IMHO, the streaming revolution is what is killing the movies, but I’m tired of grousing about the streamers and will let that go for today.
I don’t pretend to be an expert, but a lot of the people I read and listen to think that Disney is a lost cause. Increasingly I tend to agree. All of the streamers suffer from wokeitis, but in Disney’s case the problem seems to go deeper than that.
At this point, I incline towards the view that Disney won’t survive in the long run unless there is a shareholder revolt, a takeover of the Board of Directors by people determined to reverse course, a wholesale purge of senior management, and a determined, sustained effort to clean house at lower levels. And at Disney, the cancer is so widespread that the company will have to be substantially rebuilt from the bottom up.
The other streamers are a mixed bag. Some are worse than others, but I occasionally find movies worth recommending. (Many of the best are independent or foreign films that they’ve picked up for distribution.) But Disney is in a death spiral. It needs a Board coup.
The big thing happened when Disney started not paying the royalties on the property they bought. And they would make you sign a NDA before they would talk to you about the fact that "screw your contract with 20th Century Fox, Lucas Films or what ever, we have no obligation to pay you, we just bought the rights not the responsibilities".
Now of course that is not true but when you were looking at taking on the biggest bully on the block, you could not go to the media (NDA remember) and the reason that you asked about the royalties was you needed the money you were kind of up a creek.
This was whispered about in the writing community, especially SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association) but nothing that you could really nail down.
And then Alan Dean Foster got sick. And he tried to make sure his estate was in order so his wife would be taken care of. And he discovered what Disney was doing. ADF had written tie-in books for decades and his contracts were written most carefully because he know what kind of snakes ran the studios. So he KNEW that he was in the right and Disney was in the wrong. So he told them what they could do with their NDA and went to war. And won.
But now the whispers were shown to be correct. If you were a writer for Disney you were not going to get paid. So it is not your imagination. The quality of writing has gone down hill because good writers refuse to work for Disney.
They have only themselves to blame.