Nope.... The general breakdown in the 80's when Eisner was putting his evil plan in place was a distributor got 70% of the box office receipts the first 2 weeks of a film release. Now a ticket was only $4 dollars back then so about $2.80 per ticket, but then a family of 4 goes to the theater and its $11.20 to Disney. While a VHS movie would net companies 30% profit, and on a $20VHS that is only $6 per movie and the family of 4 doesn't need to buy 4 movies just 1 so the number say that Disney would be better off with movies in the long-run.
Your argument fails to take into consideration a good many things
1: "Now a ticket was only $4 dollars back then" "then" being the 1980s
The average movie ticket went from $2.69 in 1980 to $4 in 1989. In 1985 average ticket was $3.55. I honestly don't know if studios made 30% off each VHS tape as you attest, but since you were wrong about ticket prices, we have to acknowledge, it's a possibility, so your assumptions about how much they were making off movie tickets versus tapes could be way off. Especially since...
2: Disney like many other studios started cross-marketing their VHS tapes with other products - most famously the non Disney Top Gun having a Diet Pepsi commercial that "premiered" on the tape and helped to let the tape be sold at a price affordable to consumers verus a rental price of 80-100 bucks. The Disney tapes would have coupons for paper towels or McDonald's or cereal or any kind of product. Disney made money synergizing their classics with those companies, which increased the profitability of the video release.
3: As you wrote, "a distributor got 70% of the box office receipts the first 2 weeks of a film release," but then there was a sliding scale of how the money got split, and if a movie were in theaters long enough, that became more of a 50-50 split (studios nowadays make a much bigger cut during the first few weeks than 70%, and movies don't usually last long enough in theaters anyway, which is one of the main reasons why your popcorn and soda is over $10, that's the only way the theaters make a profit because so much more of the ticket price goes to studios). As a result, after 4 weeks in 1985, Disney was only getting $1.77 of a $3.55 ticket, whether it was a new movie or a re-release.
4: As multiplexes exploded in malls across America, major studios started producing more content to fill those theaters, so there was less of a guarantee a re-release would make money when so many more new movies were coming down the pike. Maybe you'd rather take your kids to the new Spielberg flick than a re-release you saw last time it was re-released. And as I wrote earlier, this included Disney's own new-at-the-time movies. Would Disney want a new flick to flop because people went to see a re-release of Bambi? Or vice versa? But hey one way to solve that problem...
5: VHS tapes were a great way to promote NEW Disney cartoons coming to theaters, usually a captive audience, because not everyone fast-forwarded past the trailers, especially when the VHS was first played. I remember trying to fastforward a trailer on a tape only to have my nieces tell me no, they loved those trailers as much as the movie. And that instant love meant they HAD to see the movie when it came to the theaters, no waiting for VHS...though of course they had to have the VHS too.
6: not everyone takes their kids to a movie, even a Disney re-release of a classic. Maybe the kids are too young, maybe too rambunctious, maybe they get scared in a dark theater, VHS prices seemed like a value because the kids could see the movie an infinite amount of times.
7: the shift to home video still worked nicely with the moratorium that is aka "The Disney vault." Instead of a theatrical re-release, movies were released and then pulled from home video. People with babies would buy Disney movies because by the time Junior was old enough to watch it, it might not available any more! I remember working for a video rental store for a time. They had unopened OOP "vaulted" Disney movies they would sell for a Franklin and a few got bought. And when Movie X was back on video "for a limited time," new parents would jump on the chance to buy it for their kids. Or if your copy wore out, you'd buy it again, especially if it had been (booming voice here) DIGITALLY REMASTERRRRRRRRRED!
So for parents on a tighter budget, home video made more sense as kids could rewatch the movie, and if Disney took a little hit for the price of the tape compared to the price of a theatrical re-release it was compensated by the cross-promotion they'd arrange with other products having ad time on the tape or coupons/fliers in the box. For parents with a little more money, you took the kids to the new movies in theaters, bought the classics on VHS to keep. And clearly, the money rolled into Disney like crazy.
Other than that, your analysis is quite valid.
