In 2002, Disney sent pirates into space, and before we could turn Thanksgiving leftovers into a week’s worth of turkey sandwiches, the studio was already tightening its belt.
Treasure Planet, the ambitious sci-fi adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, cost an estimated $140 million to produce. But co-director Ron Clements says Disney effectively threw in the towel just days after the film opened.
Nearly 24 years later, Clements is revisiting what went wrong, and the story goes beyond disappointing ticket sales.
In an interview with People, Clements, whose credits include The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Hercules, suggested that inadequate marketing and problems inside Disney’s executive offices helped sink one of the studio’s most ambitious animated projects.
He recalled that “the studio wrote the movie off the Monday after it opened,” an unusually quick acknowledgment of financial defeat that he believes further damaged the film’s chances.
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The numbers certainly weren’t encouraging. Treasure Planet eventually earned approximately $110 million worldwide, and Disney anticipated a $74 million pretax loss. But while Disney counted its losses, the people responsible for making the movie faced something far more personal: the possibility that their jobs were disappearing.
Computer-animated hits such as Shrek and Ice Age were a hit and would soon change Hollywood’s understanding of what audiences wanted. Inside Disney, executives were questioning whether traditional hand-drawn animation had much of a future.
That uncertainty followed the artists into production. Clements recalled that some employees worked on Treasure Planet even though they knew they might not have jobs at Disney once it finished.
Not exactly the motivational speech anyone wants to hear before spending years drawing a movie.
Clements also pointed to tensions between then-CEO Michael Eisner and Roy Disney, an influential advocate for traditional animation. Clements suggested their increasingly strained relationship made an already difficult production environment even worse.
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Yet the filmmakers delivered something Disney would eventually have reason to celebrate, even if the studio weren’t particularly eager to.
Treasure Planet received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature in 2003, losing to Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. According to Clements, Disney neither campaigned for the nomination nor particularly wanted the movie recognized.
But that recognition was still quite a turnaround for a film that had been treated as a financial catastrophe only months earlier.
Today, Treasure Planet has developed a devoted cult following, something Clements appreciates even if the recognition arrived decades later.
In his new memoir, Making Disney Magic . . . from a Mermaid to Moana, Clements revisits a career that helped define modern Disney animation.
For Treasure Planet, the lesson may be less about whether audiences wanted a space adventure and more about what happens when a studio begins questioning the people responsible for bringing the magic to life.
The movie eventually found its audience. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen on the timeline of those signing the checks.
