‘Willow’ Star Warwick Davis Strikes Back At Disney: ‘Embarrassing’

Willow star Warwick Davis has finally opened up about his true feelings over Disney deleting the Willow TV show off of Disney+ and he is not very happy about it.

Quoth Davis, on Twitter:

“I meet lovely people on a daily basis who are fans of #Willow, who are the reason the @DisneyPlus series was made,” Davis wrote on X (fka Twitter). “Please tell me @WaltDisneyCo, what do I say to these subscribers when they ask why they can’t watch the series any more? #embarrassing”

I have thoughts.

Boy do I have thoughts.

First of all, I love Davis. He’s been a part of my life since I was a wee lad, not much bigger than Elora Danan. I am one of the world’s top superfans of Willow. I love it as much, if not more, than Star Wars. I definitely love it more than Lucasfilm’s other big IP, Indiana Jones, though I love that, too.

One thing that Willow had that these two other big franchises didn’t, was a clean record. Star Wars was great. The OG trilogy is one of my all-time favorites. But then they released the prequel trilogy, which was terrible, and then all the Disney stuff has been, well, relentlessly mediocre outside of a few diamonds in the rough like Andor.

Indiana Jones had a solid trilogy under its belt and then released Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I haven’t even watched the new one yet because, well, it makes me sad to just think about how badly they’ve ruined Indie. I wish they’d left Star Wars and Indiana Jones alone, even if it mean all we had were old movies to go back and watch, and none of these new stories at all.

(This, by the way, applies even more to George Lucas’s unforgivable edits to the original trilogy, which are among the most ghastly cinematic crimes of all time).

Willow sort of just lived on as its own thing, one single movie with a weird trilogy of sequel books (easily ignored if you didn’t like them) a Zelda-like video game and the occasional random cultural Easter Egg, like the character Elora Danan in Reservation Dogs. The IP was dead, and a big part of me really wished it would come back. For many years I hoped and dreamed that a sequel or a prequel would be made.

I remember when Netflix and the Jim Henson company made the prequel series to The Dark Crystal and it was absolutely fantastic, I thought at the time “This would be so cool if they could do the same thing for Willow and give us a show that really captured the spirit of the movie this well.”

But then Willow actually released on Disney+ and it was . . . nothing at all like the movie. It was like if you took the movie and then sent it to the CW and made it into a show for teenagers (which, as we all know, teenagers don’t even like to begin with). The majority of the cast was suddenly teenage girls (a blond, a brunette, a redhead!) and a couple teenage boys, and Warwick Davis was sidelined entirely.

And believe me, if they’d focused on Elora as the main character that would have been fine. It even makes sense! A story about Elora and Willow and their new pal, Boorman (easily my favorite new character) on a quest to find the missing Madmartigan is a story I could have gotten behind. On their way, they could have run into the Brownies, discovered new and amazing creatures, gotten into some crazy hijinks and so on and so forth.

But instead we got a show with extremely cringey dialogue, bizarrely out of place teen romance subplots, puzzling costume choices that felt cheap and out of place, the constant insertion of modern music into not just the credits, but scenes throughout the episodes—and so much more awfulness that the final product no longer resembled Willow even in the slightest.

This is not the Willow I grew up with. Not even close. It’s bad fan-fiction that seemed to miss the entire point of the original film.

So while I sympathize with Warwick Davis, and genuinely don’t think shows should just be deleted entirely from streaming platforms especially this fast and without some other way of purchasing them (like physical media or VOD) I also think that the most embarrassing thing about the Willow TV show was the show itself. The bad writing, the inability to capture the spirit and feel of the original, the fact that it was so clearly made for “modern audiences” rather than its actual fanbase, that’s embarrassing.

If they’d made a show geared toward fans like me, and captured the actual spirit of the original, I bet it would have been a big hit on Disney+ and I’d bet good money it would have not only not been disappeared, but would be heading toward a second season now. The real shame is that the people in charge of this bungled it so badly they gave the corporate vampires an excuse to delete it for a tax write-off. Nobody wins. Everybody loses.

Stupid Daikinis, will we never learn?

The silver lining is that the original movie still exists on Disney+ and unlike the bastardized OG Star Wars films, Lucas never ruined this with his post-release edits. For this, at least, we can all give thanks.