Despite CEO Bob Iger’s call for quality over quantity earlier this year, The Walt Disney Company has lost nearly $900 million on recent movies, according to a recent analysis.
The company’s last eight films have suffered extravagant losses, according to box office analyst Valliant Renegade.
The struggles go back to the disappointing release of the film “Lightyear,” as the losses were incurred during the releases of “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,” and “Elemental.”
While films like “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” have done significantly better than the others, the losses have still piled up with bigger flops like its most recent movie “Elemental.”
According to Deadline, two of the biggest flops included “Lightyear,” which lost $106 million, and “Strange World,” which lost $197 million.
Valiant Renegade reports that the eight movies cost a total of $2.75 billion to make but only brought in $1.86 billion for the company, bringing the total losses to roughly $890 million.
One factor Valliant Renegade says has played a role in the recent losses the company incurred is the absence of third-party streaming contracts.
“One of the things that we always talk about here, that is the perfect time to remind everybody, is that Disney consumes all of its own content post-theatrical,” Valliant Renegade stated. “Meaning that Disney that used to license their big content out like the entire MCU to places like Netflix for years, those were billions of dollars’ worth of third-party contracts that have now been taken off the table.”
The analyst said that when looking at how much the company has lost, the failures on the big screen can’t be the only thing considered.
“We also need to consider how much money Disney has lost in economic-opportunity costs,” the analyst said. “You see, that’s how much money they could have made had they actually taken these films and licensed them to Netflix, or Amazon Prime, or even similar to what Universal does with a split Pay 1 window.”
Valiant Renegade claims that if Disney made a deal of some sort it could mean “more money in its pocket” instead of financial struggles.
Disney has struggled as of late, resulting in Iger cutting jobs and projects in an attempt to save money. Overall, he was expected to cut an estimated 7,000 jobs from his company’s global workforce in a series of cuts that ended in May. The move, announced in February, is expected to save the company nearly $5.5 billion in costs.
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