Disney Irish
Premium Member
And South Korea ended up being a huge market for Elemental even though it stalled here in the US.
You never know until all the box office results come in.
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Wish (Walt Disney Animation - November 2023)
- Thread starter DCBaker
- Start date
You never know until all the box office results come in.
TP2000
Well-Known Member
The projection that Wish will lose more than $200 Million for Disney is based on the assumption that there is still $25 Million or so left in the last few major foreign markets, namely Brazil, Australia & New Zealand, and South Korea. It will be a tough slog to get there for Wish, but those last few foreign countries should get it closer to $100 Million total global box office.
Wish's foreign box office currently stands at $71 Million as of Sunday, December 17th. That includes Estonia, for the record.
With $100 Million-ish overseas, and $70 Million-ish domestically, Wish will lose over $200 Million for Disney in its theatrical run.
Just back from a quick (slightly wet) weekend in WDW, so sorry for letting this part of the conversation die for a bit.
I suspect that we aren't supposed to just view the example wishes as simply mountain climbing, flying, and singing. That would indeed be a bit silly. I think they're representations of the broader human striving that Rosas is lacking, e.g. mountain climbing = exploration, flying = innovation, singing = art/inspiration for future generations. This reading is reinforced by the epilogue where the woman who wants to fly isn't hung up on getting to magically levitate through the air, but is instead going to work on creating a flying machine. Does everyone in our society get to do this boundary-stretching work? Of course not, but I definitely think that someone has to be doing that work in order to create a successful civilization.
BuddyThomas
Well-Known Member
Thanks for the continuous blow by blow updates.
Ghost93
Well-Known Member
I just don't know what the point of the constant updates are. Wish flopped. Whether it deserved to or not is up for debate (I thought it was mediocre, but have no hatred for it). I feel the daily box office updates are beating a dead horse. There's no rebound coming at the box office for Wish.
Maybe it will do well on streaming, but I still hope Disney stands firm and doesn't release the film on Disney Plus for Christmas. They need to untrain audiences from expecting Christmas day streaming releases for Thanksgiving animated movies.
Most likely it will do well on streaming.
I'm honestly wondering when the corporate "reckoning" will come for Wish doing so poorly. I find it so bizarre, given how much from-the-top meddling is done on Disney's films in general these days (retools, reshoots, reschedulings, etc.) that apparently no one looked at Wish at any point in production and raised questions about its clumsy world-building and stakes, the look of the animation, the songs, etc. (I think back to the huge overhauls Beauty and the Beast, Toy Story, Frozen, etc. had.)
MoonRakerSCM
Well-Known Member
Darn those pesky clickbait youtubers for influencing the UK, Spain, Mexico, and China markets...
Or maybe I give the youtubers too much credit... it must be those negative message board posters!!!!
TP2000
Well-Known Member
Most likely it will do well on streaming.
What does that even mean? Disney+ loses them hundreds of millions of dollars every 90 days.
Does a mega-budget movie that bombed "doing well on streaming" equate to only losing $280 Million instead of $287 Million?
TP2000
Well-Known Member
This is an excellent point.
But it is one I've brought up repeatedly for previous mega-budget flops in the past year. And no one has a good answer for it. Apparently, Disney's flagship movie studios get to keep setting fire to giant piles of cash and lose hundreds of millions of dollars per film, and no one is held accountable for that.
Instead, there is a short list of excuses that are to blame for the massive global audience shunning Disney's recent movies. And it's all due to toxic fandom, Internet service now being available across most of the globe, the various ists and phobes that are only discussed in faculty lounges, and also the Disney+ service. With a fading shout out to Bob Chapek, as a charmless hack.
Meanwhile, there's no night parade in either WDW or Disneyland Resort, no new ride is currently under construsction on either coast even though all six parks are woefully short of ride capacity, and nothing new has been announced to begin construction any time soon in any of the parks in either California or Florida.
LittleBuford
Well-Known Member
I don't think its failure was as predictable as you suggest, or even predictable at all. While recognising its faults, I liked it quite a bit and found it a more enjoyable watch than, say, Frozen 2, which made a lot of money. It's a much better movie than its box-office performance would suggest.
Sir_Cliff
Well-Known Member
Sure, the message of the film is essentially that of The Road to Serfdom (to the extent that the road to tyranny is paved with the incremental sacrifice of individual freedom for the supposed collective good) and the degree of your sympathy to that philosophy will probably influence your response to the film. If you take the maximalist position that individual freedom is the most important thing in the world and that any negative impacts of dismantling the social and political order of Rosas will be compensated by the increased innovation and entrepreneurship in society, then the film's outcome is wholly unproblematic.
There are elements of that world view with which I am sympathetic, but I find the film just embraces it too unconditionally to essentially argue that it doesn't matter whatever else the citizens of Rosas are giving up as they now have the only truely important thing. To me, though, that's a little too close to the notion that there is no such thing as society, only individuals and there's no real effort by the filmmakers to nuance it at all.
Ghost93
Well-Known Member
One issue is that in the past few years Disney has largely only done internal test screenings for their movies. Maybe it's to avoid spoilers leaking, but I think it's clear that this approach isn't working as there is a disconnect between what's resonating with Disney staff and their families and the general public.
Well, that's the thing. I've never taken to the CGI era of Disney in-house animation myself, but I do understand how and why movies like Frozen were such gigantic hits, basically being "Renaissance" (and I'm not talking Beyonce) 2.0 films in terms of structure, style, etc. Looking at the trailers, song previews, and some of the tie-in books for Wish, the movie looked weakly plotted and poorly made but I knew that was just my opinion and it clearly had all the elements for another princess-adjacent megahit, if not as big as Frozen given how moviegoing has changed around the world post-pandemic. I honestly didn't expect many of the professional reviews to reflect the opinion I gained from my gleanings, or for the film to attract so many fewer eyeballs than, say, The Little Mermaid remake or Elemental despite having the studio's biggest marketing campaign for an animated feature of any kind since Frozen II.
Going back to the colossal year the company had in 2019, where movies like Frozen II, The Rise of Skywalker, The Lion King and Aladdin remakes, Toy Story 4, and three Marvel movies did robust business despite some of them getting mixed to vicious reviews from professional critics -- it's wild to see how badly things have come off the rails in 2023. Even in the interim, while they had significant disappointments/flops like several MCU titles, Lightyear, pretty much anything Fox/Searchlight made (due largely to promotional neglect), and the Mulan remake -- as well as the fatal treatment of non-franchise Pixar titles that might have thrived theatrically, particularly Turning Red -- they did have Spider Man No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Avatar - The Way of Water, and Encanto, which beat the odds with its box-office underperformance to becoming a genuinely beloved film on streaming with a healthy afterlife in merchandising.
I think part of this erosion of Disney as a "brand" (as Homer Simpson once said, "People can come up with statistics for anything, Kent. Forty percent of people know that!") isn't just related to politics perceived or real -- Disney as a corporation getting into controversies regarding its commitment to "family values" isn't exactly new. I think the dropping quality of some of their bigger hits is catching up with them. Back in its better days, the AV Club ran an excellent series of critical essays called The Popcorn Champs that looked at the biggest film at the U.S. box office for each year starting in the early 1960s - or second-biggest, as this was running concurrently with a similar series of essays on the history of superhero movies! Since that column handled Avengers Endgame for 2019, The Lion King remake was the film Popcorn Champs covered (this was written in September 2021 for reference).
Disney’s lucrative remake plan culminated with a soulless, joyless “live action” Lion King
Disney’s lucrative remake plan culminated with a soulless, joyless “live action” Lion King
www.avclub.com
I keep thinking back to the closing when I think about What Happened to Wish:
"In its witless and numbing repetition [of what people liked before], it might be the ultimate late-era blockbuster—the most representative example of that last little run before people, through habit and necessity, stopped going to the movies entirely. If the movie business, in its current form, is about to die, then it won’t just be the pandemic that killed it. The rote joylessness of spectacles like The Lion King will have a lot to answer for, too."
As an addendum - based on the two trailers, I didn't hold out much hope for Wonka being good either though I was still curious about it (I do have a soft spot for whimsical family fantasies with modest stakes but produced on a large scale). And a lot of Internet commentators were similarly dubious. And then the reviews came out, I got a bit more optimistic, and I ended up really enjoying it. Why didn't Wish, which has a lot of similar elements, have that same arc with critics and the public? I wonder...