Live-action mistake: Disney’s Mulan (2020), failure analysis, and media industry studies

Abstract

Within engineering, failure analysis identifies and assesses technical failure in the hopes of preventing it for the future. What value, if any, might this kind of critical postmortem offer media industry studies? This article considers Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan as a ‘media failure’–a rare fumble from a global media conglomerate with a consistent record of blockbuster successes. Considering a range of factors and stakeholders, this article underscores how studying failure not only can be as generative as studying major successes, but also can reveal how media failure itself is often a situated, constructed phenomenon.