A well-known film box office analyst estimates that in the last 12 months, Disney, whose woke agenda has placed it at odds with much of the general public, lost nearly $900 million on its last eight releases.
YouTube Financial analyst Valliant Renegade measured the performances of “Lightyear,” “Thor: Love and Thunder,” “Strange World,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “Antman and The Wasp: Quantumania,” “Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3,” “The Little Mermaid,” and “Elemental.” The last two films are still playing in theaters.
The analyst matched the films’ performance against their marketing budgets in the trailing 12 months (TTM) and Disney’s return on investment (ROI).
Using stipulated budgets from places like “The Numbers” and leaving out the costs associated with production overruns and reshoots, he noted that the production budgets of the eight films amounted to $1,735,000,000, while global prints and ads came to an additional $1,015,000,000.
Thus, he estimated that the total costs amounted to $2,750, 000,000, acknowledging that he was probably “lowballing this in a few cases, which is favoring Disney.”
Valliant Renegade pointed out that from box office rentals, (money theaters pay back to the distributor), Disney would take in 55% of the box office sales domestically, 43% internationally, and 25% from their films released in China. He pointed out that the box office numbers can be misleading as they do not take into account the expenditures by the studio and the distributor to produce and market the film.
One example: “Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3” took in $345.6 million domestically while bringing back roughly $190 million to Disney. $385 million internationally while bringing in roughly $165 million; and $90 million from China while bringing in roughly $22.5 million.
He estimated that for the eight films, Disney’s total returns amounted to $1.861 billion, which would mean that for the eight films, they suffered a loss of $890 million.
He pointed out that his figures do not include the economic opportunity costs that Disney had by refusing to license its films to other streaming services and companies.
“Disney consumes all of its own content post-theatrical,” Valliant Renegade explained. “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.”
“So not only do we need to consider how much money Disney has lost at the box office, we also need to consider how much money Disney has lost in economic opportunity costs,” he continued. “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 one window. If Disney had just taken the Universal-type deal with those two major streamers Disney would have a lot more money in its pocket, but they’ve chosen to keep it all home to support Disney+.”
(Disclosure: The Daily Wire has announced plans for kids’ entertainment content.)