Anora the Brooklyn Stripper ... Your New Disney Princess!
Florida Man vs. Anora on Disney Plus
Is Anora the Stripper now in the official Disney Princess canon? Nowadays, the answer is not quite clear.
Since the beginning of the Disney Renaissance in 1989, Disney has loved to shatter precedents with its princesses. In 1991, Disney gave us its first brunette princess with Belle in Beauty and the Beast. Jasmine from 1992’s Aladdin broke the color barrier as the first non-white princess. (She also was implicitly Muslim-coded!) Pocahontas was Native American. Mulan was East Asian.
Disney’s 2009 film The Princess and the Frog saw the starkest and most controversial change with the first Black princess in Tiana. With all these steps of progress in mind, isn’t it time to have the first sex worker Disney princess?
The Big Disney Stew Now Gets All the Streaming Slop!
The Intermixing of Hulu and Disney Plus
In Year of Our Lord 2025, the state of the Walt Disney Company is quite murky. Since ascending to the role of Disney CEO in 2005, Bob Iger’s many corporate acquisitions blur the lines of what is truly Disney. It seemed simple enough when they bought Pixar in 2006, but is Star Wars a part of the Disney canon? Is Marvel a part of the Disney canon? Is The Simpsons a part of the Disney canon? Is Family Guy a part of the Disney canon? In March 2025, the Disney Plus app is beckoning me to not watch Moana 2. No. Instead, they want me to watch Sean Baker’s erotic film about a Brooklynite stripper.
As a subscriber to Disney Plus, I will receive emails notifying me of new additions to their streaming library. Over the past year or so, I have been used to seeing announcements in my inbox for films from traditional Disney properties going on Disney Plus: Inside Out 2, Moana 2, etc. These email notifications function as white noise to me.
For the most part, I started subscribing to Disney Plus so that I had unlimited access to the 700+ episodes of The Simpsons, my favorite television series of all time. Consequently, I instinctively delete any email from Disney Plus when I periodically clear my iPhone’s Mail app throughout the day, but the image of Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn embracing each other in Las Vegas aborted my otherwise automatic muscle memory.
I fully understand that Disney owns Hulu, which brings along more mature content. When Disney launched Disney Plus in 2019, they purportedly launched the service for families. The most mature content that we got on Disney Plus in 2019 was the Star Wars films, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and 30+ seasons of The Simpsons. On the other side of the tracks, Hulu had more mature properties in its library not suitable for Disney Plus.
Not until March 2024 did Disney start co-mingling the properties. You can now watch anything that was originally on Hulu now on Disney Plus! One of my favorite television shows of all time is King of the Hill. Usually, I would have to go to Hulu to access episodes of the show, but — over the summer of 2024 — I had a hankering (get it?) to re-watch some old episodes. I was shocked when I discovered that I could do it on Disney Plus. I never had to log into the Hulu app again.
Sure, King of the Hill seems innocuous enough. It’s no more inappropriate for children than The Simpsons although your children probably have a higher chance of enjoying the zany humor of The Simpsons as opposed to the dry, hyper-realistic tone of King of the Hill. However, when — last week — Mikey Madison’s face popped up on my Disney Plus front page, I saw this event as a turning point for Disney.
Not only could I watch Anora on Disney Plus, but Disney was also pushing it onto me through my email notifications. Disney probably knows my demographics. They might not be emailing the Anora notification to a mother in her mid-thirties with young children. She just gets notifications for the beloved Australian children’s animated show Bluey. Nonetheless, Disney sees Anora as a property worthy of advertising to certain people. As a 27-year-old childless adult man, I am now in one of Disney Plus’s targeted demographics. At the time of its initial launch in 2019, that might not have been the case beyond Star Wars and MCU dorks.
Disney Prince Jordan Belfort?
To play Devil’s advocate, I thought to myself that Disney might just be trying to jump on the hype for Anora, especially, after sweeping so many Oscars at the Academy Awards two weeks ago. Disney acquired the streaming rights before anyone else did, but it seems as if these actions are not limited to Anora. I think that Disney is beginning a full-on barrage of R-rated content on Disney Plus. On the morning of March 23, in my Twitter feed, I saw an announcement that Disney Plus would be adding Martin Scorcese’s bacchanalian 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street to the streaming library.
I see the outward announcement of adding The Wolf of Wall Street to the Disney Plus library as a performative action. In March and April of 2025, Disney Plus will be adding the wide-release feature film with most uses of the f-word and the one with the third-most uses of the f-word. You can see the ranking from Wikipedia in the image above.
I don’t think the top two films are legitimate wide releases. If you exclude those two entries on the list, then Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street comes in at first place. The Safdie Brothers' 2019 thriller Uncut Gems comes in at second place, and Sean Baker’s Anora comes in at third place. Disney now just needs to acquire the rights to Uncut Gems to complete the Unholy Cinematic Trinity of F-Bombs. Too bad that Netflix has sold its soul to Adam Sandler.
Forget about just the use of the f-word. That’s just one out of many swear words relegated to R-rated films. Scorsese’s film has deliberately heinous and gratuitous sex scenes and depictions of drug use as does Anora although Baker’s film is more realistic and less flagrant. Nevertheless, we see many scenes in strip clubs in Anora. The title character is a sex worker for darn sake! Disney is deliberately making a statement by offering these two films on their streaming service in March and April.
These aren’t just any R-rated films. Disney isn’t choosing other R-rated Academy darlings from 2024 like Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. No. Rather, Anora and The Wolf of Wall Street use their R ratings to the fullest extent, especially, the latter film. In fact, ahead of the release of The Wolf of Wall Street, director Martin Scorcese was expecting an NC-17 rating from the MPAA. What’s next? It’s Anora in March and The Wolf of Wall Street in April. What happens in May of 2025? Will Disney Plus start foisting the orgy-infested 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut to its many subscribers?
Final Thoughts
If Anora is now a Disney princess just like Cinderella, is Jordan Belfort now her Prince Charming? Before I end this article, I want to clarify that I loved the film Anora. I was very happy to see Sean Baker earn four trophies on the night on March 2, 2025. Likewise, I was happy to see a young up-and-coming performer like Mikey Madison earn the Academy Award for Best Actress (even though I was rooting for Demi Moore).
I am more so critiquing Disney’s cynical promotion on its streaming service of this film, which is very much not a Disney film. Sure, Disney Plus is also promoting the 2024 Marvel film Deadpool & Wolverine, an R-rated film just like Anora, but at least Deadpool & Wolverine is a proper Disney film even if it is through the distinct label of Marvel Studios! I believe that this inclusion of Anora and The Wolf of Wall Street right next to Moana 2 and Inside Out 2 signals a chaotic transition period in Disney’s history just as we saw in the span of time between the end of the Disney Silver Age in 1967 with The Jungle Book and the onset of the Disney Renaissance in 1989 with The Little Mermaid. Perhaps Disney is now entering a similar dark age, and perhaps this dark age lasts another 20 years just as the previous one in the 1970s and 1980s did.
I am eagerly awaiting what Disney does in the next few years. I do not know if they will shift to more adult-oriented content as CEO Michael Eisner did in the 1980s when he launched Touchstone Pictures, which mostly made just live-action films. At this time in the 1970s and 1980s, Disney even almost shuttered its animation studio.
Eisner’s foray into adult-oriented content proved to be a miscalculation. Touchstone Pictures ultimately faded away while traditional animation ushered Disney back into a so-called Renaissance of both creativity and financial success. One film, 1989’s The Little Mermaid, sparked this Renaissance. Largely, since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, people have abandoned physical movie theaters for streaming as hermetically secluded media consumers in dark rooms in their homes.
In this new landscape of media consumption habits, could Disney really produce another The Little Mermaid? Could Disney create and animate another iconic and original princess like Ariel? Or are we forever relegated to subpar live-action xeroxes of classic Disney characters like Snow White in this box office bomb of a remake in 2025? Alternatively, will unvarnished and occasionally vulgar heroines like Mikey Madison as Anora become the new Disney princesses?
As for the male protagonists — or, perhaps more fittingly, the male anti-heroes — will we just get more guys like Deadpool. Their meta-referential edginess reeks of antiquated mid-2010s humor from Bojack Horseman and Rick & Morty.Moreover, Anora is the new Cinderella, and Deadpool is the new Prince Charming.
Will the Walt Disney Company double down on its recent embracing of adult content? Will Disney return to form with animated classics like the original The Little Mermaid and The Lion King? I have no idea. Nobody does. In the meantime — maybe your 8-year-old daughter will soon be able to buy an Anora the Brooklyn Stripper doll in a gift shop in Magic Kingdom’s Fantasyland in Orlando. She will be right next to Elsa from Frozen III.