To be fair, this is not the first time Disney has been in trouble. After WWII, Walt Disney had to practically rebuild the studio from scratch since, during the war, its focus had been realigned to war-time products. Then 1970 to 1988 was the company’s second “dark age,” a time of wild experimentation as the ship drifted after Walt’s death.

However, the company bounced back stronger both times with “Cinderella” in 1950 and “The Little Mermaid” in 1989. The Disney Renaissance unfolded over the next decade. More importantly, the products created during these slouch periods, in hindsight, still feel like Disney. Some are insipid (“The Fox and the Hound”), some explore the dark side of childhood (“The Black Hole,” “Something Wicked This Way Comes”), but there are still elements of that hard-to-describe Disney magic in them.

The company’s current troubles are much worse than a few box-office disappointments. They’re more like box-office bloodbaths.

[The problem for Disney isn’t bad box office, at least not its core problem. As Stone says, Disney’s had these spells before and managed to revive itself. However, those crises were different in one key way: Disney didn’t damage its brand trust on family-oriented entertainment the way they have in their Woke Era. Disney may have produced a few duds, but the duds didn’t attempt to indoctrinate children into radical political ideologies or attack faith itself, and especially never denigrated its own classics in the way Disney and its stars have chosen to do. I wrote about that a few months back by making it into a Disney-esque fable, in fact. That’s what makes this crisis different, and why the damage will be much harder to repair. — Ed]