The Boogeyman is set to finally be real, with Rob Savage‘s highly-anticipated Stephen King adaptation due in theaters tomorrow, going head to head with Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse as it tries to entice audiences with promises of cold sweats and a subsequent jump in nightlight stock.
All this to say, The Boogeyman looks to be quite the fear-fest, but even the idea of a trauma-hungry monster is no match for the paralyzing terror that entertainment companies experience at the thought of its IPs being used outside of their umbrella. It’s probably no coincidence that Disney put out a live-action Dumbo movie as the copyright to the IP was closing in on its then-expiration date.
That, of course, is our knee-jerk assumption for any company that wags its finger at even the most benign inclusion of its property, as seemed to be the case with The Boogeyman and its scripted use of a lightsaber as a nightlight/self-defense tool for Vivien Lyra Blair’s character, but Disney actually had a fairly understandable reason to step in.
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Savage revealed that Disney asked him to remove the lightsaber from the final film so as to avoid accidentally lampooning Star Wars too harshly, as Blair recently appeared as a young Princess Leia in the Obi-Wan Kenobi limited series, and the resulting combination was a bit too nerve-wracking for the Mouse House to be okay with.
“Disney, in all fairness, didn’t want an image in the movie of young Princess Leia with a shitty knockoff lightsaber fritzing out in her hand, so they said no and that we had to come up with something else, and so me and the production team desperately searched for [other] kids’ toys that glow.”
From an audience perspective, it may have made for a hilarious parallel for those familiar with the Star Wars miniseries, but we can also understand how it wouldn’t be the greatest look in the world for a number of people involved.
The Boogeyman releases to theaters tomorrow on June 2.
