The 2023 Disney Failure Thread

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, January 25, 2024 20:58
VIEWED: 8549
PAGE 8 of 13

I find it rather amusing that when the media cycle doesn't have anything negative to say about Trump and there's no interesting Ukraine updates out there, you can find our resident Socialist Second in the Cinema threads simping for the big companies.



It's one thing to lie about your numbers to the IRS if you're Disney. It's quite another to be caught several times now lying about them to your shareholders.

The TRUTH of the matter is, Universal is 2023's biggest winner, and Disney is 2023's biggest loser.

And if WB didn't luck out with Barbie, it would have been in a race to the bottom with Disney.




And as far as "revenue" is concerned, there IS NO REVENUE for Disney anymore. Streaming wasn't only a dead-end for them, but it was a costly mistake since they lost all of that REVENUE they had by licensing out their big properties to other streaming services like Netflix. It also had the very unfortunate side-effect of killing its cable network channel in 2023. Nobody is buying Disney toys anymore. Nobody is going to Disney parks anymore. Hell... they're shutting down their entire India operation just to stay afloat.

You'd have an argument here about Hollywood Accounting if it were any year other than 2023. But as a company the size of Disney, you can't lose every game you're playing at the same time and pretend to anybody you're still doing alright.

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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So I read the article from Slashfilm that was cited in wikipedia:

https://www.slashfilm.com/1373331/oppenheimer-florence-pugh-career-fir
st-experience/

Quote:

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Gross profit is what you get if you are a big enough actor or producer to demand this. You get a percentage of profit based on the gross of the film – how much it makes before any costs. Therefore, you are guaranteed to get paid since the studio can't hide anything. Very few people can demand gross points. But if you have them and your film hits big, you make millions. In fact, this can be so profitable you will sometimes see big stars forgo any salary at all except union minimum just to get these points.Unfortunately, Mr. Prowse relates what is almost universally the case with a net profit clause. Studios almost never pay on this clause, as they claim nearly any and every expense possible to keep the film from showing any actual profit. Very few films have ever shown a net profit on the books.How do they do this? Well first, imagine that George Lucas decided to go to New York tomorrow to talk about showing Return of the Jedi in 3D. And he stayed at the Ritz Carlton, ordered sushi at 3 a.m. from room service and used the hotel phone to call Bahrain to make prank calls.Well, 26 years after the release of the film, the accountants at Lucasfilm are going to charge $86,000 to the costs of Return of the Jedi. I am NOT joking. This is what they do. If George Lucas utters the words Star Wars and he's spending money, they're putting it on the red line for one of those films.On the flipside, Mr. Prowse would be wise to use the FORCE, aka a lawyer, to get Lucasfilm to cough up. You see, as you can tell by the above, the accounting is utter bullshit. And on a film like Return of the Jedi, Lucasfilm would be extremely reluctant to open its books in open court. Extremely reluctant because of how incredibly embarrassed studios have been in the past when they have made the mistake of doing this. Plus, the ensuing publicity would be embarrassing to Lucasfilm. Can you imagine the hedlines if Darth Vader sued George Lucas?In short, if you have net participation on a film that has grossed hundreds of millions, you may get some dough, but you'll have to sue to get it.

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Of course.

This isn't any different than record contracts that are so bad that the only way the bands actually make any money is by selling merch at concerts. Concerts that they're also not getting paid any money to perform otherwise, on top of the next-to-nothing they got paid for making their first 2 or 3 albums. You only get to demand better terms when you hit Taylor Swift levels of popularity and you've been in the business long enough to know better.

Christ... Prince had to change his name to a fucking hieroglyph there for a while until he won the right to use his name back in court.

Yeah... They're fuckin' dirtbags for doing this. But they know they can get away with it because the politicians and judges are paid off to let them get away with it. They also know they hold all the power and any new actors or music groups that finally get their "big break" are so desperate to finally make it that they'll sign literally anything thrown in front of them because they know that if they don't there are 1,000 other people who are lined up right behind them to sign that contract.

Why do you think a scumbag like Harvey Weinstein got to have sex with some of the hottest women on the planet? His great personality? Or perhaps it was that cratered face that resembles the surface of Mars? Yeah. I bet that was it.

This still is not an argument for what Disney is going through right now.

1. Even if Disney has ballooned the hell out of their budgets, they're so far in the red that cutting those budgets down to half of what they were on the books still makes no money and still likely loses them money in 2023.

2. It stands to reason that EVERY one of the big stuidos is doing this, and yet Universal has still managed to put u

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Quote:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

At the end of the day the IRS knows what they made and didn't make.

And if the above sentence is not true, might I suggest that some of those 87,000 new IRS agents that taxpayers are funding to go after people making less than $30k per year set their sites on Hollywood instead perhaps?

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The IRS does not know. The only limitation on how much cheating a public corporation does is the dishonesty of the board of directors.

For someone who does NOT have a board of directors, Roy Cohn for example, Trump's mentor. Roy never paid income tax and the IRS could do nothing to him. Roy would simply refuse to cooperate, and file a stalling motion in court, and the IRS was stymied. We only know now because Roy is dead. Trump probably has pulled the exact same stunt. We won't know for sure until after he is dead and a new set of lawyers and accountants, ones not selected for dishonesty by Trump to close his estate, take over. It is very hard to cheat when dead. While alive, Trump's income is whatever he says it is, which is why Donald Trump 'paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017'.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Quote:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Idiot Second used to defend Disney and has said that Disney goes up and down with the S&P 500.

Disney stock dipped below $80 a share today before settling at $80.57.

Let's see what the S&P looks like.... Hmmmmmm... $4,451.14


March 12, 2021:
- Disney peaks at $197.16 per share.
- S&P 500 sits at $3,943.34.

September 7th, 2023:
- Disney ends the day it dipped below $80 at $80.57 per share.
- S&P 500 is $4,451.14.

Disney's loss in that time: $116.59 per share or -40.87%
S&P 500's gain in that time: $507.80 or +12.88%

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Math seems off.
Methinks 116.59 / 197.16 would be closer to a 59.13% loss. Or -59.13%
Using S&P500 as benchmark, control group, the potential of Disney would have been about $222. So the loss is actually equivalent to $141.

Quote:

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Disney hasn't been this low since March 1st of 2014 when it was $80.41 per share, which was the highest it had ever been at that point after a 12 year consistent rise in price after the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s.

Bob Iger is getting sued now a 2nd time for defrauding investors and lying about Disney+ results after it was revealed they lost another $800 Million in streaming last quarter.

Theme Park attendance has never been lower.

Disney might go bankrupt if it is forced to buy Hulu.

Disney has lost over $775 Million in the Box Office so far in 2023.

Toys for 8 year old movies still rot on shelves, even at discount stores like Ollie's because nobody wants to buy their diversity hire woke crap that the since fired DEI team of college educated morons insisted get made only to eventually find their way into a landfill whenever Ollie's decides it wants the shelf space back and cuts its losses. At least Ollie's will get a tax writeoff for that terrible mistake.
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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Disney caved in and settled with Charter Cable service. There was no agreement for a week, so Walt Gayness must have seen Bankruptcy on the horizon.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Idiot Second used to defend Disney and has said that Disney goes up and down with the S&P 500.

Disney stock dipped below $80 a share today before settling at $80.57.

Let's see what the S&P looks like.... Hmmmmmm... $4,451.14


March 12, 2021:
- Disney peaks at $197.16 per share.
- S&P 500 sits at $3,943.34.

September 7th, 2023:
- Disney ends the day it dipped below $80 at $80.57 per share.
- S&P 500 is $4,451.14.

Disney's loss in that time: $116.59 per share or -40.87%
S&P 500's gain in that time: $507.80 or +12.88%

---

Math seems off.
Methinks 116.59 / 197.16 would be closer to a 59.13% loss. Or -59.13%

---

Correct. Thanks for that. I know what I did wrong here. Oops!

Quote:

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Using S&P500 as benchmark, control group, the potential of Disney would have been about $222. So the loss is actually equivalent to $141.

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Yeah. I won't be doing that though, because my whole point is that the idea that Disney is tied to the S&P (especially in recent years) is pure bullshit. Interesting fact though.

Quote:

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Disney hasn't been this low since March 1st of 2014 when it was $80.41 per share, which was the highest it had ever been at that point after a 12 year consistent rise in price after the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s.

Bob Iger is getting sued now a 2nd time for defrauding investors and lying about Disney+ results after it was revealed they lost another $800 Million in streaming last quarter.

Theme Park attendance has never been lower.

Disney might go bankrupt if it is forced to buy Hulu.

Disney has lost over $775 Million in the Box Office so far in 2023.

Toys for 8 year old movies still rot on shelves, even at discount stores like Ollie's because nobody wants to buy their diversity hire woke crap that the since fired DEI team of college educated morons insisted get made only to eventually find their way into a landfill whenever Ollie's decides it wants the shelf space back and cuts its losses. At least Ollie's will get a tax writeoff for that terrible mistake.
--------------------------------------------------
How you do anything is how you do everything.

---

Disney caved in and settled with Charter Cable service. There was no agreement for a week, so Walt Gayness must have seen Bankruptcy on the horizon.

---

I did see this.

And I giggled.

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Numbers from 09/05:

(Labor Day was included in last week's increases because I wasn't going to do the extra work required to remove Labor Day after the studios couldn't be bothered to update their numbers until Tuesday either.)

Quote:

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
This will encompass all Disney/Pixar/Fox Studios failures for the year. This OP will be updated from time to time as more data comes in, particularly when a movie officially ends its theatrical run and we have solid numbers.

[ALL FIGURES UPDATED 09/05/2023] NOTE: The studios and The-Nubmers didn't bother getting anything updated until late Tuesday night, so I'm not going to bother doing all the hard work and getting legitimate numbers for the Holiday weekend either. Numbers on the Disney list and the Worldwide lists will include Labor Day, so next week's update will be back to normal but only include the 6 days after Labor Day.

Sub-threads for notable movies can be found here:

The Little Mermaid Failure Thread: http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=65598

The Elemental Failure Thread: http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=65628

The Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Failure Thread: http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=65629

NOTE 1: I have decided to add the 2.5x Rule of Thumb and mark the existing numbers as the 2.0x Rule of Thumb that has been suggested by Variety magazine when discussing how much money Disney is losing on movies. The truth lies somewhere in the middle of both figures.

However, I will still keep any movie that grossed more than 2 times the Production Budget in the Winners category for now.

For more information on this, look earlier in the thread.

NOTE 2: To not completely ignore international changes from week to week, I've simplified the explanation of +/- money any movie makes whether it's still in theaters or not for each entry. Just one single line now. We all know that the international numbers fluctuate quite a bit and become extremely noticeable once a movie has neared the end of its run and several weeks afterward, so I won't go into detail below every movie when it happens.

I've made a note to verify all final numbers here a few months after Disney's last 2023 movies exit the theaters in 2024 to make sure they're still accurate since movies that have been out of theaters for weeks still seem to lose and gain some money after the fact.



Live Action Remakes that were so bad they skipped a theatrical release and went straight to Disney+:

Peter Pan and Wendy (April 23rd, 2023)
Production Budget: $170 Million
source: https://vancouversun.com/entertainment/local-arts/disney-peter-pan-wen
dy-canadian-film-industry
Box Office: $0 [FINAL]

Net Gain/Loss: -$170,000,000 - Marketing Costs (Unknown) [FINAL]



Theatrical Releases (WINNERS):

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania * [Walt Disney Pictures/Marvel Studios] (February 17th, 2023)
Production Budget: $200,000,000
source: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Ant-Man-and-the-Wasp-Quantumania-(20
23)#tab=summary
Worldwide Opening Weekend: $250,000,000 (125% of Production Budget)
FINAL Worldwide Gross: $463,635,303 (232% of Production Budget)
*No change from last week as of 09/05.

Net Gain/Loss [2.0x RoT]: +$63,635,303 [FINAL]
Net Gain/Loss [2.5x RoT]: -$36,364,697 [FINAL]

Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 3. [Walt Disney Pictures/Marvel Studios] (May 5th, 2023)
Production Budget: $250,000,000
source: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Guardians-of-the-Galaxy-Vol-3-(2023)
#tab=summary
Worldwide Opening Weekend: $290,000,000 (116% of Production Budget)
FINAL Worldwide Gross: $844,321,673 (338% of Production Budget)
*No change from last week as of 09/05.

Net Gain/Loss [2.0x RoT]: +$344,321,673 [FINAL]
Net Gain/Loss [2.5x RoT]: +$219,321,673 [FINAL]

The Little Mermaid [Walt Disney Pictures] (May 26th, 2023)
Production Budget: $250,000,000
source: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Little-Mermaid-T

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