“Get awake, go broke” might be the best way to describe Disney’s insistence on telling stories that most Americans don’t want to be a part of, let alone want their children to be a part of.
After moving sharply to the left and getting involved in some of the most controversial culture wars of the day, Disney’s share price has dropped and any goodwill toward the company has disappeared.
Most famously, the woke company lost its independence when Florida governor Ron DeSantis took away their special rights because they spoke out against his education bill, which said that teachers in kindergarten through third grade couldn’t talk to their students about sex and gender.
But there’s another story that’s getting bigger, and it’s also affecting how much money the company makes. Three of their most recent animated movies have gone wrong, which has cost the company a lot of money.
The Daily Wire talked about three movies, Strange World, Lightyear, and Turning Red, that had huge budgets but didn’t do anything right.
The Daily Wire wrote this about Strange World:
Take the 2022 movie “Strange World.” It came out in November of that year. In this original project, a family of explorers called the Clades find a plant called Pando, which is used by civilization as a powerful source of energy. The family gets back together to figure out why the plant is losing its power so many years after they first found it.
Wikipedia said that the movie probably made less than $100 million around the world and that it would “lose the studio $100-147 million.”
“Lightyear,” a spinoff of the “Toy Story” series that everyone was looking forward to, was Disney’s second huge box office bust, according to the Daily Wire. “This movie told the story of how Buzz Lightyear got to be one of the main characters. The “Toy Story” series and characters are very well-known, but the movie made a few mistakes along the way. The biggest problem was that it came out when Disney was looking for a chance to show how good it was.
Again, Wikipedia added up the total box office numbers and said that the movie was the “fourth-highest grossing animated film” of last year. It made more than $200 million, but its reported budget was the same amount.
Last, the Daily Wire talked about the movie Turning Red, which comes out in 2022. Even though the movie didn’t have a lot of overt LGBT themes, it did have “mature themes” that made parents think twice.
Some analysts said that the movie bombed because Disney made the strange decision to release it in theaters and on their streaming service at the same time. However, this could also be seen as a way for Disney to blame the huge loss on something other than the movie’s content. It was thought that the movie had lost more than $150 million.
In the past, Disney was known and loved for its animated movies that were memorable, emotional, and even magical. From 1937, when Snow White came out, until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Disney once again became the top producer of animated classics, and even after that, when it made more recent movies like “Frozen,” almost every house owned and loved Disney movies.
It seems like not many people are interested in what Disney does next. It doesn’t look like Disney will be able to fix their problems anytime soon, and even if they do, they’ve burned so many bridges that most people will just move on to other ways to have fun.