The Walt Disney Company, Family Entertainment, and Hollywood’s Global Hits

This chapter examines how the Walt Disney Company achieved its recent dominance at the global box office by reviewing the company's ever more complex operations across its whole history and its commercially most successful features (both in the cinema and on video/DVD/Blu-ray) since the 1940s. The chapter shows that Disney paved the way for Star Wars (1977) and Hollywood's renewed focus on family entertainment from the late 1970s onwards. The analysis focuses on Hollywood’s biggest hits, highlighting their appeal to an all-inclusive mass audience and the internationalism of their stories, characters, and themes, with a special emphasis on the centrality both of parent-child relationships and of global threats and devastation.