According to a recent box office analysis, The Walt Disney Co. is predicted to have lost $890 million from the last eight theatrical releases to movie theaters. The latest films, including The Little Mermaid, Elemental, Lightyear, and others, have all had large budgets but either barely broke even or lost money, per the analyst.
Valliant Renegade, a YouTuber who analyzes the box office, called the performance of Disney’s recent movies “box office disasters.” Valliant Renegade has covered prominent box office news for Disney’s latest releases, including Lightyear, Thor: Love and Thunder, Strange World, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3., The Little Mermaid, Elemental.
The YouTube channel has analyzed the financial performance of each of these blockbuster films in detail, comparing the box office earnings against the marketing and production budgets. Individually these films have had lackluster results, so Valliant Renegade thought it would be an interesting view to combine the aggregate results of all the movies to get an idea of Disney’s overall box office performance.
Renegade diagnoses the financial woes as being due to the bloated budgets, which total in the billions when combining the spending for each film. According to his calculations, Disney spent a total of $2.75 billion in the production, marketing, and distribution of the last eight films it produced. Furthermore, Renegade determined that Disney earned only $1.86 billion in theatrical rental income, the money received from movie theaters for showing the films.
Based on this analysis, Walt Disney would lose nearly 900 million dollars at the box office on these films. To make matters worse, Renegade discusses the implications that Disney+ streaming will have on the earnings capacity of these new films. In the past, once a movie made its run at the box office, it would be licensed to third parties, like Netflix, where it could continue to generate income.
However, now Disney consumes its own content post-box office by releasing it on Disney+, meaning there is no potential for its films to generate revenue through third-party contracts after the buzz dies down during the initial release. Therefore, this exacerbates the box office losses that could have been offset losses through licensing revenue. The analyst forecasted the loss from these foregone licensing opportunities to be roughly $1 billion.
Disney’s box office revenue used to always be a reliable financial metric that boosted the company’s performance. The entertainment company has also faced other financial woes where CEO Bob Iger led a cost-cutting campaign to cut $5.5 billion in expenses and nearly 7,000 employees. Furthermore, the company’s stock price saw a 44 percent decline in 2022.
Many have blamed Disney’s involvement in politics as an explanation for its declining performance. The company has inserted a woke agenda into much of its new entertainment, which could turn away families who don’t want their children to be exposed to such content. For example, Pixar’s Elemental featured a gender non-binary character for the first time in the studio’s history. Disney could be yet another example of companies that “go woke” and subsequently ” go broke.”
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