Crater is the latest Disney+ original movie and comes just days after the disappointing news that Disney+ will be removing content from its services. During a recent earnings call for Disney, CFO Christine McCarthy revealed that the company is in the process of removing certain content from their streaming service and, similar to Warner Bros. Discovery, will write down some of these projects by removing them from Disney+. The intention is now to produce fewer projects and cut back on projects that don’t seem to increase subscriber growth.
Crater is a very good movie. Despite originally being developed at 20th Century Fox before Disney bought the studio and acquired the project, it feels very much at home with a certain style of Disney movies. It’s an original idea, aimed primarily at kids and families, and it’s a high-concept pitch that harkens back to the early days of Walt Disney’s live-action movies. Still, it’s unfortunately the type of movie that’s likely to be sacrificed as a write-off or not be seen as a high value to the company in the future because it won’t lead to more subscribers. Careless, Crater has a lot of value to offer that cannot be quantified.
Crater is a story about growing up
Crater is set on a moon colony in 2257, where humans work to mine resources so that humanity has the fuel to travel to a planet called Omega, a new human settlement. The story follows a young boy named Caleb (Isaiah Russell-Bailey). After his father’s death, he would be sent to Omega due to a contractual reason that says anyone who dies working in the mines will have their family sent to the new planet.
Before he is permanently placed on another planet, his three friends – Dylan (Billy Barratt), Borney (Orson Hong) and Marcus (Thomas Boyce), in addition to another transfer to the Addison (McKenna Grace) colony, decide to steal a lunar rover to to visit a crater that Caleb’s mom and dad used to visit. This journey will test these children emotionally and see them become masters of their own destiny. Among all science fiction sets, Crater is a coming-of-age story about a group of friends who must cope with the fact that one of their friends is about to move out and have one last night of fun.
Crater is directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, who is best known for character focused dramas like Easier to practice And The Stanford Prison Experiment. While he may seem like an odd choice for what is a family movie, he brings with him a level of emotional maturity necessary for the project. He’s able to capture the fun of these kids on their journey, but he’s also able to have quieter, somber moments of characters just talking as they contemplate their futures and own mortality.
The film also features a cast of strong young actors. The cast is minimal, with only a few adult speaking parts, with the primary focus on the central kids, and much of the film rests on their shoulders. McKenna Grace has been a rising star for years and shows why she is one of the top young stars in Hollywood. Russell-Bailey, Barratt, Hong and Boyce not only hold their own, but shine as performers tasked with conveying carefree children, as well as children who have had the burden of adulthood upon them sooner than expected. This is a talented cast that audiences will hopefully see in movies for years to come.
Crater plays on fears and anxieties of its target audience
Crater‘s base place Stay with me meets Ad Astra. The film is produced by Shawn Levy, who has made a career of making modern Amblin Entertainment films such as ET, The GooniesAnd Batteries not included. Be it movies he has directed Really steal And The Adam Project to his other endeavors as a producer Love and monsters or the successful one Stranger thingsLevy specializes in creating projects aimed at capturing that ’80s Amblin magic that audiences love, while also updating them for 21st century audiences.
Yet while Stranger things And The Adam Project are very much focused on evoking those movies to appeal to an older audience that grew up with them, Crater is very much aimed at an audience of kids, which makes it more authentic to those 80s style kids movies.
What makes Crater uniquely interesting is how it’s a movie aimed at Gen Z that seems to speak to concerns and fears they have. Crater has noticed quite a bit of commentary about class, as it has been established that anyone working on the lunar colony should theoretically be able to go to Omega after 20 years of work. But the strict contract means anyone who misses a workday, is sick, or slows down production can add more time to their shift, and it can also be passed down through generations. So the kids in it Crater start their lives finishing the time their parents had before they even started their own business, effectively making this a life they can never escape.
This brings to mind the idea of debt and notions of generational traumas, anxieties and fears that many children face today as they were born into a world of ongoing global conflict and recessions and even spent much of their adolescence indoors due to a global pandemic. Social media has made them much more aware of the injustices in the world, forcing many to grow up quickly. Crater acknowledges that and is a kids movie that is very focused on them, rather than their parents trying to remind them of their own childhood. Crater instead asks an older audience to engage with a story that isn’t about them and take a real stand.
Disney changes movies and leaves them behind as Crater
Disney celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, celebrating the company’s history extensively. What often gets the spotlight are their animated classics that have served as the mainstays of the company, or recent entries from subsidiaries like Marvel and Pixar, the Star Wars franchise, or even iconic live-action pieces such as Mary Poppins and the pirates of the Caribbean. Still, Disney seems to want to forget about the smaller films that have given it an identity.
Disney has been a constantly changing company and their business model has changed. They still wanted to invest in mid-budget theatrical family movies, and Disney Channel Original Movies was another way for them to tell the same wacky stories aimed at kids that they specialized in in the 1950s and 1960s. When Disney+ launched, the original movies seemed to be the mid-budget movie that the studio stopped releasing in theaters, but had more polish and bigger budgets than what they could afford a Disney Channel movie. Who needed material Crater a home.
Disney is now focused on blockbuster events, so much so that even a remake is fun Peter Pan and Wendy or a highly anticipated sequel like Disillusioned are too risky for theatrical releases. Movies like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The little Mermaid, ElementaryAnd Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate fill their summer slate and are all blockbusters. Less than a decade ago, Disney was still releasing mid-budget films in the cinema. The same year they came out Guardians of the Universethey also released movies like Million dollar poor And Alexander and the terrible, terrible, not good, very bad day. Now those would both be Disney+ releases, if they were made at all.
Crater is a Disney movie that the company sadly doesn’t believe is viable in the theatrical market, and there was a time when audiences and creatives alike could be thankful there was at least a market like streaming to invest in it. Yet those days now feel numbered. To get made, one must be a major franchise. It’s not going to be a Marvel movie or one Star Wars project that is difficult to get off the ground at Disney, but has a film-like character Crater.
While Disney may have only seen it as content for their streaming service, it’s clear that the creatives, both in front of and behind the camera, have put a lot of effort into Crater a movie they want to see. They didn’t create a piece of content to be thrown away. They set out to make a film that could entertain, educate and inspire, and they achieved it. It may not be groundbreaking, but not all movies have to be. Sometimes a movie can just exist. If it appeals to someone, it matters. You never know who will be reached and influenced by a film like this. To sort Crater and watch it with the family this summer for a nice relaxing afternoon, as it shouldn’t be lost in the vast space of streaming.
Crater debuts on Disney+ on May 12, 2023.