So all-consuming and all-conquering has Disney become, it even owns the rights to its analogies now. First Disney was Marvel supervillain Thanos, relentlessly acquiring pop culture’s Infinity Stones including Pixar, Lucasfilm and Marvel itself – all the better to obliterate half the Hollywood universe. Having swallowed up its rival 21st Century Fox for a colossal $71bn, Disney became the Death Star – an empire so intimidatingly huge and hungry it reduced its rivals to the status of scattered rebels. Last year, Disney dominated the movies like no studio has before, taking more than 38% of the world’s box office. Now, with its streaming service Disney+ rolling out, Disney is like Simba in The Lion King: as Mufasa tells him, “everything the light touches is our kingdom”.

Maybe not quite everything, yet. But Disney’s gravitational pull is warping the very space-time continuum of the media landscape. You will have to work harder than ever to escape the Magic Kingdom’s reach. If it doesn’t get you with the Avengers, it will get you with The Simpsons, or National Geographic, or Wes Anderson. If it doesn’t get you with Elsa sticking plasters, it will get you with Baby Yoda memes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Minnie driver… new Disney CEO Bob Chapek, right. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP

Can anything stop Disney? Are the rebels’ weapons useless against it? Or might the Death Star contain a fatal design flaw? One potential wrinkle came last month with the surprise resignation of Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger. His successor was also a surprise: the unheard-of Bob Chapek, formerly head of Disney’s theme-parks division. Iger, who was scheduled to retire at the end of 2021, will stay on as chairman to “make sure that our creative pipelines are vibrant”. Inevitably, the relationship between the two Bobs has been likened to that of “Sith apprentice and Sith lord”, though given Chapek’s background, he is also an uncanny parallel to Tom Wambsgans, Matthew Macfadyen’s character in HBO’s Succession, who plots his ascent from the lowly resorts division of the Roy media empire – at last, an analogy Disney doesn’t own.

Iger was very much the architect of Disney’s spectacular renaissance. By all accounts a straight-talking, decidedly un-Thanos-like New Yorker, he rose through the ranks of ABC television before Disney acquired it in 1996. In his autobiography, Iger recalls his first board meeting as Disney CEO in 2005. He got straight to the point and said: “As you all know, Disney Animation is a real mess.” On a visit to Hong Kong Disneyland he had noticed that most of the characters in the parade were from Disney movies past, with barely any from the last decade.

His solution was to go shopping. It helped that Iger had personal relationships with some key people – such as Steve Jobs, whom he persuaded to sell Pixar to Disney in 2006, for $7.4bn. He also got Jobs to vouch for him to Ike Perlmutter, owner of Marvel. Iger also had a relationship with George Lucas, which helped him acquire Lucasfilm. Rather than “Disneyfying” these assets, Iger was smart enough to let each of them operate independently. As he told Pixar’s bosses: “It doesn’t make sense for us to buy you for what you are and then turn you into something else.” In fact, he imported Pixar’s culture to rejuvenate Disney’s own animation department, just as he sidelined Perlmutter to give free rein to Kevin Feige, the mastermind of Marvel’s spectacular movie series. Considering Avengers: Endgame has taken close to $3bn alone, that $4bn price tag for Marvel looks like a sound investment.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Homer’s new home… The Simpsons are now part of the Disney family. Photograph: Alamy

Iger and Disney also had the good fortune to be stocking the cupboard just as the whole media landscape was tilting in favour of “over the top” streaming services. Having vanquished its old Hollywood rivals, Disney now finds itself facing the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV+, HBO Max (which launches in the US in May), and Comcast/NBCUniversal’s forthcoming Peacock. “The old guard of the traditional entertainment business is going through changes nobody would have predicted even five years ago,” says Cynthia Littleton, business editor at Variety. “So there was a real feeling that if Disney did not prepare for the future, they could become a takeover target by a gigantic tech firm.” She describes Iger as a “once-in-a-generation executive”. “He gets a lot of credit for looking out at the landscape and saying: ‘We need to do this and we need to do this now.’”

Littleton does not imagine Disney+ will catch up with Netflix’s 160 million subscribers any time soon. Its stated target was 60 to 90 million, although it already has 30 million subscribers in the US, and some analysts are predicting it could reach 130 million in five years. “I think they expect to be a really strong competitor, but they don’t see it as a zero sum game.”

One weak spot in the plan is the content. Disney+ gives you more than 500 movies and 350 series from the Disney/Pixar/Star Wars/Marvel back catalogue, not to mention National Geographic and 30 seasons of The Simpsons – all for a very competitive £5.99 a month (compared to £8.99 for HD Netflix). But much of it is aimed at children and families. Flagship Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian has been a runaway success, but grownup subscribers expecting more of the same might be disappointed. Much of Disney+’s original content either plays it safe or pitches it wrong. There are family-friendly reboots such as High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, and a live-action Lady and the Tramp; there are new series such as The World According to Jeff Goldblum, in which the actor cocks a quizzical eyebrow at, you know, stuff. And there are dispiritingly on-brand shows like Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings (couples getting married at Disney theme parks), or Be Our Chef, in which families compete to make a Disney-themed dish to serve at Disney World. You have to wonder how vibrant those “creative pipelines” are right now.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kick-ass too… Yifei Liu in Disney’s delayed live-action Mulan remake. Photograph: Jasin Boland

For the Mandalorian demographic, there are some Marvel spin-offs further down the pipeline: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (due in August, although production has been suspended due to the coronavirus crisis) and WandaVision (December). But shows have been cancelled or long-delayed, including a Tron-themed series and Star Wars spin-off Obi-Wan. Other, edgier fare has been moved to the streaming service Hulu in the US (it owns that, too), such as Love, Victor – inspired by the hit movie Love, Simon, with a gay protagonist dealing with his sexuality. The latter suggests Disney is keeping things “family friendly”, which could be tantamount to playing to a conservative common denominator.

It is a similar picture in the movie world. With so many universes coming under the Disney umbrella, and so much return required of its investments, there is the fear that Planet Disney will now simply eject a steady stream of sequels and spin-offs. But with both the Marvel and Star Wars sagas reaching some kind of conclusion last year, you wonder how much appetite there is for more of the same. Disney and Pixar are still putting out original stories but, again, their big successes of late have been sequels such as Toy Story 4 and Frozen II, or remakes of Disney classics such as The Lion King.

Next in the pipeline comes a live-action remake of Mulan, which could expose another compromising aspect of Disney’s supremacy. China is vital to Disney’s growth, and the Mouse House has learned its lesson with Mao’s house, so to speak. Its 1997 movie Kundun (directed by Scorsese) led to a virtual shutout by the Chinese authorities for its pro-Tibetan stance. Disney has, by all accounts, been making huge efforts to get back in ever since. It finally succeeded in 2016, with the opening of the $5.5bn Shanghai Disneyland, which Iger described as “the biggest accomplishment of my career”. But Disney only owns 43% of it; the rest is in the hands of the Chinese government.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Star wares… Disney+ release The Mandalorian. Photograph: Disney+/Reuters

So the new Mulan is unlikely to be taking any chances. The story looks to be closer to the original Chinese legend than the 1998 animation: no Eddie Murphy-voiced comedy dragon, and no sexuality-subverting relationship with officer Li Shang, who falls for Mulan when she is pretending to be a man. It could still be a great movie, but Mulan betrays a concern over just how much Disney is honing its product according to commercial and political considerations. When Walt Disney opened Disneyland in 1955, he dedicated it to “the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America”. But Disney the company no longer represents American values; it seeks to embody those of the world – potentially including its most repressive regimes.

This is not to suggest Disney is inherently problematic, or that it is doing anything the rest of Hollywood isn’t also doing. Against these totalitarian fears, you could set such frontier-pushing mainstream films as Black Panther or Captain Marvel or Moana – all of which have made radical steps in terms of representation and inclusion. Or Disney’s laudable embrace of the LGBT+ community (Mulan aside): it has hosted unofficial “Gay Days” at Disney World for more than 20 years. Disney’s dominance is not simply down to deep pockets; its reputation was built on courage and innovation. Despite its flops, it has consistently set the bar creatively.

So you could see Disney as a machine designed to exploit the masses by any means, or you could see it as a creative coalition striving to make the best possible fare. Either way, we have never seen a kingdom like Disney’s, except, perhaps, in one of its movies. In The Lion King, Mufasa gives the young Simba a portfolio-management lesson straight out of the Iger playbook. “Everything you see exists together in a delicate balance,” he says. “As king, you need to understand that balance and respect all the creatures, from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope.” To which Simba replies: “But Dad. Don’t we eat the antelope?”

Still, having established itself as entertainment’s apex predator, is a last-minute plot twist in store? The coronavirus has disrupted the landscape immeasurably, and Disney has been disproportionately hit. As the biggest player, it has had to delay more high-profile releases than any other studio – including Mulan, which was due out on 27 March, and halt production on more movies. It has also had to close all of its theme parks, which is revenue it will never get back. The parks and products division makes up roughly 50% of Disney’s profits. In addition, another of its acquisitions, the leading US sports channel ESPN, has no actual sports to broadcast. It is suddenly looking vulnerable. In the past month or so, the company has lost about a third of its value – some $85bn. There is speculation that Apple could be contemplating a takeover bid. Having devoured its rivals, will Disney be unable to fight off an even larger predator? That would be the ultimate irony. Or perhaps it’s just the circle of life.

Disney+ is available on various platforms from Tuesday 24 March