Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Splash

The decision to kick off Touchstone Films with Splash was actually kind of brilliant. In the past, Ron Miller’s Disney had struggled mightily to attract older audiences who ordinarily wouldn’t be caught dead seeing a Disney picture. They’d attempted to redefine themselves with big-budget sci-fi movies, darker horror and suspense films and thoughtful coming-of-age dramas. They were even willing to erase the Disney name entirely if they thought it might help. And while some of those movies had worked creatively, nothing had been able to rehabilitate Disney’s reputation as a cornball studio stuck hopelessly in the past.

Now, it would have been relatively simple to hit the reset button and launch Touchstone as its own totally unique thing with no public connection to Disney. But that’s not what Miller or anyone else wanted to accomplish. The Disney name had to be preserved and polished off. They wanted everyone to know that Touchstone was Disney, just not your parents’ Disney, your grandparents’ Disney, or especially not your kid brother or sister’s Disney. Disney could still be relevant and maybe, just maybe, even a little bit cool.