Disney’s Wish Digital Release Date Announced After Disappointing Box Office Run

Disney’s Wish was set up to be the House of Mouse’s big centenary celebrations in 2023, but after a lower than expected box office result, the Walt Disney Company are now looking for the film’s digital release to deliver a strong result. As per Collider, Disney will release Wish on all major VOD providers on January 23, with Blu-ray, 4K UHD and DVD following on March 12. As of time of writing, a Disney+ release date has not been set.

Disney’s Wish bounced back from its first round of less than glowing critics’ reviews, to land a much more positive score of 81% from Rotten Tomatoes audience ratings. While the movie still falls short of some of the House of Mouse’s biggest hits, the reactions did give the movie a small boost after its dismal opening weekend. However, even this could not stop the movie from barely making back its huge $200 million budget.

Wish tells the story of Asha, a teenage girl who, in true Disney style, wishes upon a star and suddenly finds it coming down from the sky and causing all kinds of mischief. The connection to Disney’s long-standing love of the “wishing star” is no coincidence, and is the reason why the movie has been released as the Walt Disney Company celebrates its centenary. Bringing with it a stacked cast including Ariana DeBose, Chris Pine and Alan Tudyk, the film was expected to be a huge hit over Thanksgiving weekend, but projections were not exactly stellar.

While critics called out the movie’s reliance on the usual Disney tropes, which landed it with a “rotten” score of 48% (at time of writing), audiences saw something different in the film. As a celebration of Disney’s 100 years in the business of making people smile, it is probably not surprising that Wish is full of callbacks to the past of the company. While many critics don’t seem to have quite grasped this reasoning, audience reviews at least proved that the film hit the right mark with many of its viewers.

Wish may not have reached the giddy heights of the likes of Elemental (93%) or Raya and the Last Dragon (97%), but audiences took to it much better than last year’s Stange World, which only earned a 66% audience score.

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Is Wish a Good Movie, or a Bad One?

In the last few years, the opinions of critics and audiences have been wildly different on many occasions. What critics have hailed as a future classic, has only just scraped under the bar with cinema audiences, and vice versa. Wish has continued that trend with the movie scoring twice as high with audiences, who have not been put off by the film’s nostalgic elements and rinse and repeat storytelling as much as critics.

Although many reviews complained that there is nothing new about the story, as the film is more interested in reigniting memories of Disney’s past endeavors, it seems that the mix of songs, lovable characters and a classic Disney villain deliver exactly what you would expect from the studio. As MovieWeb’s Richard Fink summarized as one of the movie’s champions:

“Wish is precisely what you want from a Disney animated film. It feels classical but also modern, the same way that Frozen did in 2013, or The Little Mermaid did in 1989. Between massive shifts in release schedules and refocusing on different properties, it is unclear what Disney will look like in the future. However, what can be said is that if the company keeps making films like Wish, then the future looks bright. It is an incredibly high note to end the 100-year celebration on.”

As Wish prepares to make its home video debut, you can check out our exclusive interview with star Ariana DeBose below.