The live action Alice in wonderland for some reason made billions of dollars, and that kicked off the Disney live action train.
It came out in 2010, around the big period for Hot Topic. Included in that is the love for Tim Burton (Nightmare Before Christmas was the hottest thing around then) which was a driving force towards the movie's success.
Anyone knows why Disney stopped making animation films for boys? It was an incredibly brief period of great classics and then back to films for family/girls.
They never got a massive audience for those films like the girl ones. Their bread-n-butter was princess stories and musicals, and if not that, usually cute characters that can sell marketable plushies. The Disney Renaissance was their best period and it was majority female-oriented films between Little Mermaid, Beauty and The Beast, Aladdin and Lion King. The 2010s was another success period, which again, was majority female-films with Tangled, Frozen, Moana and arguably Zootopia, while Ralph and Big Hero 6 were sort of sidelined and didn't do as well. Disney Channel was another solidifier as it was the girl brands that kept the channel a float and propelled them into beating Nickelodeon back in the 00s.
Disney never seemed to understand how to mass appeal to boys. Their general style was too safe to make any real gains, especially when the competition for boy's media in the animation industry and larger entertainment was so fierce between the 80s-2000s. Girls were easy given the musical nature and lack of general content from competition. With boys, Disney gets slaughtered as they compete with Warner, Mattel, and later Nickelodeon. Mickey got too sterile to take on Bugs and SpongeBob, while the company was too family-oriented to create anything akin to the DCAU in terms of darkness and action, beside kind-of Gargoyles. Disney lacks edge, all their male leads were too wide-eyed and inoffensive to leave lasting impressions in the same vein as a Batman or Shrek.
Unpopular-opinion, Star Wars was arguably the perfect Disney boys film. It understood how to create a modern fairy tale-like story that appealed to a primarily male audience. It was a Disney hero's journey, but they did away with the musical and romance (besides Solo scoring) completely. They also didn't shy away from the brutality and action, having characters get sliced, choked, blasted, burned and eaten. Then there is Darth Vader who has all the traits of classic myth villains, but updated to make him redeemable and more interesting by the end. Disney could never recreate the magic that very much felt like it aped off them. Even when they tried with Tron, they still failed to fully understand Star Wars.
the Beevis and Butthead revivial in the 2010s was a ratings juggernaut and they still canceled it because that male demo isn't good for advertisers anymore.
MTV was not the channel they used to be and B&B's era was long gone. Old fans didn't want to come back and the show didn't mesh with nu-MTV to be relevant.
But it is sort of hilarious how every cartoon for boys flopped super hard in theaters and became a cult classic later on.
Shrek? Or really all of DreamWorks?
The films flopped as they were mostly built by newbies who were inexperienced dealing in the industry or companies close to death. Disney had a monopoly on animation till DreamWorks. WB was too unprepared to market films beyond Space Jam and Bluth was nearing death's door after doing a lot of Disney-like slop that killed any investment.