix, Hulu (which it owns) and others. They didn’t like how dark the scripts for Book were so they tried to change things up, bringing in new writers to adjust the tone of the series. But as more and more scripts came in, Disney realized that things weren’t changing the way they wanted and decided to just cancel the entire project. They are taking this family-friendly thing very seriously.
It’s a bit bizarre that Disney didn’t want much darkness in a series about popular Disney villains. Ursula, The Beast, Maleficent — these are all troubled, dark characters. I’m not suggesting that Book of Enchantment should have been at the level of, say, Requiem of a Dream but surely Disney could afford some heaviness. Disney+ could have still been family-friendly even if Book of Enchantment carried a bit more weight than other projects on the service.
This isn’t the first production that Disney balked at because of tone. They moved the High Fidelity show, which was supposed to also be on Disney+, over to Hulu once it became obvious that the series was going to be too adult. They also have been toying with their High School Musical series after show runners attempted to tackle more adult subjects. They’re very, very adamant about Disney+ being a streaming service for the whole family. Hopefully they remember that and keep it in mind before they green light more shows that end up being canceled because of tone.