A few weeks ago Disney announced a new animated series titled Iron Man and His Awesome Friends. It is aimed at children and follows the massive success of Spidey and His Amazing Friends. Kids LOVE Spidey, so it's no surprise that Disney would develop another show just like it. It's also no surprise that they hired blink 182's Mark Hoppus to write and sing the theme song.
Disney has been courting 90s and early 2000s pop punkers for a while. In fact, Spidey and His Amazing Friends is sound tracked by Fall Out Boy's Patrick Stump. Stump wrote and sings on the theme song and has written various other songs for the extremely successful kids' series (in the show, Spidey and his friends start a band). Spidey isn't even Stump's first time working with Disney. Fall Out Boy wrote "Immortals" for the end credits of the 2014 Disney film, Big Hero 6.
(Stump also has music in The Batman Lego Movie, but that's not made by Disney.)
To go back even further, in 2008, Disney released a cartoon called Phineas and Ferb on the Disney Channel and that theme song was co-written by the punk band, Bowling for Soup. The band performs the song regularly in their live shows.
To show that their investment in the genre is in more than just a handful of bands, Disney commissioned a compilation album last year titled a A Whole New Sound. It's a 12 song compilation that pairs 12 classic songs from Disney animated films with 12 bands of the 90s/2000s punk era. The songs span from "Part of Your World" (New Found Glory) from 1989's The Little Mermaid to "Surface Pressure" (Plain White T's) from 2021's Encanto, with everything in between, obviously including the megahit "Let it Go" (LOLO) from 2016's Frozen. Hey look, Bowling for Soup is on this compilation, too!
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug so it's no surprise that Disney has invested in a genre where elder millennials are continuing to go back to that well, many of them with their kids. blink 182 is as big as ever now that Tom DeLonge has rejoined the band, the Vans Warped Tour is back, and there are multiple festivals like Riot Fest and the When We Were Young Festival that are bringing these 20+ year old bands back on stage in a town near you.
Punk bands are also tend to be extremely prolific since punk songs are so short, so writing a theme song for a cartoon, or recording a cover is no of a Disney song, isn't too difficult of a request to fulfill. Even the legendary Ramones have recorded a Spiderman cover.
Me First and the Gimme Gimmies (now known as Spike and the Gimme Gimmies) are a punk supergroup that exclusively records covers. There are more punk cover compilations than I can count. It seemed like everyone had the Before You Were Punk series when I was back in high school.
New Found Glory actually recorded an EP of covers of famous movie songs back in 2000, right before they hit it big with their self titled album. Their From the Screen to the Stereo EP has become a 3 volume series.
So when I saw the track list for A Whole New Sound, it absolutely made sense that New Found Glory would be part of it, knowing their history with covering movie songs, but as I mentioned earlier, a punk band recording a cover is almost like a rite of passage for a punk band. Everyone does them. While it makes total sense of why Disney is courting the 90s/2000s pop punk scene, it is a bit of a pivot for Disney. Typically, Disney hasn't looked to rock for crossover success, though Disney hasn't completely abandoned pop. "How Far I'll Go" from Moana has an Alessia Cara radio version, Frozen has a Demi Lavato version of "Let it Go", and Raya and the Last Dragon has a Jhene Aiko song for the end credits.
In the 90s and 2000s, when pop punk was dueling boy bands on TRL, I remember reading some article asking if this wave of pop punk was that different than the pop music that they were "battling" against. At the time I thought it was a preposterous idea, but it seems like at least, Disney is willing to make that bet.