The Mediocre Mermaid.

And audiences aren't fleeing a nakedly politicized Disney so much as they are drifting away from dreary storytelling: It wasn't the presence of gay characters in last year's inert Lightyear and tedious Strange World that tanked their box office, but that the political signaling felt particularly heavy-handed given that the movies had nothing else to offer. And a Disney whose movies don't inspire that love any longer is a Disney that's more vulnerable than a visitor to the Magic Kingdom might suspect. Politics has something to do with this rut, though often in a subtle rather than a flagrant way: In the age of woke, Disney's storytellers seem uncomfortable with the old fairy-tale reliables, such as sweeping romance and outrageous villainy, and instead keep trying to reinvent the Disney movie with more familial drama and more impersonal antagonists. [Extracted from the article]