July 16 - Hocus Pocus

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On this day, in 1993, Walt Disney Pictures released the Halloween comedy Hocus Pocus. Pocus started life in the early Eighties. Screenwriter Mick Garris wrote a film about a boy who'd been turned into a cat three centuries ago by witches, based on an idea that producer David Kirschner came up with. That script was sold to Disney in 1984 and was dark,  scary, full of 12 year olds and called Halloween House. It languished in development hell for almost a decade, undergoing severe rewrites, gaining and losing cast and directors and generally going nowhere. Then, in 1992, Bette Midler caught wind of the project, said she wanted to do it (in the role that was originally written for Cloris Leachman) and suddenly all the lights on the movie turned green.

Disney hired Kenny Ortega to direct the film, which was an unconventional choice. Kenny had been a choreographer for years with classics like Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller's Day Off under his dance belt. While a choreographer isn't that far off the mark from a director, the only thing Kenny had directed up to this point was the movie Newsies, which wasn't a hit Broadway show yet (or even a cult classic film). It was a little picture that had flopped terribly at the box office. Kenny offered the lead role of Max Dennison, the virgin who accidentally resurrects the Sanderson sisters, to Leonardo DiCaprio, but Leo was too busy earning an Oscar nomination for What's Eating Gilbert Grape to accept. Omri Katz got the role instead and filming suitably began in October 1992, with the production being completed a mere four months later.

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When Hocus Pocus was released, it did better than Newsies, but not by much. It did gross more than its budget, but with advertising costs factored in it probably gave Disney a good $15 million tax write off. At this point you might be scratching your head and saying wait a minute. This is a Halloween movie and it was released in July. What gives? The official story is that The Nightmare Before Christmas was chosen as the studio's Halloween entry that year and management didn't want Hocus to interfere with that movie's returns. So they randomly released it earlier. A much truer story would be that management didn't think much of Hocus and didn't care when it was released, it was always going to be a tax write off to them. Except, in the end, it wasn't.

Owning a property means that you get to use that property over and over again, however you wish. When the Halloween season rolled around every year on the Disney Channel, and later on ABC Family, Disney needed content to show. Hocus Pocus became an annual tradition on both channels, and since people were seeing it at the right time of year, gained bigger and bigger audiences with each showing. It's gotten to the point now that Freeform (what ABC Family is currently called) actually breaks viewership records every year and Hocus Pocus has become a tentpole event for them. Excitement over the movie has led to the center stage show at Walt Disney World's Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party being based on the Sanderson sisters. Hocus' three stars, Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker (all of whom have had successful careers since) have even expressed interest in making a sequel. So far Disney has yet to commit to the sequel the fans want, but rumors continue to fly about a crappy made-for-tv remake. Like I said. When you own a property, you get to do with it whatever you wish. Not necessarily what the fans wish.

April 10 - Newsies

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On this day, in 1992, Walt Disney Pictures released a brand new musical, Newsies. Staring a young Christian Bale (and established actors such as Bill Pullman, Ann Margret and Robert Duvall), Newsies is loosely based on the New York City newsboy strike of 1899. With over a dozen songs written by the incomparable Alan Menken and Jack Feldman, this movie, 64 years into the company’s history, would be the first completely live action musical ever filmed by Disney. The film also marked the directorial debut of Kenny Ortega, who, up to this point, had choreographed films like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Dirty Dancing and would later helm Hocus Pocus and the High School Musical series. With its peppy songs and highly talented cast, I’d like to be able to report that Newsies took the box office by storm. It did not. It only had a budget of $15 million and couldn’t even scrape that together. After barely grossing $2.8 million, Newsies limped off the big screen to languish on the dust heap of Hollywood with the rest of the failures. Except that turned out to be another thing it did not do.

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The home video market was a boon to movies in more ways than one. Not only could studios gain extra income on a picture long after theaters were no longer showing it, but films that might not have gotten the attention they deserved the first time around received a second chance at life. Don’t get me wrong, here, a terrible movie on the big screen generally remained terrible at home and people who had the misfortune of renting it said “Well, now we know why it came and went so fast. That’s two bucks we’ll never get back.” But every once in a while, a quirky movie like Clue or an underappreciated historical musical like Newsies came along and home video gave viewers the chance to find plenty to love. A small but rabid cult following began to grow around Newsies (and Clue too, but this post doesn’t concern that gem), looking for a way to honor the object of their affection. It didn’t take them long to figure out what they wanted.

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When Beauty and the Beast made the leap from the big screen to the Broadway stage in 1995, most of the theater world was unprepared for the onslaught of adaptations that was to come. Once The Lion King and Mary Poppins had cemented that kind of move as a solid thing, Disney began looking around for other properties to make the transition. Fansies (as followers of Newsies have become known) had long been campaigning for their beloved movie to join the ranks of the Broadway bound. Finally, Disney agreed to resurrect what they considered to be a flop. They hired Alan Menken and Jack Feldman to write more songs and got Harvey Fierstein to write the book. The talented trio worked their magic and by the time Newsies: The Musical was in previews at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey in 2011, it was already a Tony contender (even though it wouldn’t open on Broadway for several more months.

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Newsies: The Musical ran for three years on Broadway, logging in just over 1,000 performances. It was nominated for eight Tony Awards (winning two) and six Drama Desk Awards (again, winning two). Following the close of the Broadway run, Newsies: The Musical then toured North America, playing another 784 times in 65 cities over two years. A performance in Los Angeles was filmed and shown in theaters for one weekend only in February 2017. Over the four days of limited theatrical release, Newsies: The Musical grossed almost $3.5 million. For those of you that are counting, that’s several hundred thousand more than the original film grossed in its entire run. It’s safe to say that Disney no longer considers their little David and Goliath story a flop (and it only took 25 years to prove them wrong).