This is Disney, FCOL! They've been on the downslope again since The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It's their pattern, a handful of absolute classics, then a pile of crap.

They made five classics between 1937 and 1942, then went forgettable until 1950, when they hit a purple patch that lasted until 1959. Between 1964 and 1973 they managed some better-than-average films. Then they got into a stride again in 1989 with The Little Mermaid, producing seven classics and two clunkers. Since then we've had The Emperors' New Groove (2000), Tangled (2010), Wreck-It Ralph (2012), Frozen (2013), and Moana (2016). (I was going to include Brave (2012) but that was Pixar, wasn't it?) All peaks rising - sometimes only just - out of a sea of turkeys and unnecessary sequels.

Why should a crap Disney film be a surprise, any more than yet another unnecessary, retcon/addition to the Star Trek franchise? Lilo & Stitch was set in Hawaii, with mostly Hawaiian native characters -diverse, but still trite, saccharine and pointless. Must I also point out the total absence of white/European characters in both the excellent Aladdin and the execrable Mulan?

It's entirely possible that Disney had bet the farm on getting Harry Potter, and have been running around like headless chickens ever since. They knew they'd never get LOTR, because when Tolkien sold the rights to United Artists in 1960, he stipulated that they were never to be given or sold to Disney. But Potter was - in their minds at least -a property that was right in their established field and would be, as it has since proved, a twenty-year money-spinner. They probably had the plans all laid out, right from moving Hogwarts to Massachusetts to a blonde Hermione singing to animals. But JKR, in one of her few lucid moments, turned them down and stuck to it, forcing Disney to abandon the plan and just churn out anything they could find!

How's that for a conspiracy theory?