While there are still some final numbers trickling in from a few studios there won't be anything that shakes up our year end figures.
For 2019 Disney saw a lot of strong performances in a year of many other studios stumbling a bit. A marked improvement from their 2018 results that contained the under-performance or low-end expectations of many movies. This past year, while in total a good year, saw far more studios with those under-preforming stats on movies nearly across the board.
Disney released 10 movies this year (discounting the Fox acquisition) over 5 different sub-studios: 5 under themselves as Disney, 2 from Marvel Studios, and 1 each from DisneyNature, Pixar, and Lucasfilm. Many are placing the success this year on films like Avengers: Endgame, but even excluding the movies not directly released under Disney and only crediting them with their 5 in-house branded movies they still would have made 1557.4 million dollars ... edged out of their #1 place by less than 5 million by Warner Bros., a studio with 20 releases in 2019. As for everything else: Endgame could have captured the #5 studio slot
by itself, they averaged 367.5m
per movie (407.4m with the 7.7m Penguins excluded), and they released both the highest grossing live action film of all time and highest grossing
animated film of all time (though they are still trying really hard not to call Lion King animated - it still counts).
This is an absolutely ridiculous run to compare anything to. And it's not a feat that's likely to be repeated soon. It's likely going to be 5 years or more before any studio, even Disney, has a genuine chance to try this again. The dominance they've had this past 2 years is likely coming to an end. While Disney's 2019 has been a year of both bringing things to a close and going back to well trod paths, their 2020 slate goes some uncharted directions ... but we'll save that for the
2020 box office thread.
Last year they broke the 3 billion domestic year. This year Disney made $3,764,869,434 domestically (over 10.5 billion world wide) overtaking that record by a margin of over 20%. They had 33.5% of the
entire market share of all domestic box office sales in 2019; besides Disney only Warner Bros. has ever captured more than 20% of the market in a given year and that was in 2009.
It's been a wild year folks, thanks everybody for going along on this weird journey.