King Magnifico is the main antagonist of Disney's Wish.
He is the ruler of Rosas and a powerful sorcerer, who can grant wishes to any person, no matter the background. But he displays a prideful and egotistical sense of himself while believing he is the only one who decides who gets their wish granted or not.
He is voiced by Chris Pine.
What Makes Him a Base Breaking Character?[]
What Do People Like About Him?[]
- He represents Disney's return to their classic villains, where they are evil from the start and have no redeeming traits. Magnifico is presented this way through his ego and power-hungry personality.
- People love the songs he's in especially his villain song. Those who are willing to defend "This is the Thanks I Get?" for being too upbeat point to songs like "Shiny" from Moana, "Friends on the Other Side" from The Princess and the Frog, and "Mother Knows Best" from Tangled, as examples of equally as upbeat Disney villain songs.
- Many like his characterization as a power-hungry narcissist, who pretends to care about others. This is especially the case in Japan where their fan base is quick to resonate with his motive of wanting others' respect for himself, due to that being more in-line with their norm which prioritised gratefulness and honour.
- Many people, including those who did not like the film, love Chris Pine's performance as King Magnifico and see him as the only redeeming thing about the movie.
What Do People Hate About Him?[]
- Many detractors have criticized Magnifico's downfall from being a good king who genuinely cares about his subjects to becoming more and more egotistical when people start to question his system as forced, due to being presented with not much build up from his solid motives, claiming that the narrative does this to justify Asha's actions as ultimately right.
- Ironically, this led some people to view Magnifico as another twist villain because Asha is led to believe that he is the good guy in the beginning of the film and then quickly revealed as the main bad guy.
- Detractors felt the movie failed its premise on his character because in most of his songs and motives on the wishes do not come off as evil and ironically agree with his stance on them to some degree. Magnifico believes that wishes should be limited and that he is the only one who decides who gets their wish granted or not. His first song make it very much seem that he genuinely cares about his subjects and the fact he was willing to grant their wishes no matter what their background is.
- Many agree with him on his decision on not wanting to grant Sabino’s wish to inspire the people with his music as the wish itself is incredibly vague and might have some ramifications, which all fall flat due to vagueness as the only actual reason given in the film for Sabino’s wish to be rejected was because Magnifico himself was a selfish king and thus the wish would be an actual threat to his power. He quickly assumes that the wish might encourage people to go against him somehow even though Sabino has no intention to, which makes Magnifico's random assumption incredibly outrageous.
- Magnifico literally admits that his people willingly give up their wishes in order to have it granted with the idea that life is too hard to achieve anything. In a way, this makes the people look very lazy as they don't put any effort to achieve things that they want especially if its something simple and rely on someone like Magnifico to make their lives easy. To some people, this gives Magnifico an actual reason to feel underappreciated, albeit hypocritically since Magnifico himself let them become lazy and ignorant in the first place, and that he has every reason to be mad at his people.
- The argument that people will become depressed because their wish is not granted yet falls flat as the movie does not present any ramifications of Magnifico selectiveness when it comes to the wishes besides getting power from it, other than Simon O’Donohue becoming the sleepy man he is after Magnifico took his wish. But he only realizes this when he was corrupted by the dark magic book.
- Many detractors really hated the idea of him using the dark magic book as they felt it was unnecessary and rendered Magnifico's evil to something one-dimensional.
- To make it worse, the movie revealed that whoever uses the evil book can not change back with Queen Amaya wanting her husband back from the book. The scene implies that Magnifico wasn't always evil and it was the book's fault for how he turned out, when it is evidently not since Magnifico knew what he was doing when he turned to using the book and was well aware of the consequences making his corruption done by his own volition, even though it was intended for Magnifico to be a pure evil villain.
- His villain song has been criticized for being way too upbeat, which made him less of a character with evil intentions and the lyrics make it feel like a generic pop song rather than a musical theater-styled one. Like the other songs in the film, the rhyming makes no sense and barely has prosody. For example: "I let you live here for free and I don't even charge you rent / I clean up all your messes and I'm always there when you need to vent" or "I can't help it if mirrors love my face / It's genetics, yeah, I got these genes from outer space."
- The lyrics are so bad and confusing it lead people to feel that the movie is AI generated including the music, even though one of the writers, Julia Michaels had made many songs that received varying degrees of reception yet at least scored positions in the Billboard Hot 100 Top 50. It was highly rumored that Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice were only given a few keywords and only a month of planning which led to the songs’ rushed state.
- A lot of people like the original concept of King Magnifico and his wife being the main villains of the movie. They were disappointed that this idea never came to fruition and felt it would make him stand out from Disney's classic villains, where none of them have an evil spouse. They even felt this original idea would've made him a better villain.
- For those who found sympathy in Magnifico as a character or found some of his reasons justified felt his defeat was too harsh compared to the damages to peoples' mental state in which detractors believe was a "necessary drawback" to staying in Rosas due to how vague and underdeveloped it is, where he is trapped in a glass shaft on his staff by the end of the movie with his wife leaving it in the dungeon forever. It doesn't help when detractors genuinely don't like Queen Amaya as a character.
- Some people didn't like how he was given a tragic backstory, for a vast majority of reasons: they feel it makes him feel too sympathetic, it seems like it goes against the "Pure Evil" route the creators were going for, it contradicts what he claims his motivation is in his Villain Song, and it's only briefly mentioned twice in the movie and never brought up again. This led to some fans theorizing that Magnifico lied about that and was actually the one who destroyed his own village in the first place in his quest for power.
External Links[]
- King Magnifico on the Pure Evil Wiki
- King Magnifico on the Disney Wiki
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 Base Breaking Characters
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