Escape From Tomorrow (film)
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''Escape from Tomorrow'' is a 2013 American independent thriller film written and directed by Randy Moore in his directorial debut. It tells the story of a unemployed father having increasingly bizarre experiences and disturbing visions on the last day of a family vacation at the Walt Disney World Resort. It premiered in January at the
2013 Sundance Film Festival The 2013 Sundance Film Festival took place from January 17, 2013, until January 27, 2013, in Park City, Utah, United States, with screenings in Salt Lake City, Utah, Ogden, Utah, and Sundance, Utah. The festival had 1,830 volunteers. Films A r ...
and was later a personal selection of
Roger Ebert Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert beca ...
, shown at his 15th annual film festival in Champaign, Illinois. The film was a 2012 official selection of the PollyGrind Film Festival, but at the time filmmakers were still working on some legal issues and asked that it not be screened. The film drew attention because Moore had shot most of it on location at both Walt Disney World Resort and Disneyland Park without permission from The Walt Disney Company, owner and operator of both properties. Due to Disney's reputation of being protective of its intellectual property, the cast and crew used
guerrilla filmmaking Guerrilla filmmaking refers to a form of independent filmmaking characterized by ultra-low micro budgets, skeleton crews, and limited props using whatever resources, locations and equipment is available. Often scenes are shot quickly in real loca ...
techniques to avoid attracting attention, such as keeping their scripts on their
phone A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
s and shooting on handheld video cameras similar to those used by park visitors. After principal photography was complete, Moore was so determined to keep the project a secret from Disney that he edited it in South Korea. Sundance similarly declined to discuss the film in detail before it was shown. It has been called "the ultimate guerrilla film". Rather than suppressing the film as Moore claimed would happen, Disney chose to ignore it. It has been compared to the work of Roman Polanski and
David Lynch David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, visual artist and actor. A recipient of an Academy Honorary Award in 2019, Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, and the César Award for Be ...
. Although many who saw it at the Sundance Film Festival expressed strong doubts that the film would be shown to a wider audience due to the legal issues involved and the negative depiction of the parks, The Walt Disney Company did not prevent the film from being released. At the time of its premiere, Disney stated that it was "aware" of the film; since then the online supplement to '' Disney A to Z: The Official Encyclopedia'' has included an entry for the film. It was released simultaneously to theaters and video on-demand on October 11, 2013, through Producers Distribution Agency, a Cinetic Media company. It has received mixed-to-negative reviews, praising its visuals and ambitious production, but criticizing its execution.


Plot

On the last day of his family's vacation at Walt Disney World Resort, blue-collar worker Jim White gets fired for an unknown reason, during a phone call with his boss at the Contemporary Resort Hotel. Refusing to ruin his family's vacation, Jim decides to keep it to himself. The family leave their hotel room and takes the monorail to the park alongside two French teenage girls, Isabelle and Sophie, who pique Jim's interest unbeknownst to his wife Emily and their two children Elliot and Sara. During the rides, Jim has a series of bizarre and disturbing
hallucinations A hallucination is a perception in the absence of an external stimulus that has the qualities of a real perception. Hallucinations are vivid, substantial, and are perceived to be located in external objective space. Hallucination is a combinatio ...
, such as the faces of animatronic characters warping and taking on evil appearances, and his family verbally abusing him. After an argument with his wife, Jim takes their children to various Disney park rides, while pursuing Sophie and Isabelle. Later on, he meets a mysterious woman, who uses a necklace of hers to hypnotise him, making him black out and wake up to her having sex with him. She then informs him that the parks' wholesome, costumed princesses are actually part of a secret prostitution ring that services rich Asian businessmen and that the turkey legs sold in the park are actually
emu The emu () (''Dromaius novaehollandiae'') is the second-tallest living bird after its ratite relative the ostrich. It is endemic to Australia where it is the largest native bird and the only extant member of the genus ''Dromaius''. The emu' ...
meat. Jim's attempts to meet Isabelle and Sophie are noticed by Emily, causing tension between her and Jim, even when they go further with the kids to Epcot. After Emily and Elliot go back to the hotel following an argument with Jim resulting in her slapping Sara, Sophie approaches and invites Jim to come with her and Isabelle. When Jim refuses, Sophie spits in his face and walks off. Jim notices that Sara has disappeared and frantically searches for her, until the park guards use a taser to knock him unconscious. Jim awakens in a secret detention facility under Epcot's Spaceship Earth where he sees pictures of a naked woman he imagined on the Soarin' ride, and video screens displaying events that happened earlier. A scientist discusses Jim's flights of fantasy and imagination, revealing that he is part of an experiment by the
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Corporation ever since he first went to the theme park as a child with his father. His boss is in on the conspiracy and his firing was all part of the plan along with the closure of the Buzz Lightyear ride, just as he and Elliot approached the boarding area. The scientist also tells Jim that he had turned in Elliot to them, like Jim's father had done to him as a child. After damaging the instrument panel with medical ointment and decapitating the scientist, who turns out to be an
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, Jim escapes the laboratory through a sewer. He then finds that Sara has been captured by the mysterious woman, now wearing a Snow White costume. She proceeds to tell them about her past as a costumed princess, which ended after she crushed a little girl to death whilst hugging her. She hypnotizes Jim with the necklace again, but Sara pulls it off and smashes it, freeing Jim from her spell, and allowing her and Jim to escape. After returning to his hotel room and putting Sara to bed, Jim begins suffering from digestive distress, and vomits up a large amount of blood and
hairballs A hairball is a small collection of hair or fur formed in the stomach of animals, and uncommonly in humans, that is occasionally vomited up when it becomes too big. Hairballs are primarily a tight elongated cylinder of packed fur, but may includ ...
, which he recognises as symptoms of
cat flu Cat flu is the common name for a feline upper respiratory tract disease. While feline upper respiratory disease can be caused by several different pathogens, there are a few symptoms that they have in common. Avian flu can also infect cats, but " ...
; brought on by Sophie spitting on his face earlier, unknowingly infecting him. Elliot, awoken by the noises in the bathroom, comes in to find Jim on the verge of death. He weakly begs Elliot for help, but he shuts the door on him. The next day, a distressed Emily finds Jim's dead body, which now has cat eyes and a grinning face. Cleaning staff arrive to remove all proof, with one of them filling Elliot's head with false memories of riding the Buzz Lightyear attraction. As Jim's body is taken away, a new family comes to the hotel, which consists of another version of Jim, the woman from the Soarin' attraction, and their daughter.


Cast

*Roy Abramsohn as Jim White *Elena Schuber as Emily White *Katelynn Rodriguez as Sara White *Jack Dalton as Elliott White *Danielle Safady as Sophie * Annet Mahendru as Isabelle *Alison Lees-Taylor as the Other Woman *Lee Armstrong as the Man on Scooter *Amy Lucas as the Nurse *Zan Naar as the Fantasy Woman/New Wife *Stass Klassen as The Scientist *Trevor McCune as Valet


Background

Randy Moore, a native of
Lake Bluff, Illinois Lake Bluff is a village in Lake County, Illinois, United States. Per the 2020 census, the population was 5,616. History The first settler family to claim land within the area now part of Lake Bluff arrived in 1836. They claimed 100 acres of ...
, frequently visited his father in Orlando following his parents' divorce. The two often spent time together at Walt Disney World nearby. "It was a special, physical place, and it became an emotional space," he told '' Filmmaker.'' He added: "Obviously, I have a lot of father issues that I can't separate from that place." Later, their relationship deteriorated. He decided to pursue a career in film. After attending two other film schools, he graduated from Full Sail University in another Central Florida town, Winter Park, as the class valedictorian. He moved to Southern California and began working as a
story editor Story editor is a job title in motion picture and television production, also sometimes called "supervising producer". In live action television, a story editor is a member of the screenwriting staff who edits scripts, pitches stories, and reports ...
, primarily doing uncredited rewrites. In Hollywood, he married and started a family. Much like his own father, he frequently took his own children to Disneyland. "It wasn't until our first family trip together that this very visceral emotional landscape of my past, that I had by now nearly all but forgotten, hit me again like bullet." On the family's first trip to Walt Disney World, the emotions grew stronger. " was like he was there as a ghost. We were going on the same rides I used to go on with him, but now we're no longer talking anymore." His wife, a native of the former Soviet Union who had no memories or expectations like his, saw things with fresh eyes. Moore said "She's a nurse and goes between floors at hospitals. At one point she turned to me at some princess fair or something and said, 'This is worse than working the psych ardat the hospital.'" He read Neal Gabler's biography of Walt Disney and took the children to Disneyland more frequently. "I became obsessed with finding a connection," he recalled later. He wrote the screenplay for ''Escape from Tomorrow'' in a month along with two others. An inheritance from his grandparents provided the bulk of the film's budget, which he put at around $650,000, triple what he had originally planned.


Production

"There was nowhere else to do it," Moore says of his decision to use Disney World as a setting and shoot at the parks. Disney, which has a reputation for aggressively protecting its intellectual property, has been tolerant of visitors uploading videos of their visits to YouTube and elsewhere since most of those user-created videos project a positive image of the parks. But Moore did not expect to get permission from Disney to shoot there given his negative, surrealistic portrayal of the park. Moore used
guerrilla filmmaking Guerrilla filmmaking refers to a form of independent filmmaking characterized by ultra-low micro budgets, skeleton crews, and limited props using whatever resources, locations and equipment is available. Often scenes are shot quickly in real loca ...
techniques, which sometimes call for using locations without getting permission. ''Escape from Tomorrow'' is not the first film made in whole, or part, this way at the Disney parks. In 2010, the British
street art Street art is visual art created in public locations for public visibility. It has been associated with the terms "independent art", "post-graffiti", "neo-graffiti" and guerrilla art. Street art has evolved from the early forms of defiant graff ...
ist Banksy shot a scene for '' Exit Through the Gift Shop'' in one of the parks with his collaborator
Mr. Brainwash Thierry Guetta, best known by his moniker Mr. Brainwash, is a French-born Los Angeles-based street artist. According to the 2010 Banksy-directed film ''Exit Through the Gift Shop'', Guetta was a proprietor of a used clothing store, and amateur v ...
. They managed to smuggle the footage out after being detained and questioned by park security. The following year, a
viral Viral means "relating to viruses" (small infectious agents). Viral may also refer to: Viral behavior, or virality Memetic behavior likened that of a virus, for example: * Viral marketing, the use of existing social networks to spread a marke ...
found footage short, ''Missing in the Mansion'', filmed in the Haunted Mansion, was distributed online without interference from Disney. Extensive pre-production was necessary. The unique nature of the film shoot dictated steps not normally taken in filmmaking, such as charting the position of the sun weeks in advance since they could not use lighting equipment. Scenes were rehearsed and blocked in hotel rooms, rather than the actual locations. "We must have walked through the entire movie at least eight or nine times during multiple scouting trips before we ever rolled camera," Moore says. Before principal photography, the cast and crew bought season passes to both the Disneyland and Walt Disney World resorts. They spent ten days in Florida, then returned to California for two weeks at Disneyland, making the parks depicted in the film a combination of both resorts. Actors and crew entered the parks in small groups to avoid attracting attention. "At one point, I even made the camera department shave off their facial hair and dress in tourist attire, which almost provoked a mutiny," says Moore. Despite the actors wearing the same clothes for days on end, Moore told the '' Los Angeles Times'', park personnel never appeared to notice them, save for one day near the end of filming when Disneyland security thought they were paparazzi harassing a celebrity family. The film was shot using the video mode of two Canon EOS 5D Mark II and one
Canon EOS 1D Mark IV The EOS-1D Mark IV is a professional 16.1 effective megapixels digital single lens reflex camera (DSLR) camera body produced by Canon. The EOS-1D Mark IV is the successor of the Canon EOS-1D Mark III and was announced on 20 October 2009, ju ...
digital single-lens reflex A digital single-lens reflex camera (digital SLR or DSLR) is a digital camera that combines the optics and the mechanisms of a single-lens reflex camera with a digital imaging sensor. The reflex design scheme is the primary difference between a ...
cameras, which helped the filmmakers look more like typical park visitors. To compensate for their inability to control the lighting, the film was shot in monochrome mode. " were shooting with really fast lenses wide open, so our
depth of field The depth of field (DOF) is the distance between the nearest and the furthest objects that are in acceptably sharp focus in an image captured with a camera. Factors affecting depth of field For cameras that can only focus on one object dist ...
was razor thin. Black and white helped us enormously with focus and composition, since we were doing almost everything in camera and didn't use a focus puller," Moore recalled. It was an irreversible choice. " cause the 5D doesn't shoot
RAW Raw is an adjective usually describing: * Raw materials, basic materials from which products are manufactured or made * Raw food, uncooked food Raw or RAW may also refer to: Computing and electronics * .RAW, a proprietary mass spectrometry dat ...
, we customized settings in its monochromatic mode and couldn't go back to color, even if we had wanted to." Moore was comfortable with the result because of the surrealistic, dreamlike quality it created, forcing viewers to see the familiar sights of the Disney parks in a new way. Actors and crew used their
phone A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
s to communicate and store information such as the script—that way, they looked like guests casually using their phones. The phones were also used to record sound, in addition to digital recorders taped to each actor's body that were left running all day. For day scenes, Moore felt comfortable risking only three or four takes of each scene, but found he could do more at night. Scenes involved riding on eight recognizable attractions in the parks. One required waiting in a long line for the Buzz Lightyear ride at Disneyland, and the actors rode It's a Small World at least 12 times to get the scene right. "I was surprised the ride operators weren't a little more savvy," Moore told '' The New York Times''. For a scene where two characters pass on the People Mover, Moore had the actors ride it for hours while he worked out the timing. After the location filming, production went back to soundstages for interiors. Some scenes were shot against a
green screen Chroma key compositing, or chroma keying, is a visual-effects and post-production technique for compositing (layering) two images or video streams together based on colour hues ( chroma range). The technique has been used in many fields to r ...
background for
second unit Second unit is a discrete team of filmmakers tasked with filming shots or sequences of a production, separate from the main or "first" unit. The second unit will often shoot simultaneously with the other unit or units, allowing the filming stag ...
footage of other locations to be substituted, allowing the use of crane shots. With the photography done, Moore took the film to South Korea to
edit Edit may refer to: Concepts * an action that is part of an editing process (including of images, video, and film) * a particular version that is the result of editing, especially of film (for example, fan edit), or music (for example, radi ...
to prevent Disney from finding out; he also refused to tell most of his close friends what he was doing. Visual effects were done by the same company there that had done them for the 2006 South Korean monster film, '' The Host''. The post-production tasks were as challenging as the production itself. Sound editors had to listen to the entire uncut tracks from the recorders taped to the actors' bodies in order to find the dialogue. Content proprietary to Disney, such as the lyrics to " It's a Small World" and footage from Soarin', was removed from the film to avoid copyright infringement. Composer
Abel Korzeniowski Abel Korzeniowski (; born 18 July 1972) is a Polish composer of film and theatre scores. Life and career Korzeniowski was born in Kraków. He had contact with music from early childhood: his mother Barbara plays the cello and both his brothers A ...
contributed a light, airy score similar to those used in
Hollywood's Golden Age Classical Hollywood cinema is a term used in film criticism to describe both a narrative and visual style of filmmaking which became characteristic of American cinema between the 1910s (rapidly after World War I) and the 1960s. It eventually be ...
.


Sundance

Moore submitted the film to the
Sundance Film Festival The Sundance Film Festival (formerly Utah/US Film Festival, then US Film and Video Festival) is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with more than 46,66 ...
, where many independent films seek distributors. He had little hope that it would be accepted due to the festival's corporate sponsors. But Trevor Groth, the festival's new director of programming, was "blown away" by ''Escape from Tomorrow'', and accepted it for the festival's non-competitive "Next" category, for films that transcend the limitations of the low budgets common to most independent films. When the
2013 festival Thirteen or 13 may refer to: * 13 (number), the natural number following 12 and preceding 14 * One of the years 13 BC, AD 13, 1913, 2013 Music * 13AD (band), an Indian classic and hard rock band Albums * ''13'' (Black Sabbath album), 2013 * ...
began in Park City, Utah, the secrecy about the movie continued. The festival's website only identified the setting as a theme park. Nan Chalat-Noaker, critic for the ''
Park Record The ''Park Record'' is a twice-weekly newspaper published in Park City, Utah. It was founded in 1880 as the ''Park Mining Record'', edited by James Shupback. After two editorial changes, Sam Raddon, formerly with the ''Salt Lake Tribune ''The ...
'', recalls that the festival and even the film's publicist were unwilling to share further details about the film, but strongly urged critics to see it. In her review, she declined to identify the setting of the film by name, although she dropped broad hints, out of fear it would alert Disney's lawyers. The premiere, on the festival's first night, was not fully attended; when word got out to the attendees, all the other shows were effectively sold out.


Reception

On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 56% based on 87 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Conceptually audacious but only intermittently successful in execution, ''Escape From Tomorrow'' is nonetheless visually inventive and darkly surreal." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 58 out of 100, based on 27 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Before the Martin Luther King Day weekend was over, ''Escape from Tomorrow'' was being widely discussed by festival attendees. ''The New York Times'' and the ''Los Angeles Times'' both ran articles about the film and Moore. Much of the attention focused on the audacity of the filmmaking. Movies.com reported that people were already calling it "the ultimate guerrilla film". On the night of the premiere, Drew McWeeny wrote: He allowed that it was "undisciplined at times, rough around the edges in places, technically uneven, and there's no sense of pacing to it at all. Even so," he concluded, "there is a sort of naive charm that makes it impossible to look away." Other critics concurred that the film had artistic merit. " tching Moore's noir tale is like being super-glued to your seat while getting poked in the eye," Chalat-Noaker wrote. "It's both fascinating and repelling." Stephen Zeitchik of the ''Los Angeles Times'' called it "one of the strangest and most provocative movies this reporter has seen in eight years attending the Sundance Film Festival". At Indiewire, Eric Kohn wrote that "Moore portrays Disney World as the ultimate horror show and gets the point across in nearly every scene". While they conceded the film's audacious production made it worth their time to watch, other critics found flaws. "It's not a great film. The story has some good ideas, but the execution is uneven," wrote Peter Sciretta at
/Film ''/Film'', also spelled ''Slashfilm'', is a blog that covers movie news, reviews, interviews, and trailers. It was founded by Peter Sciretta in August 2005. Podcasts Six podcasts have run on the site. ''The /Filmcast'', hosted by David Chen, De ...
, while still recommending it as "unlike anything you've seen before r willsee again". Similarly,
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's William Bibbiani "wouldn't have missed it for the world" but qualified it by noting that the film often lacked "cohesion and clarity". Kyle Smith of the '' New York Post'' had the most negative assessment, calling it "more fun to discuss than to sit through". While he found the guerilla filmmaking aspect of it "intriguing", all it amounted to for him was "a couple of amusingly surreal moments" that could have taken place at any sufficiently large amusement park: "Even Disney-hating hipsters are going to be disappointed; the film is a pure festival play that is more or less unreleasable unless theater owners start selling weed along with popcorn."
A.O. Scott Anthony Oliver Scott (born July 10, 1966) is an American journalist and cultural critic. He has been chief film critic for ''The New York Times'' since 2004, a title he shares with Manohla Dargis. Early life Scott was born on July 10, 1966 in ...
of '' The New York Times'' and Michael O'Sullivan of '' The Washington Post'' each also gave a negative review for this film. "None of it is as scary or as funny as it should be," the former wrote, "and what starts out as a sly thumb in the eye of corporate power ends up as a muddled and amateurish homage to David Lynch". The film premiered on October 11, 2013, opening in 30 theaters in the U.S., eventually reporting total box office grosses of $171,962.


Legal issues

Many journalists who saw the film at Sundance speculated that it was likely that Disney would take legal action to prevent the film from being shown outside the festival, or perhaps even during it. "Disney's lawyers are probably climbing onto helicopters and planning a raid on Park City right now," wrote McWeeny. Critics urged others present to see it before it was too late, and commented that it was questionable if those not present at the festival would ever have an opportunity to see it. However, others noted that if Disney had attempted to block the film's release, it was unclear on what legal grounds it could be done. Moore took care to avoid direct copyright infringement of songs or films played as part of attractions, and intellectual property law is less clear on the other aspects of the film. Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, who distributed his first novel, '' Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom'', set in a 22nd-century Disney World, under a
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license, believes there's at most "a possible trademark claim, and I suppose that Disney could conceivabl bring suit for violating the park's terms of use, but these are much harder cases to make than copyright." Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu did not think Disney would have any defensible intellectual property claim. "Though the filmmakers may have committed trespass when they broke Disney World's rules and if it violated the terms of entry on their tickets, the film itself is a different matter," he wrote on '' The New Yorkers blog. "As commentary on the social ideals of Disney World, it seems to clearly fall within a well-recognized category of fair use, and therefore probably will not be stopped by a court using copyright or trademark laws." Despite the film's repeated use of Disney's characters and iconography, Wu explained, trademark law was not sufficient. "Disney does not have some kind of general intellectual-property right in Disney World itself." To make a trademark-infringement case against Moore, he continued, Disney would have to convince a court that the use of its protected imagery in the movie could reasonably lead viewers to believe that it had a role in the film's production, and he did not think that was a plausible argument. "The scene where a Disney Princess attempts to crush a child seems to eliminate that possibility." As for copyright, Wu saw Moore's use of the Disney parks as
transformative In United States copyright law, transformative use or transformation is a type of fair use that builds on a copyrighted work in a different manner or for a different purpose from the original, and thus does not infringe its holder's copyright. Tr ...
: As such, he saw the film as offering artistic commentary on the cultural impact of Disney, and thus clearly falling under fair use. Wu likened it to a 1990s case brought by Mattel against artist Thomas Forsythe, after he sold some of his photographs depicting another American icon, Barbie, being eaten by vintage appliances as a way of calling attention to the toy doll's role in promoting the objectification of women in American culture. Not only did the court dismiss Mattel's complaint, " e judges were so annoyed by the lawsuits that they awarded attorney's fees of nearly two million dollars to the artist ... A judge has to think of the First Amendment when asked to ban art work." In his /Film review, Sciretta raised another issue: At ''
Slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic rock. ...
'', Aisha Harris allowed that this was a possibility, especially if children were filmed without their parents' consent, but noted "the law on that issue is not black and white either."


Response by Disney

Disney did not return reporters' calls or emails for comment, nor did it take any legal action during the festival, although it confirmed to CNN that it was "aware" of the movie. Despite critical apprehension that the film would never be shown outside the festival, some observers saw the situation as more complex. Were Disney to attempt to forcefully suppress the film, that effort could serve to draw even more attention to it, a phenomenon known as the
Streisand effect Attempts to hide, remove, or censor information often have the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information via the Internet. This is called the Streisand effect. It is named after American singer and actress Barbra Streis ...
. Even if Disney were to successfully prevent official distribution, the film could easily be pirated and distributed over the Internet. In his ''Post'' review, Smith suggested that Disney prevent this by taking the opposite course, simply ignoring ''Escape from Tomorrow'' and letting the attention dissipate by itself. Michael Ryan, director of
The YoungCuts Film Festival The YoungCuts Film Festival is an international film festival based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, whose mandate is to advance the careers of young filmmakers. Originally established in Toronto in 2001, the festival was created to ident ...
, noted that there was a precedent for the film in the Air Pirates lawsuit, in which Disney spent eight years in court with some underground cartoonists who had published an underground comix parody in which
Mickey Mouse Mickey Mouse is an animated cartoon Character (arts), character co-created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. The longtime mascot of The Walt Disney Company, Mickey is an Anthropomorphism, anthropomorphic mouse who typically wears red sho ...
and the other Disney characters engaged in explicit sex and used illegal drugs, among other behavior they avoided in Disney's own narratives. He suggested that Disney buy the rights and release the film itself, which it could easily do as its announced interest would guarantee it a monopsony on the film since no other distributor would want to match Disney's deep pockets or its feared legal response. As a Disney release, ''Escape from Tomorrow'' would have a large potential audience of both Disney enthusiasts and antagonists, Disney would be making money from property it already owns instead of someone else and the company's apparent willingness to go in the joke would take some of the
satiric Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or e ...
edge off. Moore expressed hope that the film could be shown and released, even if it meant a legal battle. Since the film's release Disney has acknowledged it in another way. The online supplement to '' Disney A to Z: The Official Encyclopedia'' includes an entry for ''Escape from Tomorrow'', describing it as "An independent surrealistic cult film surreptitiously filmed at Walt Disney World and Disneyland." According to '' The Hollywood Reporter'', Disney chose to avoid responding to the film altogether, rather than seeking legal action, in an effort to prevent increased publicity.


Awards


References


External links

* * * * * {{Walt Disney World 2013 films 2013 horror films American black-and-white films Camcorder films Films about vacationing Films about dysfunctional families Films about sexuality Films set in Orlando, Florida Films shot in California Films shot in Florida American independent films Disneyland Walt Disney World in fiction Films set in amusement parks Disney parodies Films about adultery in the United States American horror films 2013 directorial debut films 2013 independent films 2010s English-language films 2010s American films