When did Disney villains stop being so villainous? New show suggests
they may just be misunderstood
[May 02, 2025]
By MIKE SCHNEIDER
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Cruella de Vil wanted to turn Dalmatian puppies
into fur coats, Captain Hook tried to bomb Peter Pan and Maleficent
issued a curse of early death for Aurora.
But wait, maybe these Disney villains were just misunderstood? That's
the premise of a new musical show at Walt Disney World that has some
people wondering when did Disney's villains stop wanting to be so ...
villainous?
The live show, “Disney Villains: Unfairly Ever After,” debuts May 27 at
the Disney's Hollywood Studios park at the Orlando, Florida resort. In
the show, the three baddies of old-school Disney movies plead their
cases before an audience that they are the most misunderstand villain of
them all.
“We wanted to tell a story that's a little different than what's been
told before: which one of them has been treated the most unfairly ever
after,” Mark Renfrow, a creative director of the show, said in a
promotional video.
A sympathetic light
That hook — the narrative kind, not the captain — is scratching some
Disney observers the wrong way.
“I think it's wonderful when you still have stories where villains are
purely villainous,” said Benjamin Murphy, a professor of philosophy and
religious studies at Florida State University's campus in Panama. "When
you have villains reveling in their evil, it can be amusing and
satisfying.”
Disney has some precedent for putting villains in a sympathetic light,
or at least explaining how they got to be so evil. The 2021 film, “Cruella,”
for instance, presents a backstory for the dog-hater played by actress
Emma Stone that blames her villainy on her mother never wanting her.
Other veins of pop culture have rethought villains too, perhaps none
more famously than the book, theatrical musical and movie versions of
“Wicked,” the reinterpretation of the Wicked Witch of the West character
from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
The blockbuster success of “Wicked," which was based on the 1995 novel
“Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” sparked
the trend of rethinking villains in popular entertainment, Murphy said.
“With trends like that, the formula is repeated and repeated until it’s
very predictable: take a villain and make them sympathetic,” he said.
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An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float
during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt
Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18,
2022. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, File)
 Emphasizing acceptance
The centuries-old fairy tales upon which several Disney movies are
based historically were meant to teach children a lesson, whether it
was not to get close to wolves (Little Red Riding Hood, The Three
Little Pigs) or trust strange, old women in the woods (Hansel and
Gretel, Rapunzel).
But they often made marginalized people into villains — older women,
people of color or those on the lower socio-economic scale, said
Rebecca Rowe, an assistant professor of children’s literature at
Texas A&M University-Commerce.
The trend toward making villains more sympathetic started in the
late 1980s and 1990s as children's media took off. There was a
desire to present villains in a manner that was more complicated and
less black and white, as there was an overall cultural push toward
emphasizing acceptance, she said.
“The problem is everyone has swung so hard into that message, that
we have kind of lost the villainous villains,” Rowe said. “There is
value in the villainous villains. There are people who just do evil
things. Sometimes there is a reason for it, but sometimes not. Just
because there is a reason doesn’t mean it negates the harm.”
Whether it's good for children to identify with villains is
complicated. There is a chance they adopt the villains' traits if
it's what they identify with, but then some scholars believe it's
not a bad thing for children to empathize with characters who often
are part of marginalized communities, Rowe said.
The Disney villains also tend to appeal to adults more than
children, as well as members of the LGBTQ+ community who have felt
marginalized in the past, with some “Disney princesses” gladly
graduating into “evil queens.”
Erik Paul, an Orlando resident who has had a year-round pass to
Disney World for the past decade, isn't particularly fond of the
villains, but he understands why Disney would want to frame them in
a more sympathetic light in a show dedicated just to them.
“I know friends who go to Hollywood Studios mainly to see the
villain-related activities,” Paul said. “Maybe that’s why people
like the villains because they feel misunderstood as well, and they
feel a kinship to the villains.”
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