Here’s how Kingdom Hearts pulled it off: The game’s hero, Sora, ventures into a wacky multiverse of Disney and Final Fantasy worlds. In a talk at DICE 2010, Disney exec Steve Wadsworth and his colleague Graham Hopper looked back on Kingdom Hearts’ legacy, with Hopper noting it was “so radical” for Disney and Square Enix to mash up their characters that many staffers worried internally that the result would be “an abomination.” Why would Disney have agreed to something like this, they wondered? Cloud Strife and Donald Duck, in the same game? How the heck was that going to work? Back in 2002, Kingdom Hearts was a revelation - a never-before-seen example of corporate collaboration across movies and video games. These days, Sora has a much bigger villain to fight: the exhaustion that people everywhere have begun to feel toward crossover events in general and those from Disney in particular.Ĭloud Strife and Donald Duck, in the same game? Or maybe it was because the landscape of pop culture has changed so much since the first Kingdom Hearts game came out back in 2002. Maybe it was because Sora and his friends sailed into the uncanny valley during the Pirates of the Caribbean section maybe it’s because Elsa performed “Let It Go” in its entirety rather than cutting out a chorus or two and letting us be on our way. It doesn’t help that Kingdom Hearts 3 did not exactly recapture the magic. Perhaps that’s why the announcement of Kingdom Hearts 4, and the rumor that Star Wars characters could show up in the game, feels bittersweet. It helps that a few of those corporations now own all of the other ones - and there is no media company more notorious for that accomplishment than Disney, the proud owner of Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox, and more. From Fortnite to Space Jam 2, media corporations have learned to play nice with one another in the name of epic money-making. It’s 2022, and crossovers are everywhere.
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