The corporation’s buying spree has other studios trembling in its mouse-eared shadow. But are hard times ahead for the entertainment behemoth?

You’ve seen a horse fly, you’ve seen a dragon fly, you’ve seen a house fly. Now watch as a computer-animated elephant with oversized ears … crashes to the ground from a very great height. The reviews are in on Disney’s new Dumbo – reworked from the 1941 classic with “the imagination of Tim Burton” – and they are not unanimously positive, to say the least. “It transforms a gentle and miraculous tale into a routine story by weighing it down with a lot of nuts and bolts it didn’t need,” says Variety. “Floats just high enough to clear the incredibly low bar that it sets for itself,” writes IndieWire. In this paper, Peter Bradshaw calls it “a flightless pachyderm of a film” with a “pointlessly complicated and drawn-out story”. Roll up! Roll up!

If Dumbo flops, it could represent a major disturbance in Disney’s grand master plan. The corporation’s recent buying spree has left other studios trembling in its mouse-eared shadow. Over the last decade or so, Disney has snapped up plum properties such as Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar, culminating in last week’s $71bn (£54bn) acquisition of rival studio 21st Century Fox.