'Splash' At 35: This Tom Hanks Sex Comedy Was A Huge Turning Point For Disney

How, you may wonder, does Splash represent that much of a sea change at Disney? (I'm not sorry for that one.) The film's high-concept premise feels especially unbeatable in a post-Little Mermaid world: an average guy stumbles across a jaw-dropping discovery – a gorgeous, real-life mermaid with whom he falls madly in love. You probably know Splash best for being the film that featured Tom Hanks' breakout leading role. From this film, Hanks became one of the most enduring movie stars of the last three decades. (He'd appeared briefly in a low-rent horror film in 1980, before taking the lead here.)Splash was generally a massive success – made for less than $10 million, it grossed nearly $70 million at the box office at a time when most films didn't make $100 million. (Splash ended up as the tenth-highest grossing film of that year.) Not only that, and not only did it boost Hanks' career, but the film's screenplay was nominated for an Oscar. But for our purposes, Splash is most impactful to Disney for one big reason: it wasn't released by Disney.Kind of. Splash wasn't released by Walt Disney Pictures. Instead, Splash was released by a brand-new subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, called Touchstone Pictures. The creation of Touchstone Pictures by then-Disney CEO Ron Miller was, in a way, a microcosmic version of the response the MPAA had in creating the PG-13 rating. Just as families grew annoyed with finding out too late that a PG-rated film might be inappropriate for kids, so too did they feel like some of Disney's output of the late 1970s and early 1980s was getting a little too un-Disney.Nowadays, most of the films of this era have been largely forgotten, except by those who treasure them for nostalgic purposes. And it's for mostly good reason: if you look at the output from Disney in the 1980s, it's kind of a grim picture, and a short list to boot. While a movie like Tron has lasted as a cult hit (inexplicably inspiring a massively budgeted and unsurprisingly financially unsuccessful sequel in 2010), few of the other movies resonate even that deeply with audiences. Films like Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Watcher in the Woods, and Never Cry Wolf were certainly daring, and a mercifully far cry from the days of the slapstick-heavy family comedies Disney made in the 1960s and early 1970s. Unfortunately, they were also losing a lot of money.

In the 1990s, the success of Touchstone Pictures led Disney to create another studio arm that was similarly dedicated to releasing the kinds of films you wouldn't associate with the Walt Disney name. That studio, Hollywood Pictures, didn't last quite as long, shutting down in 2007. But in its nearly 20 years of operation, Hollywood Pictures also released a slate with some impressive names: Robert Redford's Quiz Show, Oliver Stone's Nixon, and M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense were among their '90s-era releases.And the 1990s became a high watermark for Disney, not just for its revitalization of animation or these other studios' titles. The company also purchased the indie darling Miramax Films. Now, of course, that distribution unit is justifiably, inextricably associated with the Weinstein sex abuse scandals. At the time, though, Disney was simply associating itself with the potential of high-quality films, everything from Pulp Fiction to Best Picture winner Shakespeare in Love.By the mid-2000s, both Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures had essentially gone dark. Touchstone Pictures still technically exists, but hasn't been active since the conclusion of a deal that Disney made with DreamWorks Pictures to co-distribute a handful of its live-action films in the 2010s. Those films were as wide-ranging as the puerile video-game adaptation of Need for Speed and Steven Spielberg's War Horse and Lincoln. For a long time, it felt like Disney's desire for acquiring Miramax, or distributing more mature films, was based on a thirst for awards. But as these deals wound down – Disney sold Miramax in 2010, while Hollywood Pictures' last film was released in 2007 – incoming CEO Bob Iger has instead centered his legacy around an expanded, on-steroids version of Michael Eisner doubling down on Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures.

And — yes, really — it all started with a goofy sex comedy about a dude who hooks up with a mermaid a bunch. The Walt Disney Company of 1984 was not on death's door, per se. The theme parks were performing well, with the addition of Epcot Center at Orlando's Walt Disney World only a couple years earlier. But what had once been the company's bread and butter — actual filmmaking — was struggling. Disney's animation unit was a few years away from the beginning of the Renaissance period that revived its own feature-animation group as well as helped influence many other competitors. It's perhaps easy to credit Eisner, Katzenberg, and Wells with much of the success of Disney in the late 1980s and early 1990s; while they took the ball and ran with it, it all started with Splash.The modest film is at least worth revisiting because it features Tom Hanks excelling at something he rarely does anymore on film: comedy. (If there's any reason to look forward to Toy Story 4, it's that Hanks gets to hopefully be funny again.) Plus, Hanks was able to work alongside two exceptionally funny Canadian comic actors, Eugene Levy and the late John Candy. Just as Hanks gets a spotlight as a leading man here, so too does Candy get to steal much of the film as the lead character's uncouth brother. And the combination of Ron Howard as director with writers Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel, and Bruce Jay Friedman itself set something of a template for future Touchstone comedies: nothing too earth-shattering, but a familiar formula with sitcommy style that feels a little more adult than what you might find on ABC.Many of the most influential, important American films of all time either came directly from the Walt Disney Company, or simply live underneath its very large umbrella now. (For animation, it's hard to think of more important films than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Toy Story. For live-action, at least among mainstream efforts, the first Star Wars qualifies equally.) But a film that may be the flashpoint in a year full of flashpoints in the industry is a particularly modest one. Splash was not made with any designs to be a groundbreaking story, just a funny, farcical, literally fish-out-of-water tale. (And 35 years later, though it has its charms, Splash feels very much of its time, in its depiction of male-female relationships.) But if you want to look at The Walt Disney Company of 2019, and marvel at how far it's come (again, not sorry for the pun), you need look no further than the story of a guy who finds a mermaid off the East River and falls hard.