Every story is a spell.

When you open a book, you’re entering that spell alone. You give the author your trust: Take me somewhere, carry me, don’t break the illusion. But when you walk into a theater, the spell is shared. You’re not only trusting the film to guide and absorb you — you’re trusting it to let you share the experience with a roomful of strangers. That is something deeper than entertainment. It’s a kind of communion. Hundreds of people, hearts beating together, gasping, laughing, even crying in unison.

That shared spell is fragile — and sacred. It is the invisible current that makes the hair rise on your arms during the opening crawl of Star Wars, or makes a whole theater hold its breath as Simba is raised aloft on Pride Rock. In those moments, we believe together.

But when the storyteller breaks trust, the spell collapses.

No company understood the story spell better than Disney.

From the beginning, Disney specialized in creating communal enchantment. Their films were not lectures or checklists; they were invitations to believe together.

And it didn’t stop at films. The theme parks were an extension of the same vision, inviting audiences into physical immersion in story: Disneyland and Walt Disney World, later EPCOT, Tokyo, and beyond — each one built on the idea that rides and places could and should be living narratives.

Disney understood the magic.

For decades, Hollywood’s spell worked because two forces pulled together: art and money.

The art impulse pushed filmmakers to innovate, to reach for beauty, to treat story as craft worth perfecting. The money impulse demanded discipline — pacing, clarity, immersion — because a film that didn’t move people wouldn’t sell. Art alone was indulgent, and money alone was formulaic, but when art and money aligned, you got classic stories: "Casablanca," "The Godfather," "Star Wars," "The Lion King."

Then, in the 1960s, something shifted. Postmodernism seeped in. Film students were trained not only to create but to deconstruct — to pick stories apart until much of the beauty and magic was stripped away. At the same time, they were swept up in politics, convinced that art could and should change society. Put the two currents together, and a new realization dawned: stories carry the power to shape lives. And so they decided to wield that power consciously. Now there was a third impulse on the stage: social change. Art gave way to money, and money yielded to agenda.

And when the main measure became agenda, the spell began to collapse. Studios stopped trusting story to speak for itself. Writers and directors were no longer trusted to tell the best tale; they were tasked with carrying the “right” message. The script became a Trojan horse, hollowed of wonder, stuffed with ideology.

Audiences felt the difference. Where once they trusted Hollywood to cast the spell, they began to see the strings — and the communion was broken.

The fracture became clear in recent decades.

When the spell is broken, audiences don’t frame it in terms like “postmodern Trojan horse storytelling.” That would never occur to them. Instead, they just know they didn’t like the story. It bored them, or it felt unreal, or they couldn’t get into it. Sometimes they even felt insulted, as if the storyteller thought them too stupid to notice the strings.

The enchantment didn’t take hold. Instead of being carried away, they felt cheated and manipulated. And when the spell was broken in a story they had once loved, the wound cut deeper. It felt not only disappointing, but tragic, like watching a beloved friend being murdered before their eyes.

That is the difference between "Bambi" and "Strange World." Between the original "Ghostbusters" and the 2016 reboot. Between "The Lord of the Rings" films and Amazon’s "Rings of Power." Between "The Last Crusade" and "Dial of Destiny."

The communion is lost. And when the communion is lost, there is no reason to spend your hard-earned money at the theater when you can stay home and stream classic old movies instead.

Hollywood still cares about money — but it no longer trusts story to deliver it. Executives believe they can engineer audiences through agenda: If they hit the right notes of representation and message, the box office will follow, and they can help create a “better” world. But good story is not propaganda. The spell only works when story is trusted to speak for itself.

Disney once built castles, parks, and entire cultural worlds on that trust in story. Now it edits scripts by committee, fires actors for tweets, and lectures audiences when films flop. It even edits out stories it finds uncomfortable from classic amusement park rides. Each move breaks the spell further.

Related: Every Story Demands a Sacrifice: To Change the World, Change the Narrative

The spell of story is not complicated, but it is sacred:

And most importantly: Trust the viewer.

Hollywood has forgotten that the audience is not a passive consumer but a participant. A story isn’t finished until it’s received — until the viewers buy into it, suspend their disbelief, and join the communion. But today’s studios no longer trust the viewer. They treat audiences as problems to be managed, as minds to be manipulated, as children to be lectured.

Trust, though, is a two-way street. If the makers don’t trust the audience, the audience will not trust the makers. And once that bond collapses, the spell dies.

That trust is what made theaters into temples of shared belief and cultural communion. It’s what made Disney more than a brand. And it’s what Hollywood has broken.

But the cure is the same as the cause: trust restored. Allow stories to be stories again, and the spell will hold. The lights will go down, the screen will flicker to life, and once more, strangers will gasp together in the dark.

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