Is Disney Still Capable of Making 'Good' Villains?

This piece originally appeared on November 16, 2023 in Sound Signal, our biweekly newsletter that identifies emerging artists, scenes, and trending tracks, crafted by the world's best writers and curators. Sign up here to never miss our take on what's next in music.

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Disney fans are pissed. For many, the legendary studio’s nostalgia runs so deep that longtime fans are even protective over its villains. According to the internet, Wish, a new animated film (out November 18) about a teen’s endeavor to save her kingdom from a “coming darkness,” doesn’t have a convincing villain soundtrack. On October 24, Disney teased “This Is The Thanks I Get,” the marquee song of antagonist King Magnifico (voiced by Chris Pine). Chaos ensued. “This Is The Thanks I Get,” which sounds like a watered-down version of “Under the Sea,” has 3M posts on TikTok, mostly panning the track. Some think Disney is “running out of ideas,” others say it represents the Lin-Manuel Miranda-ification of musicals.

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One popular post, which has 1M likes, shows “What Disney’s capable of” through a montage of villain favorites: The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s “Hellfire,” The Lion King’s “Be Prepared,” and Princess and the Frog’s “Friends On The Other Side.” Scar and Judge Claude Frollo were pure terror to my young self, and their signature numbers cemented the feeling; perhaps the lack of doom in the Wish song has people up in arms. How threatening can a moderate tempo in A major be?

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The prevailing sentiment online is that Pine’s voice lacks authenticity and sounds like it was “generated by an AI that was told to imitate Lin-Manuel,” as one Reddit user put it. The Hamilton composer wrote for Moana, Encanto, Mary Poppins Returns, and the new Little Mermaid. Though the official credits for the songwriting are to Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice, some on Twitter have come to its defense, which hasn’t stopped people from piling on the accusations.

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This fan-centric outcry carries weight in the year of a historic SAG-AFTRA strike, negotiations over AI use in screenwriting, and significant worries over AI-generated music. And a noted “crisis at Marvel” suggests audiences may be tired of being treated like children, even in movies made for kids. Disney may never admit if a machine wrote “This Is The Thanks I Get,” but the people have spoken: They prefer their villains with menacing anthems and without redemption arcs. Still, King Magnifico shook the internet. Maybe he’s the perfect villain, after all.

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