Going to Disneyland may be a perfectly acceptable way for football players to celebrate a big win, but eyebrows raise when film directors say the same thing. At least that’s a takeaway from the internet’s response to the news that Everything Everywhere All at Once directors Daniels are following their Oscar triumph by working for Disney. The filmmaking duo, consisting of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, this week announced that they would be directing an episode of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, the upcoming series starring Jude Law and created by Spider-Man: No Way Home director John Watts.

The internet responded exactly how you’d expect the internet to respond. Sure, there were some people very excited about the duo bringing their imaginative approach to a Star Wars series about which we know very little. But many others expressed dismay over Daniels’ decision. We don’t want to call anyone out by sharing specific social media posts, but the gist of the objections ranged from continued Disney control over popular culture, reminders of the disappointing response to Chloe Zhou’s Eternals – which she directed for Disney after winning best director in 2020 – to an outright sense of betrayal, claiming the duo had sold out.

To a certain degree, one can understand this frustration. Internet buzz played a key part in the movie’s success, and some fans have developed a sense of ownership over it. Furthermore, the mind-bending multiversal adventure of Everything Everywhere was posed against the Disney-owned Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which hit theaters only a few months after Daniels’ film. In fact, Daniels had met with Marvel executives about directing season one of Loki, choosing instead to make their own multiverse movie.

But amidst all the hysteria, Kwan took to Instagram to urge his fans to “chill” and to provide context. “Don’t worry,” he wrote. “We aren’t working on the whole series, we just guest-directed one episode.” In fact, Kwan pointed out that they already shot the episode, before Everything Everywhere even released. He explained that “it was an easy ‘yes’” for the duo, for a number of reasons.



Danofgeek