The Patriot Post® · Good News: The Disney Death Spiral
The last few movies that Disney has released have lost the company close to a billion dollars. With the new Indiana Jones movie coming out on Friday, it is anticipated the deficit will only rise.
According to World of Reel: “A well-known Box office analyst has estimated that the Walt Disney Co. has lost over $890 million on their last eight studio releases. The films contributing to the losses include ‘Lightyear,’ ‘Thor: Love and Thunder,’ ‘Strange World,’ ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,’ ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,’ ‘The Little Mermaid,’ and ‘Elemental.’ The eight films cost roughly $2.75 billion to produce but only brought in $1.86 billion. Okay, but what about marketing costs? You have to take that into account as well — it must be way more than $890 million in losses.”
The nuanced view (i.e., the view that wants to gloss over the bigger truth) of this fall from grace points to the fact that Disney made a tactical financial error by releasing its films post-theater only to Disney+. If the company had chosen, like Universal has, to use a split-pay method so that other streaming platforms like Amazon Prime or Netflix had to pay to use some of Disney’s content, that might have helped stymie the financial bleeding. It’s an interesting theory, but not enough to quite explain the audience’s rejection of films from a once-beloved company. These losses are specifically about big box-office films flopping.
Another thought — complaint, really — is that Disney is in a creative rut. It is recycling old nostalgic films like “The Lion King” and “The Little Mermaid” and turning them into live-action features. Apparently, “Moana” and “Bambi” are in for the same treatment. The Disney team has absolutely sucked the life out of the Marvel Comic Universe and Star Wars Universe in terms of side storylines. Yet it continues to put these franchises through the revamp machine in the hope of making more money out of old material.
What is actually the issue, however, is that Disney decided to use its position of trust as a beloved film company primarily targeting children to push an ideological agenda that is anti-family. Parents simply aren’t going to pay for trashy indoctrination.
Let’s start with “Lightyear,” “Strange World,” and “Elemental.” These stories were used to push the LGBTQ+ agenda. “Lightyear” featured a same-sex kiss, “Strange World” had a whole gay romance side plot, and “Elemental” featured a nonbinary character. It’s not just these films, though. Disney has a plethora of pride films that it has categorized and ready for viewing on its streaming platform. These films are marketed for kids, and frankly the majority of parents have a problem with that. Disney has also advertised that it has hired a gender-confused man to play a major character in a new Star Wars series, “The Acolyte.” So, yeah, this company is all in with the gender ideology indoctrination of children.
Then there are films that cater to the racism narrative: “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “The Little Mermaid,” and again “Elemental.” Granted, “Elemental” is the only one wherein the storyline was explicitly about xenophobia. However, Disney was more than willing to stir up racial grievance talking points for “The Little Mermaid.” It cast live-action Ariel as black, which was made into a huge deal. Moreover, the outright anti-white rhetoric surrounding the opening weekend of “Wakanda Forever” was off-putting, to say the least. Other Disney franchises are guilty of stirring up racial division to sell their product, with “Obi-Wan Kenobe” being a prime example. Ultimately, the message is that of racial Marxism, which is deeply rooted in anti-family sentiments.
As was mentioned earlier, Disney has been heavily relying on its animated-to-live-action remakes. Part of the reason for the audience’s rejection of these films — aside from being shot-for-shot almost the same movies as the old — is that Disney has tried to “update” the films to suit 2020 cultural norms. For example, lyrics to the beloved songs in “The Little Mermaid” were changed to fit modern notions of morality, and “Kiss the Girl” was rewritten so that consent was front and center. As another example, Disney took the whole redemptive (Christian) moral center out of its “Pinocchio” 2022 remake.
Disney has been losing money steadily since March 2022, which happened to be when former Disney CEO Bob Chapek dragged the company to a woke crusade against Florida and Governor Ron DeSantis’s Parental Rights in Education legislation, an anti-grooming bill deceitfully dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by left-wing activists. It is an interesting coincidence to note. For perspective, Disney+ launched in November 2019, so the incorporation of that streaming platform into the mix is probably not the main cause of the crash and burn of Disney’s stock and other revenue.
Disney seems to be in a death spiral, and it’s hard to see how the company’s doubling down on woke leftist maxims is going to turn that financial bleeding around. In case Disney executives weren’t already aware, Americans are fatigued by the Left’s moral relativism. They prefer truth, goodness, and beauty — things that Disney is no longer producing.