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      Tony Gilroy Kept the Faith for ‘Andor.’ Its 8 Emmy Nods Are Affirmation.

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      Wednesday was a big day for the Galactic Empire. “Andor,” the Disney+ “Star Wars” prequel series that made its debut last fall, picked up eight Emmy nominations, including one in the best drama category.Over 12 episodes in its first season, the show follows Cassian Andor, the Rebel spy played by Diego Luna, who will eventually carry out the desperate act of espionage depicted in the 2016 film “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” “Andor” has drawn acclaim for its focus on the interior lives of its characters and for homing in on the struggles of ordinary citizens. A second season of the show is forthcoming.The Emmy accolades offer a degree of vindication for the “Star Wars” executives at Disney who made a big and expensive bet on the series, and for the creator of “Andor,” Tony Gilroy, who helped write and oversee “Rogue One.”In an interview on Wednesday, Gilroy discussed the Emmy nods and how “Star Wars” has expanded on TV. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.We know that delving into the “Star Wars” universe comes with pressure. So how does it feel to rack up eight Emmy nominations today?Affirming. The past 10 months have just been such a pleasure. It’s such a huge show, but we made it so privately and quietly. When you make a “Star Wars” show or film, you can’t go out and do a lot of focus groups and a lot of testing. We really never had an audience, and the pressure to finish the show comes right down to the deadline. So really, the audience was our focus group. We really did not know what to expect as we came forward. And to end up here now with eight nominations, it’s just a gas.It’s also the payout on a really huge gamble that Disney took and that Lucasfilm took. This is not for the faint of heart, shows of this scale. And so good on them. I hope they’re happy with this result as well.“Obi-Wan Kenobi” also did well today. And “The Mandalorian” has been a success. What, if anything, does this tell you about transferring “Star Wars” stories from the big screen to TV?It’s economically challenging and its certainly emotionally and chronologically challenging to the creative team. But if you have a story that wants a larger canvas, that opportunity is now available. And there are a lot of stories that don’t want to fit into 120 pages or an hour and a half. It’s a very exciting time to be a storyteller if you can crack the formula of how to make it economically feasible.Some of the praise the show has drawn is for sort of giving us a look at ordinary people in an oppressive world. There is maybe a little less classic “Star Wars” and a little more focus on day-to-day life on distant planets. Was that intentional? Why go that direction?Those are the things that have always interested me. When Disney and Kathy Kennedy [the Lucasfilm president] came and proposed it, it was with that as a sort of genetic mandate for: Let’s go into the kitchen and get out of the dining room; let’s go to the back of the house. There are billions and billions of people that live in the galaxy. Why concentrate on the royal family and a dominant story that’s taken up all the oxygen so far? Why not see if we can’t take a deep dive into what it’s like to be at the ground level as a revolution is sweeping through?Did you have faith that “Star Wars” fans would be interested in that?I’ve been on this — in August it’ll be four years. My ability to believe and have confidence is not a constant. There have been times all the way through where I wondered if I’d made a terrible mess of my life or made the wrong commitment. It’s not like a film where you can sort of bandage yourself up and get through the experience if it’s not going well. This is a long-term commitment and the responsibility is enormous on every level.So I wish I could say that I had faith all the way through, but that would not be true. More

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      ‘Crater’ Review: A Rocking Road Trip

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      This Disney film is surprisingly nimble at incorporating an emotional core into its sci-fi adventure.You wouldn’t necessarily expect a lightly dystopian undertone concerning the oppressive state of labor in a family-friendly science-fiction Disney film (released during the writers’ strike, no less), but “Crater” manages just that while maintaining the lighthearted fun of a children’s adventure.The film, directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, takes place on a lunar mining colony, where miners agree to contracts with the promise that they and their families will earn a ticket to Omega, a distant, habitable planet. Legal loopholes, though, ensure that most don’t actually live to see that day arrive.Yet, via a rule that allows descendants of deceased miners to automatically go to Omega, the film’s young protagonist, Caleb (Isaiah Russell-Bailey, and Hero Hunter in flashbacks), is scheduled to leave the colony after his father (Scott Mescudi, a.k.a. Kid Cudi) dies — only, he doesn’t want to leave his friends behind. Hoping to make the most of their limited time together, Caleb and his friends, with the help of a new girl from Earth (McKenna Grace), steal a lunar rover and embark on a road trip in search of a mysterious crater that Caleb’s father told him to find as a kind of dying wish.It’s refreshing to see Disney invest a decent budget into an original sci-fi world for a live-action film (it’s also a movie that undoubtedly would have flailed at the box office, but may and should find an audience on streaming), and Alvarez makes good use of it. And while it might not have the indelible charm of other children’s classics, “Crater” does well not straining itself trying to please audiences beyond the family crowd. Most of all, the film is surprisingly nimble at incorporating an emotional core that makes its story more interesting than the adventure itself.CraterRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      In ‘A Small Light,’ an Ordinary Woman Helps Anne Frank’s Family

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      A new series on Disney+ and Hulu tells the story of Miep Gies, a secretary who helped Anne Frank and others hide in Amsterdam during World War II.Two days after the Gestapo’s 1944 raid on the annex where Anne Frank and others were hiding, Miep Gies, a seemingly ordinary secretary, and her colleague walked into the hiding place and encountered a chaotic scene left behind by the Nazis.Years later, Gies described what she saw that day as a mess of books, newspapers and other everyday items. “And then we started searching. For what, I don’t know, but we were looking for something,” she said in a 1958 interview. Among the items, she found a red plaid diary. Gies grabbed it and put it in a drawer in her office.She had just saved one of the Holocaust’s most famous accounts: Anne Frank’s diary.On the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, the building that housed Otto Frank’s office is now the Anne Frank House, a museum that tells Anne’s story.Peter Dejong/Associated PressIn the show, Anne Frank is played by Billie Boullet as an angsty girl chafing against the restrictions of German occupation. Dusan Martincek/National Geographic for DisneyThat moment, and much more about Gies’s life and heroism, is at the center of “A Small Light,” a new eight-part series that tells the story of Gies (Bel Powley), her husband, Jan (Joe Cole), and their involvement in Dutch resistance efforts during World War II. The show premieres Monday on National Geographic, and comes to Disney+ and Hulu the following day.Work on “A Small Light” began six years ago, after its showrunners Joan Rater and Tony Phelan, a married couple who used to be producers and screenwriters for “Grey’s Anatomy,” visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Walking around the museum and listening to tour guides, they learned that many people don’t really know the story of the Frank family anymore, let alone the story of the people who helped them, Rater and Phelan said in a recent video interview.Since then, they said, the moral question at the heart of Gies’s story — whether to do the right thing, the wrong thing or nothing at all — has only become more important, given how war, nationalism and antisemitism have once again been spreading across Europe.“When we started this project,” Phelan said, “it certainly didn’t feel as relevant as it feels now.”While the show opens with Gies, who wasn’t Jewish, trying to dodge a Nazi checkpoint, the first episode quickly takes the viewer back to 1934, when Gies was single and living with her adopted Dutch family. She finds employment with Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber) — a stern, fellow German-speaking immigrant — and meets her future husband, a social worker. Much of the first episode follows Gies living life as a modern young woman, meeting friends and going out dancing.Rater and Phelan wanted to give the show a contemporary feel by focusing “A Small Light” not just around war, but also around ordinary people’s ordinary lives being suddenly interrupted.The show’s creators wanted to give the episodes a contemporary feel by focusing not just on war, but also on ordinary people’s ordinary lives being suddenly interrupted.Dusan Martincek/National Geographic for Disney“Period pieces for me sometimes feel a bit sepia-toned, and that makes you feel distanced from them,” Powley said. But “A Small Light” didn’t feel that way. “It didn’t feel like I was wearing a costume,” she added.“These people, they had washing machines and toasters. They were living in a modern world and they couldn’t believe, in this modern world that they were living, that these things could happen,” Rater said.While the story of Anne Frank and what happened to her is well known, Gies — who died in 2010 at 100 — largely stayed out of the limelight. She published a memoir, “Anne Frank Remembered,” in 1987 and was involved with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, but much of her story stayed private.“When we started digging, we started putting together these pieces that I don’t know that anybody had ever put together before,” Phelan said. In the course of their research, with the help of a local researcher in the Netherlands, Rater and Phelan discovered that Gies and her husband also helped people hide in their own home, including two nurses.In the show, we see nurses help save babies from being killed by the Nazis, and instead sending them to live in the Dutch countryside. One memorable scene shows how nurses swapped babies for dolls, telling Jewish mothers to lose the dolls on their way to concentration camps.Miep and Jan Gies, pictured in 1957, hid people from the Nazis in their own home, as well as in Miep’s office.Sueddeutsche Zeitung, via AlamyIn the show, Jan is played by Joe Cole, and Miep by Bel Powley.Dusan Martincek/National Geographic for Disney“It is such a fascinating, heartbreaking, hard to believe story at times,” Cole, who plays Gies’s husband, said in a video interview.When in 1942, Otto Frank asked Gies to help hide him, his daughters, Anne and Margot, and his wife, Edith, in an annex at their office, Gies didn’t hesitate before saying yes.“She had no idea what she was saying yes to,” Rater said. “And then she had to keep saying yes for two years.”This was until a warm day in August 1944 when Nazis raided the office and found the eight people — the Frank family and four others — hiding in the annex.“A Small Light” was shot in the Netherlands — in Amsterdam and Harlem — and in Prague.Dusan Martincek/National Geographic for DisneyIn “A Small Light,” Gies’s decision to help despite the dangers and disruption this posed to her life (she kept the secret, brought food and books and more), her unwavering spirit and her reluctance to be seen as a hero makes the viewer ask: What would I have done in that situation? The show’s title is taken from a quote by Gies: “Even a regular secretary, a housewife or a teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.”The show “is about your personal dynamics that are interrupted by the war,” said Schreiber who recently spent time in Ukraine raising money for humanitarian aid. “That’s part of what I saw in Ukraine. These people’s lives have been interrupted and they try to continue.”“A Small Light” was shot in the Netherlands — in Amsterdam and Harlem — and Prague, where the interior scenes were filmed in a three-story replica of Otto Frank’s Amsterdam office, where the annex was hidden behind a bookcase. (The original building, on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, is now the Anne Frank House.)While “A Small Light” has moments of levity and snippets of life’s mundanity despite the war raging outside, the episodes gradually become more intense, leading up to the inevitable betrayal that doomed all the people in the annex except for Otto Frank, Anne’s father.For Powley, the show never felt like a period piece. “It didn’t feel like I was wearing a costume,” she said.Dusan Martincek/National Geographic for DisneySchreiber, who is Jewish, said he was often asked to play roles in Holocaust films. “I hate the narrative that we went like lambs to the slaughter,” which is common in such movies, he said.“But this felt different,” he added. More

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      What Do ‘Candyman’ and ‘Peter Pan & Wendy’ Have in Common? A Director Explains.

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      For the new Disney+ retelling, David Lowery drew on a range of unexpected influences, including the 1992 horror film, art-house classics and “Raising Arizona.”It was “E.T. the Extra-Terrestial” that turned David Lowery into a lifelong fan of “Peter Pan,” specifically the scene in which a mother reads the section about Tinkerbell’s possible death to her daughter while the friendly alien hides in the closet. “You just watch E.T. listening to that story, and it’s so emotionally resonant that it hooked me to ‘Peter Pan,’ no pun intended, more than any film version of it did early on,” Lowery said.For his second live-action retelling of a classic Disney film — following “Pete’s Dragon” (2016) — Lowery imagined his own variation on Neverland in “Peter Pan & Wendy,” with the young actors Alexander Molony and Ever Anderson in the title roles and Jude Law as the villainous Captain Hook. Initially, however, Lowery underestimated the task.“When I first took the job, I thought, ‘It’s Peter Pan, how hard could it be?’ It turned out to be the hardest but most exhilarating creative endeavor I’ve done to date,” he said. The difficulty, he thinks, stemmed from his desire to introduce a new shade to a fairy tale while honoring the story’s legacy.The original J.M. Barrie novel about Peter Pan and Wendy as well as the numerous film adaptations — Steven Spielberg’s “Hook,” P.J. Hogan’s “Peter Pan,” Joe Wright’s “Pan” and, of course, Disney’s 1953 animated rendering, among them — all swirled in Lowery’s mind as he reconsidered the boy who never grows up.Speaking during a recent video interview from Cologne, Germany, Lowery, 42, laid out some of the less obvious influences for his reimagining of “Peter Pan & Wendy,” now streaming on Disney+.Peter Pan’s Flight at DisneylandTo remain faithful to Disney’s take on “Peter Pan,” Lowery closely observed Peter Pan’s Flight, one of the original rides at Disneyland based on the 1953 film. The attraction, he said, “represents the movie distilled into a physical experience.” Although stunningly crafted, some the animated film’s defining iconography, most notably the image of Captain Hook straddling the jaws of the crocodile, has a greater impact on younger audiences when they see it immortalized in three dimensions in Peter Pan’s Flight.That the old-fashioned theatrical illusions the ride employs, like the use of forced perspective for London’s skyline, could still elicit wonder even in an age of digital effects, impressed him. Lowery rode Peter Pan’s Flight while preparing to shoot “Peter Pan & Wendy,” and hearing the excited reactions of children and adults alike reminded him of how beloved the animated version is. “Seeing this film condensed into a theme park ride, I realized the weight that these stories, as told by Disney, have in popular culture,” he said.‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’Lowery first watched the Steven Spielberg action adventure at the tender age of 7, and it immediately ignited his creative aspirations. “It’s a real kitchen-sink experience,” he said. “It’s a musical, it’s a drama, it’s a romance, it’s a horror film.” For the emotional approach to “Peter Pan & Wendy,” Lowery drew on the eclectic tone of “Temple of Doom” as well as its juvenile sense of humor.When creating the pirate hideout Skull Rock, Lowery tried to evoke the underground mines, in a cavernous space illuminated by lava, where the film’s Temple of Doom was located. “There’s also one shot in particular of Tiger Lily, the Lost Boys and Wendy looking down as John and Michael are about to be executed that is a direct homage to Indy, Willie Scott and Short Round looking down into the temple as the poor gentleman is about to be sacrificed to Kali,” Lowery explained.Andrei TarkovskyLowery sought to reconceptualize how Peter Pan and Tinkerbell are introduced to the Darling children. As he wrote the sequence in which Tinkerbell sprinkles Wendy with pixie dust, ostensibly to float her all the way to Neverland before she wakes up, the image of the sleeping woman levitating in the Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s surrealist “Mirror” (1975) came to mind. He added a screen grab of that moment to his look-book and then replicated it with Wendy.‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World’To differentiate his movie from traditional pirate films, including Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, Lowery looked to Peter Weir’s 2003 high-seas saga, which informed how he thought about Captain Hook and his crew. Instead of mere scoundrels, Lowery saw Captain Hook’s men as pirates playacting as soldiers and Hook himself as a decaying version of Captain Jack Aubrey (played by Russell Crowe in “Master and Commander”).“I thought, ‘What if Captain Hook at some point commandeered a Napoleonic vessel and executed all the other soldiers on board and he and his pirates took over this ship and he now thought of himself as an admiral on the HMS Bounty?” Lowery said. To help the actors, the director brought in consultants to teach them how to realistically operate a ship. One bit of unexpected synchronicity: John DeSantis, who plays Bill Jukes in Lowery’s fantasy, also appeared in Weir’s Oscar-winning film.‘Death in Venice’Since Captain Hook is horrified at the notion that he has grown up, Lowery introduced the idea that he dyes his hair. “He wants to maintain his youth as an affront to Peter,” Lowery explained. The inspiration came from Luchino Visconti’s “Death in Venice”: In the Italian director’s historical drama, an aging composer played by Dirk Bogarde colors his hair and wears makeup to appear younger. “At the end, when he’s on the beach, the hair dye just starts running down his face, exposing the deceit at the heart of Bogarde’s character,” Lowery said.Bill the Butcher and ‘Candyman’For Captain Hook’s image, Lowery drew from multiple sources. When he first pitched the project to the studio, he edited a hook for a hand onto a photo of a mustachioed Daniel Day-Lewis in 19th-century attire as Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York.” “That became the Captain Hook I saw in my mind while I was writing the script,” he recalled.With the hook itself, Lowery wanted to stay away from the precise, shiny devices used in other adaptations, like Spielberg’s “Hook.” The one Jude Law would wield in “Peter Pan & Wendy” had to look like a less refined, “pugilistic instrument of violence.” Lowery gave the prop department an image of the actor Tony Todd in Bernard Rose’s 1992 horror film “Candyman,” about a ghostly killer with a hook for a missing hand. “We want it to be rusty,” Lowery added, “and to feel like it was a piece of metal that he pulled from the boat and had a blacksmith hammer into a barely usable form.”‘Raising Arizona’There’s a vivid montage near the end of Lowery’s movie that shows Wendy’s adult life. She overcomes nostalgia and embraces the potential that lies ahead. “I wanted to capture the idea that growing up could be a beautiful thing,” he said. The montage is an allusion to a sequence, known as “Dream of the Future,” in the offbeat Coen brothers comedy “Raising Arizona,” in particular the shot where the kidnapper H. I. McDunnough (played by Nicolas Cage) imagines himself and his wife in old age with their large family gathered around a table. “As someone who is still in the process of growing up, it’s really helpful for me, on a therapeutic level, to see a character look at the future with a sense of wonder and anticipation,” Lowery said. More

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      ‘Peter Pan & Wendy’ Review: A New Girl in Neverland

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      The filmmaker David Lowery updates the classic tale with his own pixie dust, saving what’s good and scuttling the rest.“Peter Pan & Wendy” is a case study in one of the agonies of growing up: the realization that some of the entertainment that tickled us as youngsters — as in the many troubling scenes in Walt Disney’s 1953 animated adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan novel, including the ditty “What Made the Red Man Red?” — have aged as gracefully as its lead character.The filmmaker David Lowery has opted to update it with his own pixie dust: save what’s good, scuttle the rest, and add plenty of spit and polish for a 21st-century shine.Seventy years ago, when Peter Pan whisked Wendy and her siblings to Neverland so she could mother his Lost Boys, he treated her like dirt and she swooned over his heroics. Now, Wendy (a compelling Ever Anderson) decks Peter Pan (Alexander Molony) and seizes the helm of her own story. “I don’t even know if I want to be a mother!” she protests.Lowery is a wise choice for a salvage attempt. He’s gifted at exploring the haunted corners of familiar tales (“Pete’s Dragon,” “The Green Knight”) and has revealed a morbid reverence for the passage of time — perfect for a story whose villain, Captain Hook (a scene-stealing Jude Law, hiding beneath artificial under-eye bags), is literally stalked by the ticktock of a clock.Having stripped out the questionable or merely dubious themes, he and his co-writer, Toby Halbrooks, are left with many minutes to fill. In addition to including a traumatic back story for Captain Hook, they add two lovely reveries on aging: a montage in which Wendy savors her youth and another where she’s tantalized by the prospect of growing up.The girl-powering of the plot means scrapping the catty mermaids, the glimmer of a love triangle with Tiger Lily (here played by Cree actress Alyssa Wapanatahk) and pretty much everything interesting that Tinkerbell (Yara Shahidi) once got to do, including her multiple attempts to murder Wendy. The fairy is now merely given a camera trick — Tinkervision — a blurred, jittery point of view that has its best moment when she flies through blood spatter.Lowery clearly adores the look of the cartoon. He and the cinematographer Bojan Bazelli pay it tribute with their use of moody skies, striking shadows, unexpected camera angles and a darkly beautiful color palette that shimmers like jewels in a cave. Still, these well-meaning choices struggle to cohere into a satisfying picture. Peter Pan comes across as a pest, and when Wendy belts the movie’s thesis — “This magic belongs to no boy!” — it hits the ear like a distracting clang.By the time the woolly pirates burst into their second rousing sea shanty (kudos to the song composer Curtis Glenn Heath), our minds begin to liken the Jolly Roger to the philosophical paradox of Theseus’s ship: How many planks can you swap out while still claiming it’s the real deal?Peter Pan & WendyRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      Disney’s Iger Returns to Familiar Stage, but With Different Challenges

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      The company reports quarterly earnings on Wednesday, and Wall Street is expecting it to lay out a new streaming strategy and operating structure.When it comes to reporting quarterly earnings, Robert A. Iger is an old pro. He has done it 58 times as Disney’s chief executive. But the next one, scheduled for Wednesday, will require him to give a performance for the corporate ages.“It has to be an impactful, meaningful, tone-setting, agenda-changing day,” said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at SVB MoffettNathanson who has followed Disney for 18 years.Another veteran Disney analyst, Jessica Reif Ehrlich of BofA Securities, agreed. “I don’t know that we’re going to see answers to everything, but Iger’s overall messaging is going to be critical,” she said.So, no pressure.On Wednesday, Mr. Iger will publicly face Wall Street and Hollywood for the first time since he came out of retirement to retake the reins of a deeply troubled Disney. In late November, the Disney board fired Bob Chapek as chief executive and rehired Mr. Iger, 71, who ran the company from late 2005 to early 2020. He is also contending with Nelson Peltz, the corporate raider turned activist investor. Mr. Peltz, 80, whose Trian Partners has amassed roughly $1 billion in Disney stock and is fighting for a board seat for himself or his son, wants the world’s largest entertainment company to revamp its streaming business, refocus on profit growth, cut costs, reinstate its dividend and do a much better job at succession planning.Most of those things were in motion at Disney before Mr. Peltz started his proxy battle, and analysts expect Mr. Iger to provide updates on at least some fronts on Wednesday.More on the Walt Disney CompanyLabor Tensions: Unions that represent about 32,000 full-time workers at Disney World said that members had voted overwhelmingly to reject the company’s offer for a new five-year contract.Splash Mountain’s Closure: As Disney takes steps to erase the racist back story of the Walt Disney World ride, some are claiming to be selling water from the attraction online.Return to Office: Starting on March 1, the Walt Disney Company will require employees to report to the office four days a week, a relatively strict policy among large companies.Pricing Policies: After complaints by visitors about the costs at its domestic theme parks, Disney revised policies related to ticketing, hotel parking, ride photos and annual passes.How are the content pipelines to Disney’s streaming services (Disney+, Hulu and Disney+) going to be managed? At 6:30 a.m. on his first day back, Mr. Iger ousted Disney’s top streaming executive and ordered a restructuring of a restructuring that Mr. Chapek had put into place.For months, Disney has been talking about cost cutting and layoffs. Where are they? “This can’t drag on,” Ms. Ehrlich said. “It’s not good for company morale.” (Speaking of morale, some Disney employees have been circulating a petition to protest Mr. Iger’s decision last month to require everyone to report to the office four days a week.)Shareholders are increasingly worried about the decline of Disney’s traditional television business, which includes ABC and 15 cable networks, led by ESPN, Disney Channel, FX, Freeform and National Geographic. Disney’s cable portfolio has held up better than those owned by some rival companies (notably NBCUniversal), but Americans have been cutting the cable cord at an alarming pace — total hookups declined by a record 6.2 percent from October to December.“We need an honest and appropriate view of the future of Disney’s television business,” Mr. Nathanson said. “Is there an asset change? Does spending change? Under Chapek, the messaging was never very clear.”Even in decline, traditional television remains Disney’s largest business, delivering $8.5 billion in operating income in the fiscal year that ended in October.Disney and other old-line media companies are facing a simple equation that has proved astoundingly difficult to solve: Profit from traditional television is declining at a faster rate than streaming losses are moderating. In Disney’s case, traditional television earnings are expected to decline by $1.6 billion in 2023, while losses from streaming will abate by only about $900 million, according to Mr. Nathanson.In November, Disney said that losses from its streaming portfolio totaled $1.5 billion from July through September, compared with $630 million a year earlier.But Mr. Chapek, who led the company’s November earnings call, reiterated a promise that Disney+ would turn a profit by next October. Wall Street has been skeptical of that assertion, and Mr. Iger may revise it on Wednesday, along with guidance that Disney+ would have 215 million to 245 million global subscriptions by 2024. Disney+ currently has about 164 million worldwide.Companies always try to put the rosiest spin possible on numbers when talking to analysts, shareholders and the news media on quarterly earnings conference calls. But the upbeat tone struck by Mr. Chapek in the November session did not sit well given the numbers that Disney was reporting. Along with widening losses in streaming, Disney had disappointing profit margins at its theme park business and missed Wall Street’s overall expectations for both revenue and net income, a rarity for the company. (When one senior Disney executive privately told Mr. Chapek before the call that his planned remarks were too positive, he called her Eeyore, the gloomy donkey from “Winnie the Pooh.”)Mr. Iger will undoubtedly highlight some of Disney’s recent achievements. “Avatar: The Way of Water,” released by Walt Disney Studios, has generated $2.2 billion worldwide since it arrived in theaters on Dec. 16. Disney received more Oscar nominations last month (23) than any other company. Over the end-of-year holidays, Disney’s theme parks were gridlocked, easing fears about consumer belt-tightening.“Despite the macro headwinds, the parks still feel incredibly strong,” Ms. Ehrlich said.But Mr. Iger will also need to contend with a lackluster set of overall numbers, at least if analysts’ forecasts are correct. Analysts are expecting per-share earnings of about 79 cents from Disney, down from $1.06 for the same period a year ago, and revenue of $23.4 billion, up from $21.8 billion a year ago.Analysts polled by FactSet estimate that Disney+ will have 163 million subscribers, a slight erosion from the previous quarter.Mr. Iger will probably not directly address Mr. Peltz’s proxy battle, unless an analyst prods him about it. Disney has already made its position clear, saying in a Jan. 17 securities filing that Mr. Peltz had “no strategy, no operating initiatives, no new ideas and no plan.” In a fresh eruption late last week, Trian said there was an “urgent need” for Disney shareholders to drop Michael B.G. Froman from the company’s board and give the seat to Mr. Peltz or his son. In response, Disney aggressively defended Mr. Froman, a senior Mastercard executive and former U.S. trade representative who has been a Disney director since 2018.Some prominent analysts have taken Disney’s side.“He hasn’t made a good enough case for why he needs a seat on the board,” Mr. Nathanson said, referring to Mr. Peltz.Richard Greenfield, a founder of the LightShed Partners research firm, was one of Mr. Iger’s most ardent critics during his previous tenure at Disney — so much so that Mr. Iger blocked him on Twitter and refused to take questions from him on earnings calls. Mr. Greenfield, however, recently published an aggressive defense of Disney titled “Disney Would Be Wise to Keep Peltz Off the Jedi Council.”Perhaps Mr. Iger will take a question from Mr. Greenfield on Wednesday. More

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      ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’ at 50: Those Are Magic Numbers

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      The educational snippets are the ultimate font of Gen X nostalgia. But what is it we’re nostalgic for?When I was in second grade, my teacher held a contest: The first students to memorize their multiplication tables would get dinner at McDonald’s. I was one of them. I’d like to credit hard work or the motivation of those golden fries, but in truth it was easy. I learned it from “Schoolhouse Rock.”It was not the last time that watching too much TV would pay off for me, but it was perhaps the sweetest.If you were an American kid around when I was (nineteen-seventy-cough), you probably have “Schoolhouse Rock” hard-wired into your brain too. The musical shorts, which began airing on ABC in 1973, taught Generation X multiplication, grammar, history and, eventually, nostalgia.That last lesson stuck best. Winona Ryder and company crooned “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m Just a Bill” in the 1994 generational-statement film “Reality Bites.” De La Soul borrowed “Three Is a Magic Number” as the backbone for their buoyant self-introduction, “The Magic Number,” in 1989. Nostalgia for “Schoolhouse Rock” is now itself old enough to be nostalgic for.On Wednesday, ABC will tap into that spirit with a prime time “50th Anniversary Singalong,” in which the Black Eyed Peas, the Muppets, Shaquille O’Neal and others will hook up the words, phrases and clauses of the Saturday-morning favorites.The Muppets are among the many guest stars who will appear in the ABC special “Schoolhouse Rock! 50th Anniversary Singalong.”Christopher Willard/ABCThe special promises wholesome family fun, and I can think of worse things to do on a weeknight than musically unpacking my adjectives in the judgment-free zone of my living room. But nostalgia is not just a fun emotion. Like some of the best “Schoolhouse Rock” songs, it carries a note of wistfulness.More on U.S. Schools and EducationHeavy Losses: A new global analysis suggests that children experienced learning deficits during the Covid-19 pandemic that amounted to about one-third of a school year’s worth of knowledge and skills.Police in Schools: Footage of a student’s violent arrest by a school resource officer has raised questions about the role of armed officers on campuses.Transgender Youth: Educators are facing new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students change their name, pronouns or gender expression at school.In Florida: The state will not allow a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies to be offered in its high schools, citing examples of what it calls “woke indoctrination.”In this case, it’s a reminder of a time when network TV gave us a common culture, language and lyrics, before we were sliced into subcultures and demographics. Pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-DVD — pre-VHS, even — “Schoolhouse Rock” convened a classroom of millions for three-minute servings of revolutionary art alongside installments of “The Great Grape Ape Show.”Like much classic kids’ TV, “Schoolhouse Rock” was brought to you by Madison Avenue. The ad executive David McCall, who noticed that his son could memorize pop songs but struggled with arithmetic, suggested to George Newall, a creative director, and Thomas Yohe, an art director, that they figure out how to set math to music.As Newell told the Times in 1994, they pitched the idea to Michael Eisner, then the director of children’s programming at ABC, who happened to be meeting with the legendary Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. “I think you should buy it right away,” Jones said.Unlike the dutiful news interstitials that vitamin-fortified other Saturday-morning cartoon lineups, “Schoolhouse Rock” harnessed the power of comedy and ear worms. The facts and figures made it educational. But they weren’t what made it art.That was the animation, psychedelically colorful and chock-full of rapid-fire slapstick gags. Above all, there was the sophisticated music. The jazz composer Bob Dorough wrote the banger-filled first season, “Multiplication Rock,” surveying a range of styles from the duodecimal prog-rock of “Little Twelvetoes” to the spiraling lullaby of “Figure Eight.”The lyrics were sly and funny but could also detour, like a fidgety schoolkid sitting by the window, into daydreams. The blissful “Three Is a Magic Number” isn’t just a primer on multiples; it’s a rumination on the triad foundations of the universe, from geometry to love. (If your voice does not break singing, “A man and a woman had a little baby,” you’re doing something wrong.)The following seasons, about grammar, American history and science, added other contributors, including Lynn Ahrens, the future Broadway songwriter thanks to whom an entire generation cannot recite the preamble to the Constitution without breaking into song.The short “Conjunction Junction” was referenced in the 1994 film “Reality Bites,” a sign that nostalgia for “Schoolhouse Rock” is now itself old enough to be nostalgic for.ABC, via Everett CollectionThe words and numbers in “Schoolhouse Rock” were never just words and numbers. Like the early years of “Sesame Street,” the shorts had an anarchic spirit and a pluralistic sensibility. “I Got Six” is a funk explosion whose Afrocentric animation includes a dashiki-ed African prince with six rings on all 10 fingers. “Verb: That’s What’s Happening” — imagine if Curtis Mayfield taught your English class — depicts a Black superhero long before Black Panther made it to the movie screen.When my kids were school-aged, I got the full “Schoolhouse Rock” DVD set for them, which is to say, I got it for me. (You can now stream the ’70s seasons, plus a brief 1980s series about computers and a clunky 1990s revival, “Money Rock,” through Disney+.)Rewatching the series taught me about a new subject: Time.The songs are as catchy as ever. But to screen “Schoolhouse Rock” as an adult is to visit a different period in cultural history, and not just because of the bell-bottoms. The America of “Schoolhouse Rock” was divided by Vietnam and Watergate, but it could at least subscribe to basic common facts and civic principles.Consider Bill, the underdog paper hero of “I’m Just a Bill,” longing to become a law that would keep that cartoon school bus safe at railroad crossings. Now he’s a time traveler, from a pre-Reagan age when government activism, however imperfect, was considered a force for good.Today, with culture-warring politicians like the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, red-penciling school curriculums, weaponizing pronouns and hammering history teachers for “indoctrination,” the potential land mines add up. “The Great American Melting Pot” did not imagine a future president telling asylum seekers, “Our country is full.” When “Interjections” depicted a doctor giving a child a shot, it did not anticipate legislators denouncing Big Bird for advocating childhood vaccination.A scene from the anniversary special. Whatever its flaws, “Schoolhouse Rock” told children that they counted with the same numbers and were entitled to the same rights.Christopher Willard/ABC(Likewise, when “Elementary, My Dear” taught counting by twos with a gospel-style Noah’s Ark song, it didn’t fear repercussions for bringing religion into kids’ TV.)And that’s before you even get to “Science Rock.” “The Energy Blues” makes a matter-of-fact pitch for conservation that would cause smoke eruptions today. (In 2009, a climate-focused season, “Earth Rock” went straight to DVD.) When “Schoolhouse Rock” showed kids a three-minute video on how the body worked, there was no internet algorithm to suggest a rebuttal by someone who “did his own research.”That said, I wouldn’t romanticize the “Schoolhouse Rock” era as a paradise of educational consensus. In 1974, the year before the “America Rock” season began, protesters against desegregation in Boston threw rocks at buses carrying Black students. And the series had its own blind spots, which historians and educators have since pointed out.In particular, “America Rock,” an upbeat celebration of the bicentennial, covers the American Revolution and women’s suffrage but skips over the Civil War and slavery. (The Roots filled in this hole in a 2017 episode of “black-ish” with “I Am a Slave,” about Juneteenth.) “Elbow Room” is a jaunty story of westward expansion from the point of view of white settlers, with little note of who got elbowed out. (One scene shows a settler taking a toy arrow through his hat.) America’s unflattering history didn’t make the cut because mass broadcasting meant not alienating the masses.But whatever its limits, “Schoolhouse Rock” at least told us we were equal: We counted with the same numbers, our hearts pumped the same blood, we were entitled to the same inalienable rights.And it operated in a period when people saw the same media and accepted the same facts. Months after its premiere, the Watergate hearings also aired on national TV. They were able eventually to turn even many Republicans against President Nixon, in part because Americans watched the same story together, without a partisan cable and internet ecosystem to spin the investigation as a witch hunt.It’s tempting to say that you couldn’t make “Schoolhouse Rock” again today. But I’m sure you could, even if it would be slightly different. Current kids’ shows like Netflix’s “We the People” are in a way exactly that. What you couldn’t create again today is the mass audience, or the context in which we assembled, one nation, sitting cross-legged in front of our cathode-ray teacher.Instead, we have “Schoolhouse Rock” binge-watches and sing-alongs, which, like all exercises in nostalgia, offer the tantalizing pleasure of stretching to touch yesterday, though we know we can’t. The past is like infinity, a concept that “Schoolhouse Rock” also introduced to my generation. “No one ever gets there,” as “My Hero, Zero” taught us. “But you could try.” More

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      D.I.Y. Sci-Fi: A Talk With Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

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      The filmmaking and acting team discuss their latest low-budget science fiction movie, “Something in the Dirt,” and their work on the Marvel Disney+ series “Moon Knight.”The writing-directing-acting duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s latest film, the science fiction satire “Something in the Dirt,” follows John (Moorhead) and Levi (Benson), neighboring tenants in a ramshackle Los Angeles apartment complex. After observing inexplicable supernatural phenomena in Levi’s flat, they attempt to capture the event on camera for personal gain, but meet disaster instead.Since releasing their feature debut, “Resolution” (2013), Benson and Moorhead have made movies their way, exercising full creative control over their malleable, genre-fluid aesthetic. Referred to in reviews as their “most personal” movie after its Sundance premiere, “Something in the Dirt” (in theaters) is a distillation of their sensibilities, striking a lopsided contrast with their directing contributions to the Marvel Disney+ series “Moon Knight,” an atypically weird superhero show involving dissociative identity disorder, Egyptian gods and Oscar Isaac.In an interview via Zoom, the two discussed nuances in personal filmmaking, the line between virtue and villainy, and how directing for an entertainment giant crystallized their filmmaking identities. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“Something in the Dirt” is about two guys making a movie. Did the way that you make movies and collaborate wind up echoing in the story?Justin Benson: What’s strange is our dynamic and our filmmaking process and our relationship couldn’t be more different than John and Levi’s. Obviously we’ve seen it described as “their most personal film.” There is probably some truth to that, but you’ve got to get into this oddly precise definition of “personal,” because it’s the farthest thing from autobiographical. The characters were intentionally constructed to be wildly different from who we are.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and TV series continues to expand.‘She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’: Tatiana Maslany described the giant, green character making her television debut on Disney+ as “weirdly, the closest thing to my own experience I’ve done ever.”‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’: The trailer for the long-awaited sequel was unveiled at Comic-Con International in San Diego. The film will be released on Nov. 11.‘Thor: Love and Thunder’: The fourth “Thor” movie in 11 years, directed by Taika Waititi, embraces wholesale self-parody and is sillier than any of its predecessors.‘Ms. Marvel’: This Disney+ series introduces a new character: Kamala Khan, a Muslim high schooler in Jersey City who is mysteriously granted superpowers.Aaron Moorhead: For the most part we were interested in these characters because we were exploring stuff we don’t believe. That’s not just in our films. That’s our free time, our conversations. The stuff that’s interesting feels a little dangerous. It’s on a razor’s edge of being mockable, but still can hold resonance in our minds and hearts.Benson: The only similarity between Aaron and I and John and Levi is we spend a lot of time talking about science fiction. But that’s the point. The huge difference for us is that John and Levi are quick to believe, and we never believe in anything.Moorhead and Benson in “Something in the Dirt.”XYZ/Rustic FilmsJohn and Levi trade stories with each other that either are not true or are dubious. It feels like there’s a bit of you in that dynamic. Was it gratifying to play that in this fictional, very fractured environment?Benson: There’s a cut line from the movie — Levi accuses John of being a liar, and John says, “You lie more than anyone I’ve ever met!” They lie in different ways. Levi works at a bar and wants to put his best foot forward. He’s probably got half a dozen different stories, and once you run out of them, you end up with this sad, lonely soul. John lies for other reasons, but the way they lie was part of fleshing them out as real human beings.Moorhead: We were dedicated to this idea of: you sympathize with one character and suspect the other is a villain, and then it slowly swaps through the movie, and by the end, you realize they’re both flawed human beings, neither villain nor hero. Neither of us ever believed the characters we were playing were bad people, but while we were performing, we believed in the virtue of what they were doing. There’s a part of me deep down that says it isn’t villainous if you’re virtuous, but you don’t know if you’re virtuous or not. You just hope you are.Benson: The different ways John and Levi lie connects them to us as creators, hopefully as characters with humanity. You hope that in the way science fiction operates, people don’t think you’re lying, that they understand it’s science fiction storytelling — that people don’t think you’re expressing a viewpoint one would call a lie.Moorhead: It was part of the conception of this movie to examine your own relationship with pop culture and what you put out in the world. Sometimes lies enter the zeitgeist in a way you didn’t intend. What exactly is the responsibility of the person who’s creating these things whole cloth? It is terrifying as a filmmaker to think someone might actually believe that what you are showing them is real.“Something in the Dirt” premiered at Sundance. “Moon Knight” premiered in March. This isn’t a knock against “Moon Knight,” but it comparatively feels impersonal because it’s a Marvel production. There’s a big leap from your movies “Spring” and “The Endless” to Marvel. Did that personal quality remain intact in that framework?Moorhead: When we faced a decade of being completely unemployable, we walked into every single studio pitch room on every single project, pitched our hearts out and wouldn’t be able to make it happen. We now realize that was for the better, because our alternative was to make a personal independent film. That solidified in our own minds, but also in the minds of what you call the industry, what exactly we’re doing. Now, when people ask us if we want to do something, it’s in that niche — not broadly horror, broadly sci-fi. There’s mystery afoot, and something dark and cosmic about it.It isn’t that we have to erase our personality and work within the machine. What [Marvel] wanted from us was our voice. It comes out mostly in the visuals, because scripts are separate from direction, but we put a lot of ourselves into it. But your thesis is definitely correct. There’s by definition nothing more personal than an independent film.Benson: [“Moon Knight”] has given us opportunities to work with collaborators we wouldn’t otherwise, which has expanded our creative worlds. These opportunities have also given us time on set in a compressed period that’s been like a second film school in some ways — though being a filmmaker is continuously being in film school, because every day is never planned for, really.Moorhead: The greatest terror we both hold is losing our curiosity and ability to grow. It can happen, and it can sneak up on you. If you only ever make your own films, you might start to repeat yourself because you think you’ve got a bunch of great ideas, but they’re all the same idea. We only want to make stuff that expresses ourselves purely. Right now, doing something big and doing something indie, they feed each other very nicely. More