‘Stolen Kingdom’: The Movie Disney Doesn’t Want You To See

Early last year, the documentary feature Stolen Kingdom  premiered to rave reviews and sold out crowds at the Slamdance Film Festival and the Big Sky Film Festival, exactly the kind of rolling start an independent documentary hopes for in anticipation of a wide release. But alas, Stolen Kingdom has struggled to find a distributor. Consequently, the filmmakers are now going on the road, possibly to a theater near you between May 21st and June 14th, to bring better exposure for a film that already has a pretty solid pitch: Mixed up kids sneak into abandoned areas of Disney parks, usually to take creepy videos, but also sometimes to steal things. The most notorious of these alleged thefts was in 2018 from the now defunct Cranium Command attraction of the Epcot theme park at Walt Disney World Resort when someone stole of Buzzy, the 300 pound animatronic emcee to a show about exploring the human mind that ran from 1989 to 2007.

It’s not hard to guess why distributors, for whom Disney is the 800lb mouse in the room, have been reluctant to touch Stolen Kingdom. While Joshua Bailey’s feature film has a strong throughline this is, for all practical intents and purposes, a movie about how easy it is to trespass on Disney property.

Stolen Kingdom ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Joshua Bailey
Running time: 74 minutes

When Patrick Spikes comes under suspicion for stealing Buzzy, he doesn’t exactly come off as a master criminal. What he and other interviewees note, pretty consistently, is that abandoned areas at Walt Disney World Resort have no real security. Indeed, management barely even seems to care about archiving any of their old material. When we hear stories about collectors willing to fork over a hefty amount of change for old technical manuals, it’s hard to see Spikes or other explorers like him as  monstrous. The best things to steal are old trash Disney has completely forgotten about, and would probably destroy rather than archive if they ever found it again.

Although Stolen Kingdom centers around the Buzzy case, the bulk of its lean 74 minutes runtime is neither sensational nor anti-Disney. Indeed, this documentary is among the most sincerely nostalgic films about the Disney experience ever created. The stars of this show are people who love Disney so much, they not only violate park rules to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of their favorite rides, they violate actual laws. The documentary record amassed by these Disney megafans is extensive and, in many cases might be the best extant documentation of these older rides and experiences in their original context.

But by the time Stolen Kingdom gets to the creepier urban exploration YouTube videos, a more unsettling subtext begins to take hold. Namely, that despite Disney’s corporate stance as the caretaker of twentieth century American cultural heritage… they’re really not doing a whole lot of caretaking. It’s no coincidence that the high water mark of Disney urban exploration videos happened in the 2010s when creepy pseudo-nostalgia like Five Nights at Freddy’s started to go viral. Any old building or warehouse a person might wander into, they’re going to find themselves surrounded by the ruins of pop culture past, just because there’s so much of that junk that hardly anyone even remembers.

This contradiction, and this farce, blends seamlessly into the greater supertext of Stolen Kingdom. On paper, this film feels like an outrageous collision of true crime drama, ancient archival footage, old YouTube trends before everything got hyper-monetized, and a subtle, satirical critique of Disney itself. Disney is portrayed as a dragon sleeping at the back of its cave, protecting its treasure hoard from enterprising explorers and adventurers. Why does a dragon have a dungeon full of treasure, the vast majority of which it obviously doesn’t really care about all that much? Well, as Disney found out, stuff just sort of piles up over time if you’re a quasi-immortal entity who hates to do housekeeping.

Unlike dragons, though, Disney has the law on its side. Which is how the story keeps circling back to Spikes. To be clear, Spikes is definitely a thief, and admits it on camera. But he also gives such a compelling explanation of what he stole, along with how and why, that it’s difficult to sustain the theory that he also stole Buzzy. If for no other reason than Buzzy is huge. You would need a whole team of people who know an awful lot about transporting animatronics to somehow get Buzzy out of the park, a task that would likely take hours at least, without ever being seen. Even if Spikes was stupid enough to take such a risk, and could convince other explorers to go along with such a plan, it’s hard to imagine how they could have possibly succeeded.

It’s from this vantage point that Stolen Kingdom pivots to about the last genre I was expecting. Police brutality. Bailey has the footage of Spikes’ interrogation, and while I don’t want to get into details, the whole scene is an excellent demonstration of why you should never, ever, talk to the police without a lawyer present. It’s impossible to speculate to what extent that interrogation factored into Spikes receiving a relatively lenient plea deal. All we really know is, there’s a lot that Disney doesn’t want us to know not just in regard to how poorly maintained their parks are, but their influence over law enforcement in Florida.

Or maybe all cops act that way, not just the ones under pressure from Disney to make a collar. A lot of what makes Stolen Kingdom so solid as a documentary is that for the most part, it’s just presenting unusual information, be it footage or interviews, and asking us as viewers to draw our own conclusions for how to interpret what we’ve seen. That Disney would rather bury this film, but maybe now can’t totally do so, demonstrates that this documentary is as good a look as we’re ever going to get behind the corporation’s usual public relations facade. So watch it now if you can. You might not get another chance.