God Loves His Children

Unpopular opinion… I don’t think Treasure Planet will make it into Kingdom Hearts 3. Before anyone here grabs their pitchforks and torches, I want to CLARIFY that I don’t oppose Treasure Planet appearing in Kingdom Hearts 3 and that I enjoyed this film. This is by NO MEANS trying to attack the film and anyone who loves the film. To be honest, Treasure Planet is one of the most underrated Disney Films. However, this film is by no means on the same level as the Lion King, Aladdin, or even recent titles like Zootopia, Moana, and Frozen. The goal of this thread is to really dive in Treasure Planet’s success and Kingdom Hearts’ past on selecting worlds in order to analyze how it could/could not appear in KH3. Regardless this is all speculation and I don’t know what worlds Nomura decided on for KH3 already. Though one could only guess.

Although Fans desperately want TP (Treasure Planet) to be in KH3, it may not appear all because of how it bombed in the box office and it’s unfortunate history. As Many of you would know, this was the first film Roy Conli produced with Walt Disney Animation Studios, the first film he co-produced was The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, and he was accompanied with Disney writing legends John Musker and Ron Clements, who were notable for The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Hercules, were running the strings of this project that would be one of Disney’s highly expensive films to make at the time. Let’s go back to the late 1980′s where TP’s history began. 

It’s the late 80′s and it has been about 20 years since Walt passed. The company was in one of it’s biggest dark ages and needed to save the company and animation. They tried to go off the traditional Disney script with The Black Cauldron, a film that would hopefully also appeal to older audiences who think Disney is purely for kids. However, the film sunk faster than the Titanic and Dsiney needed something. Meet John Musker and Ron Clements who were working on The Great Mouse Detective. Musker and Clements pitched a film that they have been dreaming of making, a film they believed would make up what The Black Cauldron did to Disney. That film was called, Treasure Planet. This film was pitched for about 10 years ever since Musker and Clements finished production for The Black Cauldron. It was pitched after The Great Mouse Detective. However, Disney wanted to go back to their roots and choose a film that would help save Disney from it’s dark pit, that film being The Little Mermaid and every film the Musker and Clements worked on, TP was pitched until they grew tired of pitching it and only agreed to work on Hercules if they can do TP. 

There is one key person in all of this, Jeffery Katzenberg, (former Disney Chairman and President of Dreamworks Animation). Katzenberg is well known for creating the early Disney renaissance, getting Disney the partnership with Pixar and Miramax Films, and for ultimately trying to destroy Disney after not becoming Michael Eisner’s second in command. Katzenberg finally gave the green light to Treasure Planet after Musker and Clements worked on Aladdin if they were to agree to do Hercules. This happened shortly before Katzenberg decided to attack Disney with his own company, Dreamworks Animation with Steven Spielberg.  Because of Katzenberg’s decisions, Disney may not have been where it is today if he had chose TP over The Little Mermaid and every other film he chose over it. However, it was partially because of Katzenberg’s decisions that lead TP to become a financial failure from the beginning of development. Katzenberg unleashed what would be a huge wrecking ball that would plunge Disney into another dark ages. That wrecking ball is better known as Shrek. 

Shrek was the beginning of the end of traditional animated films as Walt Disney Animation Studios struggle to compete against the toe to toe rivalry between Dreamworks and Pixar. Despite how TP was released a year after Shrek and in a year where there wasn’t any computer animated films, TP suffered big time financially and ultimately led Disney to believe that kids don’t care about traditional animation anymore. After TP’s failure, Disney would later decide that Home On The Range would be the last traditional animated film until the new Dsiney Presidents, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, would decide to go back to the renaissance era of Disney by bringing up The Princess And The Frog. Although The Princess And The Frog and Winnie The Pooh (2011) would be the last traditional animated films, Catmull and Lasseter started the second Disney renaissance with films like Tangled, Frozen, and Zootopia. Taking all this information up, Treasure Planet would be the beginning of Disney’s financial downfall and destruction until Catmull and Lasseter would come to clean up the mess. 

Now let’s look at the financial report card for TP. TP had a production budget of $140 million ($180 million if you include $40 million gone to marketing). TP only made $38 million domestically and $71 million internationally at the box office. Though it made more money internationally, take into consideration all of the countries in the world that have released this film instead just Japan.  In 2011, Treasure planet was marked Disney’s biggest financial loss where they have lost $79 million. TP was originally going to get a sequel, but due to its box office failure, the sequel got cancelled. Treasure Planet would become Disney’s new Black Cauldron in how both didn’t really know who their target audience was and how both broke off a bit from Disney’s traditional storytelling. That isn’t to say that going off Disney’s traditional storytelling would led the film to failure (Big Hero 6 and Zootopia). However, both Treasure Planet and The Black Cauldron lacked some of Disney’s charm and whenever they try to implement the Disney charm, it’s rather forced (e.g. B.E.N singing a pirate’s life for me). 

After going through Treasure Planet’s history, how does that impact Tetsuya Nomura’s decision in selecting it for Kingdom Hearts 3? Let’s look back on the Disney properties he chose for Kingdom Hearts 1. Nomura choose properties the properties that were ultimately well known. For worlds he chose Alice In Wonderland, Hercules, Tarzan, Aladdin, Pinocchio, The Little Mermaid, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Peter Pan, and Winnie The Pooh. Other Properties Nomura represented were The Lion King, Lady And The Tramp (easter egg in Traverse Town), Dumbo, Bambi, Mulan, 101 Dalmatians, Merlin (The Sword In The Stone), Chernabog (Fantasia), Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty And The Beast, and of course the Mickey Mouse Cartoon characters. Nomura wanted to add The Lion King and Toy Story as worlds. However, The technology to have Sora walk on all four legs and him Swimming around was not available at the time (though he did add Simba as a summon) and Disney didn’t fully own Pixar yet. At the time, Nomura thought this was going to be the only Kingdom Hearts title and wanted to go all in with this project. Nomura carefully chose which properties would be the best for Kingdom Hearts, namely properties that had good story and themes that can tie to the main Kingdom Hearts story and that were super marketable since at the time the idea of a Final Fantasy and Disney crossover seemed far-fetched. 

One thing to really note was that Nomura represented all of the Disney renaissance films with the exception of The Rescuers: Down Under (I personally don’t see this film as a part of the renaissance since it is a sequel to The Rescuers, a film from the Disney Dark Ages), Pocahontas, and The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, especially since Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were the two weakest films of the renaissance. Kingdom Hearts would not have been where it is today if Nomura chose worlds like The Black Cauldron and Oliver and Company to be in KH1. Kingdom Hearts 2 follows the similar formula where Nomura represented all the franchises he represented in Kingdom Hearts 1 except for Alice In Wonderland, Tarzan, Snow White and Cinderella (they make a slight cameo in Space Paranoids), Lady And The Tramp, and 101 Dalmatians. Nomura now has added Steamboat Willie, Pirates Of The Caribbean, Tron, Lilo And Stitch, and Chicken Little into the mix and he wouldn’t represent any new Disney properties into Kingdom Hearts (I don’t mean new worlds from properties that Nomura already represented, e.g. Pride Lands, Enchanted Dominion, Symphony Of Sorcery) until Dream Drop Distance and X(chi). Those properties being The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Tron Legacy, The Three Musketeers, Zootopia, Moana, and The Arsitocats (The last three properties are customization easter eggs. He did wanted to add The Jungle Book in Birth By Sleep, but we don’t know why it was scraped). 

The only off the wall properties that were not as popular that Nomura already included were Tron, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, and The Three Musketeers (I didn’t inlcude Tron Legacy and Chicken Little mainly because Tron Legacy came out two years before DDD so it was still fresh on people’s minds and Chicken Little was there to promote the film Chicken Little in Japan). However, most of those properties were in DDD, which is not a numbered title so they can get away with going into the bottom of the barrel easily without suffering too much of a financial loss. The property that changes this argument is Tron.

To briefly summarize Tron, It suffered a similar situation like Treasure Planet where the film suffered poor box office results. However, Tron had two things going for it that would later help Tron get its money back from the box office and what would be Tron Legacy and Uprising. Tron had its game Space Paranoids and it was a milestone in animation. This doesn’t mean Treasure Planet’s animation was terrible, just Tron had other assets that saved its property, similar to Sleeping Beauty.

Treasure Planet has a unique world and character development (namely between John Silver and Jim. The other characters except for Captain Amelia a little bit seemed a bit weak to me though) that I would love to see if it makes it into KH3. However, it suffers for what it made at the box office and for its relevancy in today’s culture and will continue to lose relevance as years go by. It also doesn’t help that it seemed to focus what was cool back in the early 2000′s and that Toy Story and Shrek already beated its animation (still TP has beatiful 2D animation and to be honest better animation than Shrek, but everyone at the time were saying computer animation is the new standard). Also, TP suffers from other space themed contenders (namely Star Wars, W.A.L.L.E, and to some degree Lilo and Stitch) that did significantly better in the box office, and is still being marketed to this day. Though in an interview, Nomura said that Star Wars and Marvel are not off limits towards Kingdom Hearts, (I’m assuming Pixar is the same as well especially since we have the Buzz Lightyear attraction flow ride), they are rather difficult to get the rights of. However, there is more than likely no denying that if Nomura were to get the rights to use Star Wars from Disney and Lucasfilms, he will jump the gun and put it into Kingdom Hearts 3. To briefly summarize this reasoning (I will post a seperate article about this later) Star Wars has a significantly bigger fanbase, It is extremely marketable, and it is one of Disney’s biggest properties and when you want to sell a game that is a numbered title, a game that has been in development for 3 years bringing content that’s worth 10 years waiting for, trying to appease to the fans from the beginning and new fans, trying to appeal to fans that range between kid/tween to adult, and trying to draw in more people to buy your game, would you try and go for the bigger property that can potentially fit in the overall story (most of what I said here also applies to W.A.L.L.E) ? Plus who is to say that Treasure Planet is even popular in Japan? Nomura has only recently started to pay attention to fans outside of Japan and (non Japanese) the social media has only just started/ trying to interact with the fanbase. Sorry for almost going to be a bit biased.

Though it may have a bad history in the box office and somewhat with Disney (this and other films that don’t fit Disney’s standard (Atlantis, Oliver and Company, The Black Cauldron, Chicken Little) are almost considered forsaken by Disney), Treasure Planet has concepts and ideas that Nomura could easily put into KH3 in terms of level design and story significance. But who really knows. Would Roy Conli, the man responsible for Treasure Planet’s budget and marketing, be happy to announce a film that was a financial failure and nearly destroyed Disney Animation or would he just announce how everyone’s learns from their failures? If Treasure Planet were to make it into Kingdom Hearts 3, would Musker and Clements see this as an opportunity to redeem their dream film that turned out to be a failure? In the end, Nomura has to please investors with a game that has been in 3 years of development that’s supposed to bring 10 years worth of anticipation. Kingdom Hearts 3 is looking to be an extremely expensive game to make and ultimately, long time fans are still going to buy the game no matter what. In general, Square Enix and Disney may put in a lot more to market the crap out of Kingdom Hearts 3 and to get their money back. Unfortunately, Treasure Planet may not bring in the amount Square and Disney want with Kingdom hearts 3. Especially since Treasure Planet left a sour taste in Disney’s mouths. 

If you read this lengthy article all the way through congrats! I hope this gives you another perspective as to how Treasure Planet could/could not be in Kingdom Hearts 3 from somebody who has knowledge about the film and marketing industry. Granted this is all just speculation and I’m nothing more than a fan. Regardless, whether they show off Treasure Planet or not, I’ll still be hyped. I tried to be non-biased as possible writing and if it does come off as a bit biased, remember I am human. Thank you for reading!