Disney Animation's ambitious and innovative 1985 film The Black Cauldron was an experiment that dramatically failed, arguably putting the future of the studio in question.
Disney Animation was on the lookout for a new identity in the 1980s. After half-a-century of success, this decade of the company's history is commonly referred to as the "Bronze" or "Dark Age", neither exactly a ringing endorsement of its films. Hope came in the form of The Black Cauldron, which seemed like the perfect way to announce a new kind of Disney animation. It was the studio's first foray into high fantasy, a PG-rated film about a young boy trying to stop a mythical cauldron that can create an army of undead soldiers (the so-called "Cauldron-Born" scene, in which an undead army emerges from a boiling pot is still terrifying, 40 years on). It signalled that Disney was ready to appeal to a new audience.
Instead, The Black Cauldron was a disaster for the studio. A box office failure, it earned $21m (£15.6m) less than half of its $44m (£32.7m) budget. It came in fourth on its opening weekend, behind National Lampoon's European Vacation, a re-release of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and Back to the Future, already a month into its theatrical run. At the time of its release in 1985, it was the most expensive animated film ever made.
Instead of being the film that would take Disney to new heights, The Black Cauldron has become known as the film that nearly took down the company. That perception seems to have first emerged in a 2010 Slate article, which stated that the film "almost killed Disney animation". In 2025, it's hard to have a conversation about The Black Cauldron without it being mentioned that it almost shut down the animation department. But is that a justified claim, or is it merely a myth that's lingered for decades?