Escape from Tomorrow

On the last day of his family's vacation at Walt Disney World, blue-collar worker Jim White gets fired for an unknown reason, during a phone call with his boss at the Contemporary Resort Hotel. Refusing to ruin his family's vacation, Jim decides to keep it to himself. The family leave their hotel room and takes the monorail to the park alongside two French teenage girls, Isabelle and Sophie, who pique Jim's interest, unbeknownst to his wife Emily, and their two children Elliot and Sara.

During the rides, Jim has a series of bizarre and disturbing hallucinations, such as the faces of animatronic characters warping and taking on evil appearances, and his family verbally abusing him.

After an argument with his wife, Jim takes their children to various Disney park rides, while pursuing Sophie and Isabelle. Later on, he meets a mysterious woman, who uses a necklace of hers to hypnotize him, making him black out and wake up to her raping him. She then informs him that the parks' wholesome, costumed princesses are actually part of a secret prostitution ring that services rich Asian businessmen and that the turkey legs sold in the park are actually emu meat.

Jim's attempts to meet Isabelle and Sophie are noticed by Emily, causing tension between her and Jim, even when they go further with the kids to Epcot. After Emily and Elliot go back to the hotel following an argument with Jim resulting in her slapping Sara, Sophie approaches and invites Jim to come with her and Isabelle. When Jim refuses, Sophie spits in his face and walks off. Jim notices that Sara has disappeared and frantically searches for her, until the park guards use a taser to knock him unconscious.

Jim awakens in a secret detention facility under Epcot's Spaceship Earth where he sees pictures of a naked woman he imagined on the Soarin' ride, and video screens displaying events that happened earlier. A scientist discusses Jim's flights of fantasy and imagination, revealing that he is part of an experiment by the Siemens Corporation ever since he first went to the theme park as a child with his father. His boss is in on the conspiracy and his firing was all part of the plan along with the closure of the Buzz Lightyear ride, just as he and Elliot approached the boarding area. The scientist also tells Jim that he had turned in Elliot to them, like Jim's father had done to him as a child.

After damaging the instrument panel with medical ointment and decapitating the scientist, who turns out to be an android, Jim escapes the laboratory through a sewer. He then finds that Sara has been captured by the mysterious woman, now wearing a Snow White costume. She proceeds to tell them about her past as a costumed princess, which ended after she crushed a little girl to death whilst hugging her. She hypnotizes Jim with the necklace again, but Sara pulls it off and smashes it, freeing Jim from her spell, and allowing her and Jim to escape.

After returning to his hotel room and putting Sara to bed, Jim begins suffering from digestive distress, and vomits up a large amount of blood and hairballs, which he recognizes as symptoms of cat flu; brought on by Sophie spitting on his face earlier, unknowingly infecting him. Elliot, awoken by the noises in the bathroom, comes in to find Jim on the verge of death. He weakly begs Elliot for help, but he shuts the door on him.

The next day, a distressed Emily finds Jim's dead body, which now has cat eyes and a grinning face. Cleaning staff arrive to remove all proof, with one of them filling Elliot's head with false memories of riding the Buzz Lightyear attraction. As Jim's body is taken away, a new family comes to the hotel, which consists of another version of Jim, the woman from the Soarin' attraction, and their daughter.

• Roy Abramsohn as Jim White
• Elena Schuber as Emily White
• Katelynn Rodriguez as Sara White
• Jack Dalton as Elliott White
• Danielle Safady as Sophie
• Annet Mahendru as Isabelle
• Alison Lees-Taylor as the Other Woman
• Lee Armstrong as the Man on Scooter
• Amy Lucas as the Nurse
• Zan Naar as the Fantasy Woman/New Wife
• Stass Klassen as The Scientist
• Trevor McCune as Valet

Randy Moore, a native of Lake Bluff, Illinois,[9] frequently visited his father in Orlando following his parents' divorce. The two often spent time together at Walt Disney World nearby. "It was a special, physical place, and it became an emotional space," he told Filmmaker. He added: "Obviously, I have a lot of father issues that I can't separate from that place."[10] Later, their relationship deteriorated.[11]

He decided to pursue a career in film. After attending two other film schools, he graduated from Full Sail University in another Central Florida town, Winter Park, as the class valedictorian. He moved to Southern California and began working as a story editor, primarily doing uncredited rewrites.[9]

In Hollywood, he married and started a family. Much like his own father, he frequently took his own children to Disneyland. "It wasn't until our first family trip together that this very visceral emotional landscape of my past, that I had by now nearly all but forgotten, hit me again like [a] bullet."[12] On the family's first trip to Walt Disney World, the emotions grew stronger. "[I]t was like he was there as a ghost. We were going on the same rides I used to go on with him, but now we're no longer talking anymore."[11]

His wife, a native of the former Soviet Union who had no memories or expectations like his, saw things with fresh eyes. Moore said "She's a nurse and goes between floors at hospitals. At one point she turned to me at some princess fair or something and said, 'This is worse than working the psych [ward] at the hospital.'"[11]

He read Neal Gabler's biography of Walt Disney and took the children to Disneyland more frequently.[11] "I became obsessed with finding a connection," he recalled later.[12] He wrote the screenplay for Escape from Tomorrow in a month along with two others.[11] An inheritance from his grandparents provided the bulk of the film's budget,[3] which he put at around $650,000, triple what he had originally planned.[11]

"There was nowhere else to do it," Moore says of his decision to use Disney World as a setting and shoot at the parks. Disney, which has a reputation for aggressively protecting its intellectual property, has been tolerant of visitors uploading videos of their visits to YouTube and elsewhere since most of those user-created videos project a positive image of the parks. But Moore did not expect to get permission from Disney to shoot there given his negative, surrealistic portrayal of the park.[13]

Moore used guerrilla filmmaking techniques, which sometimes call for using locations without getting permission. Escape from Tomorrow is not the first film made in whole, or part, this way at the Disney parks. In 2010, the British street artist Banksy shot a scene for Exit Through the Gift Shop in one of the parks with his collaborator Mr. Brainwash. They managed to smuggle the footage out after being detained and questioned by park security. The following year, a viral found footage short, Missing in the Mansion,[14] filmed in the Haunted Mansion, was distributed online without interference from Disney.[15]

Extensive pre-production was necessary. The unique nature of the film shoot dictated steps not normally taken in filmmaking, such as charting the position of the sun weeks in advance since they could not use lighting equipment. Scenes were rehearsed and blocked in hotel rooms, rather than the actual locations.[15] "We must have walked through the entire movie at least eight or nine times during multiple scouting trips before we ever rolled camera," Moore says.[12]

Before principal photography, the cast and crew bought season passes to both Disneyland Park and Walt Disney World Resort. They spent ten days in Florida, then returned to California for two weeks at Disneyland, making the resort depicted in the film a combination of both properties.[15] Actors and crew entered the parks in small groups to avoid attracting attention.[13] "At one point, I even made the camera department shave off their facial hair and dress in tourist attire, which almost provoked a mutiny," says Moore.[12] Despite the actors wearing the same clothes for days on end, Moore told the Los Angeles Times, park personnel never appeared to notice them,[3] save for one day near the end of filming when Disneyland security thought they were paparazzi harassing a celebrity family.[15]

A Canon EOS 5D Mark II

The film was shot using the video mode of two Canon EOS 5D Mark II and one Canon EOS 1D Mark IV digital single-lens reflex cameras, which helped the filmmakers look more like typical park visitors.[15] To compensate for their inability to control the lighting, the film was shot in monochrome mode. "[W]e were shooting with really fast lenses wide open, so our depth of field was razor thin. Black and white helped us enormously with focus and composition, since we were doing almost everything in camera and didn't use a focus puller," Moore recalled. It was an irreversible choice. "[B]ecause the 5D doesn't shoot RAW, we customized settings in its monochromatic mode and couldn't go back to color, even if we had wanted to."[12] Moore was comfortable with the result because of the surrealistic, dreamlike quality it created, forcing viewers to see the familiar sights of the Disney parks in a new way.[15]

Actors and crew used their phones to communicate and store information such as the script—that way, they looked like guests casually using their phones.[3] The phones were also used to record sound, in addition to digital recorders taped to each actor's body that were left running all day.[15] For day scenes, Moore felt comfortable risking only three or four takes of each scene, but found he could do more at night.[12]

Sara (left) and Jim (right) riding It's a Small World

Scenes involved riding on eight recognizable attractions in the parks. One required waiting in a long line for the Buzz Lightyear ride at Disneyland, and the actors rode It's a Small World at least 12 times to get the scene right. "I was surprised the ride operators weren't a little more savvy," Moore told The New York Times. For a scene where two characters pass on the People Mover, Moore had the actors ride it for hours while he worked out the timing.[13]

After the location filming, production went back to soundstages for interiors. Some scenes were shot against a green screen background for second unit footage of other locations to be substituted, allowing the use of crane shots.[10] With the photography done, Moore took the film to South Korea to edit to prevent Disney from finding out; he also refused to tell most of his close friends what he was doing.[3] Visual effects were done by the same company there that had done them for the 2006 South Korean monster film, The Host.[15]

The post-production tasks were as challenging as the production itself. Sound editors had to listen to the entire uncut tracks from the recorders taped to the actors' bodies in order to find the dialogue. Content proprietary to Disney, such as the lyrics to "It's a Small World" and footage from Soarin', was removed from the film to avoid copyright infringement.[15] Composer Abel Korzeniowski contributed a light, airy score similar to those used in Hollywood's Golden Age.[3]

Moore submitted the film to the Sundance Film Festival, where many independent films seek distributors. He had little hope that it would be accepted due to the festival's corporate sponsors. But Trevor Groth, the festival's new director of programming, was "blown away" by Escape from Tomorrow, and accepted it for the festival's non-competitive "Next" category, for films that transcend the limitations of the low budgets common to most independent films.[3]

When the 2013 festival began in Park City, Utah, the secrecy about the film continued. The festival's website only identified the setting as a theme park.[9] Nan Chalat-Noaker, critic for the Park Record, recalls that the festival and even the film's publicist were unwilling to share further details about the film, but strongly urged critics to see it. In her review, she declined to identify the setting of the film by name, although she dropped broad hints, out of fear it would alert Disney's lawyers. The premiere, on the festival's first night, was not fully attended; when word got out to the attendees, all the other shows were effectively sold out.[16]

On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 58% based on 88 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Conceptually audacious but only intermittently successful in execution, Escape From Tomorrow is nonetheless visually inventive and darkly surreal."[17] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 58 out of 100, based on 27 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[18]

Before the Martin Luther King Day weekend was over, Escape from Tomorrow was being widely discussed by festival attendees. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times both ran articles about the film and Moore. Much of the attention focused on the audacity of the filmmaking. Movies.com reported that people were already calling it "the ultimate guerrilla film".[4] On the night of the premiere, Drew McWeeny wrote:

It is not possible that this film exists. It is not possible that they shot long scripted sequences on the actual rides. It is not possible that I just saw a film in which it is suggested and then shown that the various Disney princesses all work as high-priced hookers who sell their wares to wealthy Asian businessmen. It simply cannot be true.

I grew up in Florida, and I have been going to Walt Disney World my entire life. I worked at that park. I've been there as a child, as a teenager, as an employee, and as a parent. I've done Disney sitting on my father's shoulders, and I've done the Disney parks with my kids sitting on my shoulders. It is a huge part of my DNA, and I can tell you that there is no way Randy Moore pulled off what I saw tonight. It is a film that should not exist by any rational definition.

And yet... not only does it exist, but it's fascinating.[19]

He allowed that it was "undisciplined at times, rough around the edges in places, technically uneven, and there's no sense of pacing to it at all. Even so," he concluded, "there is a sort of naive charm that makes it impossible to look away."[19]

Other critics concurred that the film had artistic merit. "[W]atching Moore's noir tale is like being super-glued to your seat while getting poked in the eye," Chalat-Noaker wrote. "It's both fascinating and repelling."[16] Stephen Zeitchik of the Los Angeles Times called it "one of the strangest and most provocative movies this reporter has seen in eight years attending the Sundance Film Festival".[3] At Indiewire, Eric Kohn wrote that "Moore portrays Disney World as the ultimate horror show – and gets the point across in nearly every scene".[20]

While they conceded the film's audacious production made it worth their time to watch, other critics found flaws.[21] "It's not a great film. The story has some good ideas, but the execution is uneven," wrote Peter Sciretta at /Film, while still recommending it as "unlike anything you've seen before [or will] see again".[15] Similarly, CraveOnline's William Bibbiani "wouldn't have missed it for the world" but qualified it by noting that the film often lacked "cohesion and clarity".[22]

Kyle Smith of the New York Post had the most negative assessment, calling it "more fun to discuss than to sit through". While he found the guerilla filmmaking aspect of it "intriguing", all it amounted to for him was "a couple of amusingly surreal moments" that could have taken place at any sufficiently large amusement park: "Even Disney-hating hipsters are going to be disappointed; the film is a pure festival play that is more or less unreleasable unless theater owners start selling weed along with popcorn."[23]

A.O. Scott of The New York Times and Michael O'Sullivan of The Washington Post each also gave a negative review for this film. "None of it is as scary or as funny as it should be," the former wrote, "and what starts out as a sly thumb in the eye of corporate power ends up as a muddled and amateurish homage to David Lynch".[24][25]

The film premiered on October 11, 2013, opening in thirty theaters in the United States, eventually reporting total box office grosses of $171,962.[1]

Many journalists who saw the film at Sundance speculated that it was likely that Disney would take legal action to prevent the film from being shown outside the festival, or perhaps during it. "Disney's lawyers are probably climbing onto helicopters and planning a raid on Park City right now," wrote McWeeny.[19] Critics urged others present to see it before it was too late, and commented that it was questionable if those not present at the festival would ever have an opportunity to see it.[20][22]

However, others noted that if Disney had attempted to block the film's release, it was unclear on what legal grounds it could be done. Moore took care to avoid direct copyright infringement of songs or films played as part of attractions, and intellectual property law is less clear on the other aspects of the film. Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, who distributed his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, set in a 22nd-century Disney World, under a Creative Commons license, believes there's at most "a possible trademark claim, and I suppose that Disney could conceivabl[y] bring suit for violating the park's terms of use, but these are much harder cases to make than copyright."[26]

Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu did not think Disney would have any defensible intellectual property claim. "Though the filmmakers may have committed trespass when they broke Disney World's rules and if it violated the terms of entry on their tickets, the film itself is a different matter," he wrote on The New Yorker's blog. "As commentary on the social ideals of Disney World, it seems to clearly fall within a well-recognized category of fair use, and therefore probably will not be stopped by a court using copyright or trademark laws."[27]

Despite the film's repeated use of Disney's characters and iconography, Wu explained, trademark law was not sufficient. "Disney does not have some kind of general intellectual-property right in Disney World itself." To make a trademark-infringement case against Moore, he continued, Disney would have to convince a court that the use of its protected imagery in the movie could reasonably lead viewers to believe that it had a role in the film's production, and he did not think that was a plausible argument. "The scene where a Disney Princess attempts to crush a child seems to eliminate that possibility."[27]

As for copyright, Wu saw Moore's use of the Disney parks as transformative:

... [H]is use of Disney World is not as simple window dressing; he transforms it into something gruesome and disturbing—a place where, for example, guests are sometimes tasered and have their imaginations purged ... It might be a violation if Moore had made a film designed for viewers who wanted to see Disney World but were too lazy to go to Florida. Escape from Tomorrow, however, is clearly no substitute for buying a ticket.[27]

As such, he saw the film as offering artistic commentary on the cultural impact of Disney, and thus clearly falling under fair use. Wu likened it to a 1990s case brought by Mattel against artist Thomas Forsythe, after he sold some of his photographs depicting another American icon, Barbie, being eaten by vintage appliances as a way of calling attention to the toy doll's role in promoting the objectification of women in American culture. Not only did the court dismiss Mattel's complaint, "[t]he judges were so annoyed by the lawsuits that they awarded attorney's fees of nearly two million dollars to the artist ... A judge has to think of the First Amendment when asked to ban art work."[27]

In his /Film review, Sciretta raised another issue:

Intellectual property and copyrights aside, many people appear in this film who have never signed a release. Real families and children are seen in the background of almost every shot. None of them gave permission or knew they were being filmed for a feature film.[15]

At Slate, Aisha Harris allowed that this was a possibility, especially if children were filmed without their parents' consent, but noted "the law on that issue is not black and white either."[28]

• Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, a similar horror film involving Disney characters

• Escape from Tomorrow at IMDb
• Escape from Tomorrow at the TCM Movie Database
• Escape from Tomorrow at Rotten Tomatoes
• Escape from Tomorrow at Metacritic
• Escape from Tomorrow at AllMovie