James Cameron’s cyberpunk fan-loved feature film Alita: Battle Angel is on its way to Disney’s VOD service Disney+ Star this year.
Fans rejoice! There is a future for our favourite Battle Angel after all. Disney have not forgotten about Alita. She’s finally coming to the small screen!
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It appeared that The Walt Disney Company wanted nothing to do with Battle Angel after it got smeared by mainstream media for being film for white supremacist Nazis. Yes, I kid you not. Because Alita: Battle Angel was better received than Marvel’s Captain Marvel, Brie Larson fans and the mainstream media started smearing the film and its fans for being Nazis.
Our suspicions were confirmed when a source close to 20th Century Studios told us personally that Disney had no interested in discussing the highly anticipated sequel currently titled Alita: Fallen Angel until Captain Marvel 2 hit theatres.
“Some executives are blaming Alita for the negative press surrounding Captain Marvel, and they do not want a repeat of this situation,” the source told us.
A lot has changed since 2019 and the film industry suffered massive losses due to the lockdown of cinemas. Disney were forced to premiere a lot of their new films — of which there weren’t that many– on Disney+ which meant meant the studio lost a lot of money.
However, that is now changing and cinemas are slowly opening up around the world again and the film industry has seemingly had Cardioversion. But one of the movies that still seems to be greyed out by Disney is the highly anticipated sequel, Alita: Fallen Angel. That was until recently.
Fans have been wondering what the heck happened to the movie after it hit cinemas in 2019. Two years later and it is not available on any streaming platform. What are Disney up to?
Well, they still see value in the film otherwise they would have sold/leased the streaming rights to a third-party platform ages ago. But no, Disney wanted to make sure that the only place you could watch Alita is exclusively on Disney+.
Unfortunately Disney+ was not ready for Alita. Disney marketed its streaming service as a family friendly platform and the problem with Alita was, although it wasn’t too graphic, it definitely didn’t fit Disney’s definition of that.
Next month Disney are introducing Star, a new category to Disney+ that can be parental locked. Disney+ Star will feature a massive backlog of mature 20th Century Studios (formerly 20th Century Fox) films as well as mature Buena Vista films.
One of the films we will be seeing on Dinsey+ Star is Alita: Battle Angel, and there is even a rumour that there is a Star original series in the works. But here is what our source had to say about that.
“Disney have relocated a lot of their budget to developing original series for their streaming service, but they are bleeding money through Disney+ at the moment. I’ve heard chatter about [Alita] series, but as far as I know nothing has been confirmed,” our source said.
“It depends a lot on how well the film does on Star. But honestly, I see Disney honouring Jim’s wishes to make this a film trilogy,” they concluded.
The #AlitaArmy are one of the most proactive fan communities and they’ve done a lot to get the movie into the eyes of the public. They even flew a #AlitaSequal banner over the 2020 Oscars.
Disney and James Cameron were so confident enough in Alita: Battle Angel to re-release the film in October, 2020. Unfortunately a lot of cinemas had to cancel their screenings due to a second (or third?) wave of the nasty. Still, this is proof that Disney are not ignoring Alita fans and there’s massive hope for a sequel, maybe even a Disney+ Star original series, in the not too distant future.