Last week, Disney released Moana 2, their sequel to the 2016 film Moana. It can feel like Disney has been increasingly relying on sequels rather than new, original movies over the past several years, but Disney sequels aren’t exactly a new trend. If we look at the list of films produced by Walt Disney studios, the idea of sequels goes back almost to the beginning.
Arguably, the first Disney sequel was The Three Caballeros, released all the way back in 1945. This was during an era where Disney was releasing what they called package films, films that were made up of several shorts usually held together by a similar theme. The first of these package films was Saludos Amigos (1943) which was a film commissioned by the United States Department of State designed to promote goodwill towards Latin American countries. The movie featured segments where Donald and Goofy visited different Latin American countries and in the final segment, Donald meets José Carioca, a parrot from Brazil.
Two years later, The Three Caballeros was released. Also part of the studio’s goodwill tour, The Three Caballeros was themed around Donald Duck receiving birthday presents from his friends across Latin America, with each present resulting in a different short film. The movie featured the return of José Carioca from the previous movie and introduced a rooster from Mexico named Panchito Pistoles. Together, the three characters made up the titular Three Caballeros. Due to the nature of the package films having very little overarching plots, The Three Caballeros is not always considered to be a direct sequel, though the friendship between José Carioca and Donald in this movie is a direct result of their meeting in the previous film.
The next Disney sequel would not appear for almost fifty years. In 1990, Walt Disney studios released their second sequel, The Rescuers Down Under, a sequel to The Rescuers from 1977. Throughout the 1980s, The Rescuers became one of Disney’s most successful recent animated films, which resulted in the new heads of the studio commissioning a direct sequel. With the rise in popularity of Australian themed movies (Crocodile Dundee was released in 1986), the events of the second movie were moved to Australia.
The movie featured the return of the major characters from the first one, but The Rescuers Down Under ended up being a financial bomb. Not only did The Rescuers Down Under flop at the box office, it was released right in the middle of the Disney Renaissance, between The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. This caused Disney to back away from the idea of theatrical sequels, though they weren’t entirely out of the sequel game.
In 1994, The Return of Jafar was released directly to video. The movie, which was developed by combining the first five episodes of the planned Aladdin TV show, ended up being one of the fifteen best selling VHS of all time. Making over $300 million on a budget of $5 million, the success of The Return of Jafar sent the Disney sequel in a new direction. From 1994 to 2008, Disney would produce direct to home video sequels for more than fifteen of their movies.
In some cases they would even make multiple sequels (or prequels or midquels) to some of their most popular films. The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella and Tarzan are among the Disney movies that have spawned at least two additional movies. Eventually this trend was stopped as it was believed the lower budget direct to DVD sequels were hurting the Disney brand more and more, as they were usually met with negative reviews and never compared favorably to the theatrically released Disney movies. The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning, a prequel, would be the last of the movies released in this era. (A series of Tinker Bell movies was released after this, though these are considered their own franchise called Disney Fairies, rather than a continuation of the Peter Pan movie.)
It would be a decade before Disney sequels would return, with Ralph Breaks the Internet being released in 2018, and Frozen II in 2019. Both movies were sequels to a movie from six years earlier with Wreck-It Ralph coming out in 2012 and the first Frozen in 2013. While it may seem obvious why Disney decided to make a sequel to Frozen (When it was released, Frozen became the highest grossing animated film of all time, and at the time was only the second animated film to ever make more than a billion dollars at the box office.), but in the case of Wreck-It Ralph, the film’s creators were already coming up with ideas for a sequel before the first movie was even released. They felt like they had a lot more stories that could be told in the world they had created, and were eager to explore where they could go in another movie. Ralph Breaks the Internet in 2018, marked the first time in Disney history where the sequel was made by the same creative team that made the first movie.
And this brings us all the way back to Moana 2. With the success of these recent sequels, as well as the record setting box office of Moana 2, it should be no surprise that Disney will continue to increase the output of sequels. A sequel to Zootopia is scheduled for next year, and at least two more Frozen movies are reported to be in development. Sequels have always been a big part of movies, and while Disney has had a mixed track record with the idea over the years, that hasn’t stopped them from trying to recreate the success of their biggest movies in some way, shape, or form.