ABSTRACT
The chapter demonstrates—through the example of Disney’s 2017 live action cinematic remake of Beauty and the Beast and its numerous tie-in products—how a fetishist commodification of fantasy takes place via a transmedia storytelling experience paradigmatic of post-industrialist consumer societies of spectacle. Disneyfications’ commercial strategies are explored ranging from simulated “capitalist realist” reveries, and dual address indoctrinating children to become insatiable consumers and infantilizing adults as nostalgic collectors, to the Princess Industrial Complex, the poetics of disenchanted magic, and McDonaldization. The aim is to reveal that although transmedia extensions of a fictional universe apparently augment creative audience participation, prosumers’ subversive intents rarely ever escape the ideological containment involved in the reiteration of the brand.
