The Disney Thread.

[Gojira1604]

I saw Moana recently but didn't really like Moana.

[EarthNeronga]

Does anyone remember Disney XD?

[miguelnuva]

Frozen 4 was announced today.

[LegendZilla]

Does anyone care to speculate whether or not Disney will get bought out by Apple one day? Rumors have been persisting for quite some while and the more box-office bombs they endure, the more Disney will contemplate it.

[LSD Jellyfish]

Does anyone care to speculate whether or not Disney will get bought out by Apple one day? Rumors have been persisting for quite some while and the more box-office bombs they endure, the more Disney will contemplate it.

For the love of christ, Disney is not bombing. They've had one bad flop, after years and years of being nearly completely unchallenged for domination in the media sphere. They own an onslaught of tons of IPs they have not recently even tried to produce that people are excited to see.

[CyberZilla]

Disney having a meh year won’t kill them. Their parks and merch are the main drivers of money anyways. The movies and shows are, believe it or not, a drop in the bucket overall (though they are nonetheless important since they drive people to care about the merch and such). But they’re doing fine even with the flops this year.

[miguelnuva]

Does anyone care to speculate whether or not Disney will get bought out by Apple one day? Rumors have been persisting for quite some while and the more box-office bombs they endure, the more Disney will contemplate it.

For the love of christ, Disney is not bombing. They've had one bad flop, after years and years of being nearly completely unchallenged for domination in the media sphere. They own an onslaught of tons of IPs they have not recently even tried to produce that people are excited to see.

Those two new Frozen sequels are going to give them a nice shot in the arm. The MCU films other than the Marvels haven't even done that bad just not the 1B hits they use to be.

[Spirit Ghidorah 2010]

Lmao, Disney only raking in a shitton of money instead of an astronomical shitton of money isn't going to financially cripple them.

Someone's been watching too much Critical Drinker.

[miguelnuva]

Disney just bought Hulu to me4ge it eith Disney + btw. I doubt they do that if they were hurting for money.

[LegendZilla]

Does anyone care to speculate whether or not Disney will get bought out by Apple one day? Rumors have been persisting for quite some while and the more box-office bombs they endure, the more Disney will contemplate it.

For the love of christ, Disney is not bombing. They've had one bad flop, after years and years of being nearly completely unchallenged for domination in the media sphere. They own an onslaught of tons of IPs they have not recently even tried to produce that people are excited to see.

I beg to differ. Most of Disney's movies this year have been tanking at the box office (they've practically lost $1 billion for crying out loud!) and their streaming service has been bleeding subscribers big time. On top of that, they've decided to push some of their releases meant for next year to 2025. Even if it won't cripple them beyond repair, it's still a huge blow nonetheless.

[miguelnuva]

Does anyone care to speculate whether or not Disney will get bought out by Apple one day? Rumors have been persisting for quite some while and the more box-office bombs they endure, the more Disney will contemplate it.

For the love of christ, Disney is not bombing. They've had one bad flop, after years and years of being nearly completely unchallenged for domination in the media sphere. They own an onslaught of tons of IPs they have not recently even tried to produce that people are excited to see.

I beg to differ. Most of Disney's movies this year have been tanking at the box office (they've practically lost $1 billion for crying out loud!) and their streaming service has been bleeding subscribers big time. On top of that, they've decided to push some of their releases meant for next year to 2025. Even if it won't cripple them beyond repair, it's still a huge blow nonetheless.

What is tanking at the box office other than the Marvels? Also they pushed the 2024 stuff back because the strikes.

Also Disney plus lost 4 million subscribers out of 150m+.

Added in 1 minute 51 seconds:
https://deadline.com/2023/07/disney-202 ... 235431049/

[PuzzledAmphibian]

Is Disney going under or being bought out anytime soon? Unlikely. They could get rid of their film & television divisions and survive off the strength of their parks for years to come. They're not near that point yet.

However, they have had more than one flop this year:
The Marvels - very likely
Indiana Jones - estimated to have lost them $100 million
Haunted Mansion - cost $150 million made around $120

If we use the generally accepted 2.5x multiplier for achieving profitability amongst blockbusters, films like Little Mermaid and Elemental might not have flopped but they didn't turn a profit based on box office alone. If we're doing more than this year the list gets longer. Getting into the financials of how well some of their straight to streaming titles are doing also gets murky. Luckily for the company Disney is such a vast empire when you start including everything like the 'Experiences' division (parks, cruises, etc.) they could endure mega flops for years to come. Unfortunately for those who want to see them totally fail they're not even sweating yet.

I do think their films are suffering from what a lot of Hollywood suffers from as of late: bloated budgets. Why spend $150 million on a film like Haunted Mansion in the first place? They spent ~$250 million on The Marvels compared to even ~$150 million on Captain Marvel just a few years ago.

[LegendZilla]

Is it to bold of an assessment to predict that Disney could end up facing another "dark age" like what it faced between Walt's death and The release of the Little Mermaid?

[Spuro]

Is it to bold of an assessment to predict that Disney could end up facing another "dark age" like what it faced between Walt's death and The release of the Little Mermaid?

Certainly not as a result of limited budgets.

It's a multi-billion dollar company, they'll be fine. Movies from Warner Brothers, Sony and Paramount flop all the time, and I never see anyone proclaiming their downfall. But the second a Disney movie under-performs, detractors seem to lose their minds.

[LSD Jellyfish]

The thing was, that for the last ten to fifteen years, anything Disney put out was pretty much guaranteed to be a mega hit or at the very least easily make it’s money back. This applies to Marvel, Star Wars and much of Disney’s digital catalog. People would go see things based on just having the Disney name tag applied to it, especially if it was a well known IP.

All that’s changed now is that Disney has to be careful and considerate. Like normal studios and companies, Disney has to be careful with what they approve and greenlight, and can’t just assume it’ll be popular because they made it. Likewise, they’ve quickly learned that nostalgia and recognizable IPs can only get you so far. Whatever you blame or say about Disney, it’s not comparable to what Warner Bros has been doing for the past few years.

There’s a lot of “culture war” clickbait going on where people want to magnify disneys recent failures because it’s an easy way to make money; most people on both ends of the political spectrum have issues with Disney as a corporation, so it’s not hard to do. However, there’s a certain group, the ones that spout “go woke go broke” that specifically like making a bigger fuss about these things than they are.

I’ve always been pretty neutral on Disney personally. Zero attachment to Mickey Mouse or any nostalgia for the princess films. Gotta say though, I watched Encanto with my daughter last night and we had a blast! Disney has money, and usually makes quality things, so they have weight to throw around. Their animated products recently has been stellar.

Oh to add an addendum, a lot of Disney’s recent foibles with streaming is nothing unique or even entirely their fault. I’ve got tons of friends who worked in tech or adjacent industries. Covid-19 caused people to think that there would be a shift in society to embrace staying at home more, and while in some ways we still are, it turns out people like going out and face to face experiences. Disney was put in a weird position where their main source of revenue (parks and movies) were suddenly cut off and at the time quickly swerved into a streaming service. Temporarily this was a great solution, and it’s exactly what happened in tons of industries. But, like many Covid-19 booms once Covid-19’s (main) pandemic phase(s) ended, a lot of it felt redundant and pointless. This of course leads to less interest and corporate cullings. In other words, hindsight is 20/20 and any criticism about Disney+ and Disney’s embrace of online venues is nothing unique to them. It’s only cynical folk and right wingers who want blow it out of proportion.

[MC_Lovecraft]

The thing was, that for the last ten to fifteen years, anything Disney put out was pretty much guaranteed to be a mega hit or at the very least easily make it’s money back. This applies to Marvel, Star Wars and much of Disney’s digital catalog. People would go see things based on just having the Disney name tag applied to it, especially if it was a well known IP.

All that’s changed now is that Disney has to be careful and considerate. Like normal studios and companies, Disney has to be careful with what they approve and greenlight, and can’t just assume it’ll be popular because they made it. Likewise, they’ve quickly learned that nostalgia and recognizable IPs can only get you so far. Whatever you blame or say about Disney, it’s not comparable to what Warner Bros has been doing for the past few years.

There’s a lot of “culture war” clickbait going on where people want to magnify disneys recent failures because it’s an easy way to make money; most people on both ends of the political spectrum have issues with Disney as a corporation, so it’s not hard to do. However, there’s a certain group, the ones that spout “go woke go broke” that specifically like making a bigger fuss about these things than they are.

I’ve always been pretty neutral on Disney personally. Zero attachment to Mickey Mouse or any nostalgia for the princess films. Gotta say though, I watched Encanto with my daughter last night and we had a blast! Disney has money, and usually makes quality things, so they have weight to throw around. Their animated products recently has been stellar.

Oh to add an addendum, a lot of Disney’s recent foibles with streaming is nothing unique or even entirely their fault. I’ve got tons of friends who worked in tech or adjacent industries. Covid-19 caused people to think that there would be a shift in society to embrace staying at home more, and while in some ways we still are, it turns out people like going out and face to face experiences. Disney was put in a weird position where their main source of revenue (parks and movies) were suddenly cut off and at the time quickly swerved into a streaming service. Temporarily this was a great solution, and it’s exactly what happened in tons of industries. But, like many Covid-19 booms once Covid-19’s (main) pandemic phase(s) ended, a lot of it felt redundant and pointless. This of course leads to less interest and corporate cullings. In other words, hindsight is 20/20 and any criticism about Disney+ and Disney’s embrace of online venues is nothing unique to them. It’s only cynical folk and right wingers who want blow it out of proportion.

Ironically, the thing Disney might really be in danger from is an overcorrection from above. They might make plenty of moolah this year, but it won't be quite as much moolah as last year. As far as corporations in this End-Stage Capitalism fever dream we inhabit are concerned, that's an utter disaster, and could well lead to panic in the boardroom.

[StreamOfKaijuness]

Disney's problem in recent years is that they've been spending far too much money to produce their movies. Some of that has been due to covid-related production delays and the fact that everything around the world has gotten more expensive since the pandemic, but the bottom line is that too many of Disney's movies have cost far more to produce than they ever could have realistically made back in theaters.

When Disney released Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest way back in 2006, its $225 million production budget made it the most expensive movie ever produced at that time (not adjusted for inflation). No movie had ever cost $225m to produce before then. The following year, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End broke that record again with its $300m production budget. That wasn't a problem because the level of audience demand justified those expenses. Dead Man's Chest became only the third movie to ever top $1 billion in total worldwide box office after Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Even after Disney bought Marvel Entertainment in 2009, the budgets for Marvel Studios' movies through the 2010s were never too much for their own good. The only ones that cost $200m+ were Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Iron Man 3, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Of those, the only ones that didn't star Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark were Guardians 2 and Black Panther, both of which had enough audience demand to justify their bigger budgets. The rest of Marvel Studios' movies in the 2010s had budgets well under $200m, because they didn't need to cost that much, and they all turned a profit in theaters.

Fast-forward to 2023, however, and now Disney has Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania with a $200m budget, The Little Mermaid with a $297m budget, Elemental with a $200m budget, Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny with a $295m budget, and The Marvels with a $219m budget (after a UK rebate brought it down from its total cost of $274m). That is freaking nuts! There is no excuse for spending that much to produce any of those movies, and yet that's exactly what Disney did!

The only Disney movie on the docket this year that could have reasonably been expected to justify a $200m+ budget was Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and sure enough, Disney/Marvel spent $250m to produce it and it turned a profit in theaters with $845m worldwide.

The fourth Indiana Jones movie, Fox's Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008, topped $317m in North America toward a new series high of $790m worldwide, which more than justified its $185m budget. That movie already cashed in on the concept of a legacy sequel to the classic Indiana Jones films, so yet another legacy sequel in 2023 should have been expected to make significantly less. Spending upwards of $300m to produce Crystal Skull would have been too much, so spending that much to produce Dial of Destiny was just insane. Even Crystal Skull's $185m budget would have been too much for Dial of Destiny. If Disney had spent just $120m to produce this fifth Indiana Jones flick, then the movie's existing $383m worldwide box office haul would have made it a solidly profitable hit. Really, did the fifth Indy need to have upwards of $300m spent on it? Did CGI de-aged Harrison Ford need to happen? It's the out-of-control production cost that doomed this fifth Indy, not an absence of audience interest. There was an audience for this movie, just not enough to justify its bloated budget.

$300m is what you spend to make the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie when it's the mid-2000s and Johnny Depp's face is emblazoned on high school girls' handbags. $300m is way too much to spend on a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid in any year. Disney's remake of The Little Mermaid has drawn $298m in moviegoers at the domestic box office toward $569m worldwide, which is a ton of people, but it's still not enough because the movie was too darn expensive to produce. Remember how Kong: Skull Island was a profitable hit when it made $567m worldwide? That's because it had a $185m budget, which is the most that Disney ever should have spent remaking The Little Mermaid.

[miguelnuva]

The Little Mermaid bad a lot of dumb changes that stopped it from being more successful as well as Spiderman being on its heels which is a shake because Hallie nailed Ariel.

[MC_Lovecraft]

And to piggyback onto what StreamofKaijuness was saying, where is all that money going? It doesn't seem to translate to effects orders of magnitude better like one might expect, and I don't want to imply I'm shouting "graft, graft!" but costs seem wildly out of scale to returns.

[StreamOfKaijuness]

The Little Mermaid bad a lot of dumb changes that stopped it from being more successful as well as Spiderman being on its heels which is a shake because Hallie nailed Ariel.

But it shouldn't have needed to be even more successful. Disney should have spent a lot less producing it. That's the problem.

A movie drawing $298m worth of people to theaters in North America is really freaking good. A movie selling $569m worth of tickets in total worldwide is really freaking good. The only reason that isn't considered good enough for The Little Mermaid is because Disney spent upwards of $300m producing it.

Even before covid production delays took their toll, Variety reports that Disney's production budget for The Little Mermaid was already close to $250m. That's still way too much to be spending on a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. It's just absurd. Disney set this movie up for failure by spending far too much on it, just as they did for nearly all of their movies this year.

Not every live-action remake of one of Disney's animated classics can become a billion-dollar global box office sensation like Aladdin, which had a budget of $183m by the way. If The Little Mermaid had cost only $183m, then its $569m worldwide haul would have made it a profitable hit. Disney needs to stop making their movies so preposterously expensive that they need to be extra-super successful just to break even. That is not a sustainable approach.

Beauty and the Beast ($1.2 billion worldwide) and The Lion King ($1.6 billion), those were sure things. Those were live-action remakes that merited having huge $250m budgets. The Little Mermaid was never sure to be more successful than Cinderella ($542m), so it certainly shouldn't have been a more expensive film than even bigger hits like The Jungle Book and Aladdin.

And to piggyback onto what StreamofKaijuness was saying, where is all that money going? It doesn't seem to translate to effects orders of magnitude better like one might expect, and I don't want to imply I'm shouting "graft, graft!" but costs seem wildly out of scale to returns.

Exactly. Dumping so much money into movies doesn't automatically make them better, nor does it make more people want to go see them in theaters. It just sets the bar for success way too high for most of these movies to reach.

Each of the first two Ant-Man movies cost much less than $200m to produce and were generally well-received, and then the $200m-budgeted Quantumania was widely panned with a particular emphasis on its unfinished VFX shots.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was at least 60% more expensive than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Why? Did Dial of Destiny's blue-screen composite shots look that much better than the blue-screen jungle chase in Crystal Skull? Were any of its CGI-enhanced action scenes as memorable as when Indy shot that swordsman or had an up-close encounter with the asps? Making it the most expensive Indy ever didn't make it a better movie, nor did it do anything to prevent the very expected plummet in attendance from Crystal Skull's franchise peak. That plummet didn't need to be a problem if Disney had expected it and spent a lot less to make this fifth flick but instead they spent so much more, as if they expected Dial of Destiny to be the new box office peak for the franchise. It's crazy.