Disney (and others) at the Box Office - Current State of Affairs

[Prince-1]

I don’t understand why someone would want Apple TV. The only interesting thing on there is the peanuts stuff.

Absolutely wrong. Here are the some of the best shows on Apple:

1) Ted Lasso
2) Silo
3) Severance
4) Shrinking
5) Slow Horses
6) The Morning Show
7) Mythic Quest
8) The Studio*

*This show comes out this week but has amazing reviews. It has a huge cast led by Seth Rogan.

 

[MagicMouseFan]

Absolutely wrong. Here are the some of the best shows on Apple:

1) Ted Lasso
2) Silo
3) Severance
4) Shrinking
5) Slow Horses
6) The Morning Show
7) Mythic Quest
8) The Studio*

*This show comes out this week but has amazing reviews. It has a huge cast led by Seth Rogan.

Agree, Apple TV has great shows. If you have the Apple Vision Pro their immersive content is really cool.

 

[Disney Irish]

Absolutely wrong. Here are the some of the best shows on Apple:

1) Ted Lasso
2) Silo
3) Severance
4) Shrinking
5) Slow Horses
6) The Morning Show
7) Mythic Quest
8) The Studio*

*This show comes out this week but has amazing reviews. It has a huge cast led by Seth Rogan.

Outside of maybe Mythic Quest, none of those would probably be very interesting to a 17 yr old which is the posters age. Hence why they mentioned Peanuts as being the only good thing on the service.

 

[Tha Realest]

Absolutely wrong. Here are the some of the best shows on Apple:

1) Ted Lasso
2) Silo
3) Severance
4) Shrinking
5) Slow Horses
6) The Morning Show
7) Mythic Quest
8) The Studio*

*This show comes out this week but has amazing reviews. It has a huge cast led by Seth Rogan.

For All Mankind is also excellent, except they keep revisiting the absolutely bizarre C-plot story of a housewife and her young lover.

 

[BrianLo]

The "golden age" of Mars Needs Moms, John Carter, The Lone Ranger, and Oz the Great and Powerful.

Indeed. I just recently did some of the leg work, so I’ll re-post it.

A big annual flop out of Disney is basically status quo.

Presented as (Box Office / Production Budget)

Bomb/Flop (Around or <1.5X)
2010 - Prince of Persia (336/200), The Sorcerers Apprentice (215/150)
2011 - Mars Needs Moms (39/150),
2012 - John Carter (284/200)
2013 - The Lone Ranger (260/215)
2014 - Million Dollar Arm (38/25)*Not really a tentpole
2015-Tomorrowland (209/190), Good Dinosaur (332/200)
2016-Alice Through the Looking Glass (299/170), The BFG (195/140)
2017-
2018-A Wrinkle in Time (132/103), Solo (392/275)
2019-Dark Phoenix (252/200), The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (173/120)

"Disappointing" (Mostly 1.75-2.75X films)
2010 - Tangled (591/260), Tron: Legacy (400/170)
2011 - Cars 2 (559/200), Winnie the Pooh (49/30)*, Captain America: First Avenger (370/140), Thor (449/150)
2012 - Brave (538/185), Frankenweenie (81/39)*
2013 - Oz: the Great and Powerful (493/215)
2014 - Muppets: Most Wanted (80/50)*Kind of a bubble, bubble
2015 -
2016 - Pete's Dragon (143/65)
2017 - Cars 3 (383/175)
2018 - Christopher Robin (197/75)
2019 - Mary Poppins: Returns (349/130), Dumbo (353/170), Malificient: Mistress of Evil (491/185)

 

[Prince-1]

For All Mankind is also excellent, except they keep revisiting the absolutely bizarre C-plot story of a housewife and her young lover.

Yeah that’s a good one as well.

 

[BrianLo]

Oh, geez. Without going into finer detail like you just did (I hate math), I had it broadly headed to about $150 Million domestic, and overseas, for a total of $300 Million at the global box office which gets it to about a $200 Million loss.

If Snow White only does $115 Million or so domestic, that puts it on a trajectory for a loss north of $250 Million.

That's gonna leave an ugly mark on the 2025 box office data, to be sure.

250 is a bit too high, unless it can’t crest 200M at the box office.

But a 200M loss seems strongly possible. I’m basing that strictly on the Marvel, that had the same budget.

 

[LittleBuford]

I’ve said similar for years, people used to give Disney the benefit of the doubt and just presume a Disney film would be good, that presumption has changed and with every stumble it just gets worse. Now many wait and see, wait for friends reviews, wait for D+… they don’t just blindly go anymore. That’s true of Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, etc. They’ve lost some of that blind trust Disney = Quality.

The same is also true of a string of hits, I thought with Moana 2 and Inside Out 2 they had re-found their stride, this is going to set them back again, Stitch looks to get them back on track but Disney desperately needs a couple years of successes to reestablish the Disney “quality” preconception and help people forget the last couple years of failure.

I think there’s some rosy retrospection going on here. There have been plenty of not-so-great Disney films in past decades, and a few outright bad ones (I’m looking at you, Chicken Little). Box-office performance isn’t necessarily a measure of quality. The Lion King remake made more than a billion despite being awful, and Wish was not nearly as bad as the figures suggest. I agree with you and others that Disney’s reputation may have taken a knock, but the idea that you could always be assured of a great product when a film had the Disney name on it isn’t true.

 

[LittleBuford]

And heck yes, Severance. We have the last two episodes to go -- watching them with friends this coming Friday.

An incredible show. You’re in for a treat with those two episodes!

 

[HoustonHorn]

So I guess my question to the both of you, and anyone else who wants to chime in, would be is there anyone who has replaced Disney in the "blind trust" category where you'll run out to see them regardless? Or is it that Disney is now just on a level playing field with everyone else in your eyes, where it'll just depend on a movie-by-movie basis? Or is it that you don't really go to the theater much at all anymore because the majority of what you had been going to were these automatic Disney releases?

And so I'm not just playing the inquisitor here... I don't think Disney stuff has ever been an automatic ticket buy for me (certainly Marvel never has been), but I'm also an exception in that I don't actually like watching stuff on streaming if I can help it. There are some directors (and to a lesser extent actors) that I trust enough to pretty much make sure I'll go see all of their releases because even if a particularly movie of theirs isn't as great, it'll at least be interesting to me.

Christopher Nolan. I'm a fanboy. Unapologetically.

Used to be Star Wars as well. But now even that is not automatic. I cannot forgive Disney for what they did to it.

 

[Tha Realest]

Christopher Nolan. I'm a fanboy. Unapologetically.

Used to be Star Wars as well. But now even that is not automatic. I cannot forgive Disney for what they did to it.

Nolan is a brand unto himself - Oppenheimer is proof of that.

One of my favorite memories is being an extra in one of his earlier films and him and his DP (Wally Pfister) noticing something I was doing take after take. I don’t think he minded as I wasn’t fired on the spot.

 

[MoonRakerSCM]

Tried to get off work early today... hope there are still seats available-

 

[brideck]

Christopher Nolan. I'm a fanboy. Unapologetically.

Yep yep. Nolan is definitely one of those directors for us, too. The Coen Brothers used to be for us, but they have not been nearly as good on their own as they were together. And then there's a whole set of indie/borderline mainstream directors that we usually like, e.g. Lanthimos, Aster, Eggers, Kelly Reichardt, etc. They're not always great, but usually interesting.

 

[brideck]

Outside of maybe Mythic Quest, none of those would probably be very interesting to a 17 yr old which is the posters age. Hence why they mentioned Peanuts as being the only good thing on the service.

That would really depend on the 17 yo and what you've been exposed to. Some of us grew up watching things like OG Twin Peaks when we were only 11/12.

I watched that finale taped off TV more times than I can count, which clearly accounts for my extremely mainstream tastes today. </s>

 

[Tony the Tigger]

All right, I did some crunching based on Snow White's open, and if it gets holds like Maleficent: Mistress of Evil it'll end up around $130m domestic. If it instead gets holds like Dumbo, which performed really poorly, it'll end up around $105m domestic.

If it ends up higher than $75m after next weekend, then it'll have gotten a decent word-of-mouth bump and everything will need to be recalibrated. We'll see how much those school-age girls are talking to each other about it this week.

If it holds like Mufasa (about to hit $720 million) it can do the same.

Not holding my breath. The public discourse is awful - mostly from people who haven’t seen it.

 

[Tony the Tigger]

That would really depend on the 17 yo and what you've been exposed to. Some of us grew up watching things like OG Twin Peaks when we were only 11/12.

I watched that finale taped off TV more times than I can count, which clearly accounts for my extremely mainstream tastes today. </s>

I saw Jaws in the theater at age 4. Didn’t want to take a bath after.

 

[Casper Gutman]

Yep yep. Nolan is definitely one of those directors for us, too. The Coen Brothers used to be for us, but they have not been nearly as good on their own as they were together. And then there's a whole set of indie/borderline mainstream directors that we usually like, e.g. Lanthimos, Aster, Eggers, Kelly Reichardt, etc. They're not always great, but usually interesting.

I miss the Coen Brothers so much. That whole generation of auteurs, with their playfulness and humor and self-aware toying with cinematic conventions was tremendous fun.

Dark Knight may be my favorite comic movie of all time, but I honestly don’t fully understand the infatuation with Nolan. There’s a chilly, distant, impersonal feel to his films reminiscent of Kubrick, another auteur I’ve always found alienating. Honestly, a lot of his appeal seems to be that he makes viewers feel smart without asking very much of them. A lot of the current generation of big name directors - Villanueva springs to mind - have that same self-serious coldness. It’s a long way from the impish cineaste approach, the wink and nod, of the Coens or Raimi or even earlier filmmakers like Lynch. Where’s the fun?

PS: Just thinking of more from that disappearing generation - Tarantino, Burton, Wes Anderson… Kids who got the keys to the candy store.

Paul Thomas Anderson is fascinating because his initial sprawling epics were very much of the postmodern giddy era (the Sundance era?) but he quickly shifted into one of the leading representatives of modern Kubrickian coldness with his more recent character studies. When modern PTA tried to make an old-school PTA film, Inherent Vice, it was the worst film of his career.

I suppose Lanthimos, Bong Joon Ho, and Del Toro still have some of the old spirit - although the latter two are arguably slightly later members of the earlier generation.

 

[Agent H]

Absolutely wrong. Here are the some of the best shows on Apple:

1) Ted Lasso
2) Silo
3) Severance
4) Shrinking
5) Slow Horses
6) The Morning Show
7) Mythic Quest
8) The Studio*

*This show comes out this week but has amazing reviews. It has a huge cast led by Seth Rogan.

I’ve never heard of any of those except Ted lasso.

 

[brideck]

If it holds like Mufasa (about to hit $720 million) it can do the same.

For sure. I took a look at Mufasa and Zegler's recent Hunger Games installment, too, when I was looking at possible comps. Both of those had bigger 2nd weeks than their opening, but both of those 2nd weeks were also holidays, which is obviously not the case for Miss Snow.

I saw Jaws in the theater at age 4. Didn’t want to take a bath after.

Oh, man. I can't even imagine. I think I saw Jaws (not in the theater) when I was... 8 or so? Quint's demise was absolute nightmare fuel for awhile.

 

[Agent H]

I think there’s some rosy retrospection going on here. There have been plenty of not-so-great Disney films in past decades, and a few outright bad ones (I’m looking at you, Chicken Little). Box-office performance isn’t necessarily a measure of quality. The Lion King remake made more than a billion despite being awful, and Wish was not nearly as bad as the figures suggest. I agree with you and others that Disney’s reputation may have taken a knock, but the idea that you could always be assured of a great product when a film had the Disney name on it isn’t true.

I honestly forgot chicken little existed until just now and by extension I also remembered this abomination.