Knock on Wood

Disney+ is an anomaly. It’s the streaming home of Star Wars, Marvel Studios, National Geographic, and many of Disney’s recently purchased Fox properties. It doesn’t tend to cycle through content like Max, Netflix, and Hulu, so theoretically, it should be the top dog when it comes to the so-called “Streaming Wars.”

But one of the more baffling (and disturbing) trends is its release strategy, and exactly what the service prioritizes. You might not know it if you only log on a few times a month to watch The Simpsons or your favorite animated classic, but Disney+ releases so much original content all the time. If you look at a release calendar, there are an absurd amount of Disney+ originals released every month…and yet, the marketing for each and every one of them is essentially nonexistent. The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars series get all the promotion and fabricated hype, while these projects fall to the wayside because they don’t get the focus they often deserve.

As an example: in the last few weeks, Disney+ dropped two brand-new Disney Channel-style Christmas movies, a feature-length documentary on the making of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and a short film based on a 1970s historical fiction novella by acclaimed British novelist Frederick Forsyth. How many of those have you heard of?

That short film is called The Shepherd, and it’s a fascinating Twilight Zone-esque tale filled to the brim with period decor and Christmas music. It takes place sometime in the 1950s and follows Freddie, a young pilot in the Royal Air Force who finds himself stranded with limited fuel and no electric power during a flight home over the North Sea. It’s a holiday film, but not overwhelmingly so – and lest I reveal too much, it’s also a bit of a ghost story.

It has some big names attached – Alfonso Cuarón and John Travolta both served as producers, and Travolta also stars in a role I won’t reveal in case you, dear reader, should ever chance to spend 39 minutes with the film. 24-year-old Ben Radcliffe, who recently appeared in the third season of The Witcher and will soon don a pilot’s uniform again in Apple TV+’s Masters of the Air, plays Freddie, in a performance that is not star-making but certainly won’t hurt his chances when it comes to flying towards the big leagues.

I genuinely think this short could have done very well in terms of viewership if it had been given the spotlight it deserved, even for a single day during its December 1 release. As of writing, it has less than 50 audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, and only 733 Letterboxd users have watched it. That’s absurdly low, especially for a new release on one of the biggest streaming services there is.

Of course, there’s also the simple fact that The Shepherd is not incredibly remarkable on its own. There’s practically nothing there you haven’t seen before – in fact, most of those 39 minutes are spent in a cramped cockpit where the visuals and range of motion are limited. It’s not a new favorite of mine, nor is it particularly memorable beyond its production design, but I had fun with it. It’s a small investment, and deserves to be seen at the very least.

Some of these random Disney+ releases are decent – Chang Can Dunk is a recent example, and The Naughty Nine is a low-budget Christmas heist comedy that’s much more fun than I expected. But I don’t recall ever seeing a social media post for The Shepherd – it’s not a foreign series leased from across the pond or an original feature that’s created entirely in-house. It’s a neat 39-minute fantastical short based on an existing property, which should give it some merit.

It’s hard to even after the studio sinks millions into these projects, nobody watches them because of their failure to promote them. Personally, I’m a fanatic, always checking the release schedules, so there’s not much that I tend to miss. Crater, a really entertaining sci-fi family film, was released in May on Disney+ and removed less than fifty days later without any warning. You can’t find it anywhere now (legally, at least). Years of hard work down the toilet, and the studios attempt to justify it by saying “nobody watched it” to save money on their bottom line. It’s despicable.

This isn’t even exclusively a Disney problem, either. Max is probably the most egregious, canning projects before they’re even released as part of a tax write-off (though that’s an entirely separate discussion).

Don’t let the hard work of countless creatives go unappreciated. The Shepherd is a shorter example, but no less important; this is a problem in the entertainment industry that gets worse the bigger streaming gets. Something’s going to happen to shift the tide – I’m not sure what, and I’m not sure when, but it will be soon. And by then, I hope the people who put their blood, sweat and tears into the entertainment we so willingly consume (and, in the case of these overlooked streaming originals, don’t consume) get the attention and credit they deserve.