Disney Needs More Movies Like ‘Young Woman and the Sea’

After a year of high-profile disappointments, Disney may be back in the position to save the summer box office. In the wake of a lackluster May, where only the Disney-owned Fox title Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes has performed to expectations, several of the season’s likeliest remaining hits come from the Mouse House: Inside Out 2 in June, Deadpool & Wolverine in July, and – less of a sure thing – Alien: Romulus in August. Only one, however, will actually bear the Disney name: the Inside Out sequel, which, like other Pixar productions, will keep the traditional Disney logo out front and in the credits. The other big Disney-owned studios – Marvel, Lucasfilm, Fox – keep their parent company on the DL (that’s Disney Low).In fact, given how many Disney-branded movies come from Pixar, Walt Disney Animation (the in-house studio that makes stuff like Wish, Moana, and Frozen), or their assembly line of “live-action” remakes that are often largely animated, it’s increasingly rare to see a live-action Actual Disney movie on the big screen.

Young Woman and the Sea is the exception that proves the rule, because most likely not many people will see it, at least not in theaters. Originally earmarked for Disney+ before getting upgraded to a theatrical release and then downgraded to a limited opening, this Daisy Ridley vehicle is coming to some undetermined number of theaters on Friday before, presumably, heading to streaming in the not-too-distant future. It looks like a gesture of goodwill toward Ridley, who Disney would presumably like to continue appearing in Star Wars movies. (A follow-up focusing on her sequel-trilogy character Rey is said to be in the works.) As gestures go, it may seem relatively small, but then again, the Disney logo hasn’t appeared in front of a movie like this – not a cartoon, not based on a pre-existing Disney property, actually releasing in theaters – since 2018, when they put out The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. And that was still a fantasy movie; Disney Proper’s last real-people theatrical release was Queen of Katwe, a 2016 chess drama starring Lupita Nyong’o.

That’s closer to the type of movie Young Woman and the Sea is; sports, not realms. Ridley plays Trudy Ederle, a real-life competitive swimmer who, in 1926, became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. You can probably picture the movie about her journey with reasonable accuracy. Are you thinking of an inspirational sports movie about a plucky underdog? With a light dusting of not particularly in-depth educational-historical instruction, broadly gesturing towards century-earlier inequality from a vantage point of vaguely defined social progress? You’ve pretty much got it. There’s little that’s surprising about Young Woman and the Sea – except that it more or less works.

As directed by Joachim Rønning, who also made the seafaring adventures Kon-Tiki and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the movie has an appealing squareness, conveyed with a kind of straightforward clarity that tweenage kids might find absorbing; it plays, at times, like a well-illustrated children’s book. Its Weekly Reader-isms are brought to life by a charismatic but unfussy performance from Ridley, who plays Trudy as quietly unyielding, an awkward fit socially who survives a childhood bout with measles to feel at home in the water – before she even really knows any swimming technique. Ridley’s freckled beauty is surrounded with great character-actor faces, including Christopher Eccleston, Glenn Fleshler, and, most delightfully, Stephen Graham, as Trudy’s final and least uptight coach. Graham and Fleshler both hail from Boardwalk Empire, which takes place around the same time, so it’s fun to imagine this as a squeaky-clean flipside.

In addition to Queen of Katwe, Young Woman and the Sea recalls a number of sports movies Disney made in the 2010s and 2000s, often with producer and ex-athlete Mark Thomas Ciardi, who worked on The Rookie, Miracle, Invincible, Secretariat, and so on. Relatively recent entries in the unofficial DisneySports brand, like Ciardi’s Million Dollar Arm, haven’t done as well financially, and some of Ciardi’s movies are hacky or sentimental. (They also tend to focus on the achievements of white male athletes – or, barring that, on the white male coaches who work with minority players.) But Ciari isn’t the only supplier of live-action Disney fare; Jerry Bruckheimer, who used to make more adult-targeted movies, including several for Disney’s Touchstone label in the 1990s, produced another DisneySports title, Glory Road, as well as the National Treasure movies (and, most successfully, the more fantastical Pirates of the Caribbean series). As it happens, he produced Young Woman and the Sea, too.

All of this studio history makes Young Woman and the Sea feel like a throwback, and it seems more likely to serve as a one-off – a streaming project with the added luster of a “real” movie – than a new beginning for live-action Disney movies. After all, the apparently sainted Bob Iger has been making visionary edicts like “make slightly fewer Marvel movies” and “make more sequels to Frozen.” What doesn’t seem to be much discussed is how Disney – actual Disney, not Marvel or Lucasfilm or Fox – could make family-friendly movies that expand younger viewers’ interests beyond the realms of strict IP. Young Woman and the Sea is no doubt both sanitized from certain realities of its era, and enhanced for extra drama (there’s an incident involving one of Trudy’s coaches that is almost hilariously villainous). But its roots in real-life history make it feel so much more like a real movie than Disney’s endless self-remakes. Hell, even the hokum of National Treasure has a kind of absurd quasi-educational bent that makes it more charming than a purely mercenary caper picture.

Disney does make other live-action movies for its streaming service, but they have such history in making movies for non-theatrical sources – direct-to-video movies, Disney Channel movies – that it can be difficult for those direct-to-streaming titles to escape that stigma. (Especially when many of them are kind of bad.) Disney doesn’t need to put out six Young Woman and the Seas every year, or turn them all into blockbusters. But supporting even a few movies like this goes a long way toward making the company seem like a movie studio, rather than series of content silos.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.