Disney's Enchanted Holiday Formula

This year, Disney has improved on the holiday hit formula by turning out its patented family-friendly fare at a budget that promises big returns

by Ronald Grover

It has been a staple of the holidays for years. As the leaves turn brown and the holidays beckon, Walt Disney (DIS) greets kids and their parents with a family movie that does tons of business and, if the stars are aligned (as they often are), the hit plays straight through New Year's Day. Heck, Disney virtually invented the notion of a two-month holiday box office back in 1987, holding off releasing its Ted Danson/Tom Selleck flick Three Men and a Baby in the summer to ship it to theaters for Turkey Day. The rest, as they say, is history, marked by such November megawinners as The Incredibles, Disney's top-performing film in 2004, and $100 million films such as The Santa Clause 2 and Monsters, Inc. The common denominator for those films: They were either high-end animation movies or films with big-deal movie stars like Tim Allen in The Santa Clause.

Blockbuster on a Budget

But Disney seems to be switching gears this year with the Nov. 21 release of Enchanted, a film that seems to have neither mind-blowing animation nor star power going for it. The movie, a fantasy about an animated princess (Giselle) who is banished to New York to become a real-life ex-princess, has no star capable of carrying a film. (It does star Patrick Dempsey from Disney's ABC hit Grey's Anatomy. And while he brings his McDreamy thing to this flick, he hardly carries the picture.) As for animation, well, there is some of that—about 20 minutes' worth at the beginning that is less entertaining than cute, in a reverent Disney sort of way, with Bambi-like deer cavorting and a Chip 'n' Dale look-alike called Pip. Those few minutes are nothing a Disney animator would ever put on his or her résumé—in fact, it was created by a crew of former Disneyites.

Still, I'm going to go out on what I believe is a pretty sturdy limb and predict that Disney has found a new genre for itself: the modestly budgeted family film that plays in the big leagues, where Pixar & Co. usually tread. From the buzz I'm hearing, Disney has another hit on its hands and likely one that will beef up earnings.

How? For starters, it's a cute movie that features a relative newcomer in 33-year-old Amy Adams, who is terminally adorable and plays the role of the too-pampered Princess Giselle with dumb-witted charm and sings with a voice so sugary-sweet you'd think she'd been lifted straight from a cartoonist's drawing pad. Dempsey/McDreamy, as lawyer Robert Phillips, likely will bring in a few teenyboppers. But the biggest thing going for the movie may be the fact it was made for far less than the $100-million-plus that has become commonplace for Disney animated films. Nor is a hefty piece of the profits going to a star, like the chunk Tim Allen got last year for his third Santa Clause film.

What will make Enchanted, well, enchanting to audiences, will likely be the Magic Castle on the logo that precedes it, along with the words "Walt Disney" before the title. I'm not saying Disney can make a hit out of a flop—they've had their stinkeroos. But when it comes to the holidays, no studio seems to understand its audience better or to market to them more aggressively. When the holidays come around and you've got a couple of kids in tow, you desperately want to see something from Disney. Heck, this is the crew that made a hit out of Chicken Little two Thanksgivings ago.

Luckily for Disney, Enchanted doesn't disappoint. But then again, how could it? Disney has made this flick about as bomb-proof as anyone could. To beef up the music, Disney studio chief Dick Cook brought in the songwriting team of Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz, who between them have 11 Oscars for films that include The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Pocahontas.