Good day all. Recently, the latest film from Disney, part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Marvels was released. The film flopped. It bombed so badly that it registered a 10 on the Richter Scale. To say it cratered would be an understatement.
Disney is in a bad way financially. The stock price is down from it’s all time high of $201/share to it’s recent close of $92.56/share. (The only reason the price is this high is the proxy fight now underway) The parks aren’t doing well and most of the Disney films released in the last year have failed miserably. It’s estimated that Disney will lose over $1 billion dollars on their movies this year.
There are a lot of reasons for these failures, and I would recommend visiting That Park Place for the latest on Disney and other entertainment companies. I would also recommend watching WDWPro on YouTube for the entertainment side and Valliant Renegade for the financial side of the disaster that is Disney.
The long and short of the problems facing Disney’s film projects are fairly straightforward. They suck. Disney has gone full Woke and parents no longer trust Disney with their children. The Marvels is a case in point. However, that isn’t how the CEO of Disney, Bob Iger, sees things. He has announced the reason no one is seeing the movies is the Covid-19 Virus. Here are the details from Newsmax:
Disney CEO Bob Iger cited the pandemic — more than two years after the height of COVID-19 — as responsible for the box office woes of the female-led “Marvels” movie.
Iger claimed at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit this week that the movie was “shot during COVID,” leading to a “lack of supervision” caused by absent executives.
He also attributed the box office woes to the oversaturation of Disney-related intellectual properties dominating the film industry for over a decade.
“And I’m not sure another studio will ever achieve some of the numbers that we achieved. I mean, we got to the point where if a film didn’t do a billion dollars in global box office, we were disappointed,” Iger said. “That’s an unbelievably high standard, and I think we have to get more realistic.”
The actual problems are bad writing, bad directing lousy plots and out of control production costs. Disney’s budgets for their movies start at $200 million and only go up. Iger’s saying that there was no supervision during the Covid lock downs is disingenuous at best. Most productions flat out shut down. The real issue is that the people making the movies have a philosophy of “We’ll fix things in post production.”
The problem here is that they aren’t correcting a few minor issues, they are basically reshooting the movie. Currently, Disney has another debacle in production, the live action version of Snow White. The disaster of “Snow Tan and the Seven Homeless Junkies” which is one of the nicknames for the production, is so bad that Disney has delayed release and is shooting the movie all over again. (See the details on the WDWPro channel)
However, Breitbart noted on Friday that the movie began filming in late July 2021, well after the pandemic started to ebb.
The outlet also pointed to other successful movies filmed closer to the pandemic that have been successes for Disney, specifically “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”
I don’t know how successful that movie was. I watched it on Disney+ and I didn’t like it. Of course, I wasn’t all that thrilled with the original Black Panther either. The sequel had a problem in that the star of the original Black Panther tragically passed away. Rather then recast the part, they followed the Kathleen Kennedy policy of “Put a chick in it and make her gay!”
Still, “The Marvels” is not alone in being a failure for Disney. Other comic book movies, including the sequels to “Thor” and “Ant-Man,” as well as the latest in the “Indiana Jones” franchise, have also suffered.
“I don’t want to apologize for making sequels,” Iger told the summit. “Some of them have done extraordinarily well, and they’ve been good films, too. I think there has to be a reason to make them. You have to have a good story.”
The problem isn’t making sequels. The problem is the sequels that have come out in the last few years have completely trashed the “Universes” that they are part of. Disney has destroyed the Star Wars Universe, put the Indiana Jones franchise in the fridge and nuked it, and killed the Marvel universe. No one is going to see these movies any longer because they suck.
Iger has been big on pushing the Disney Streaming service, Disney+. The problem with it is that Disney has been raising the prices of the no ads service to levels that are becoming unaffordable for people. The idea is to push people into the cheaper levels where they can push ads on them. (I had Disney+ and recently cancelled it for that reason. It’s not worth the price)
Then there is the problem of the content. It’s the same garbage that Disney has put into the theaters. Even worse, Disney has killed their other money making system, licensing their content. Disney used to sell DVD’s, and license their movies to other streaming services such as Netflix. These tools could make a bad movie at least break even and even become profitable. Instead, they put everything on Disney+ and it simply rots.
The problem with Disney’s The Marvels and their other productions of late has nothing whatsoever to do with the Covid-19 Panicdemic. It has everything to do with a corporation that puts Woke politics ahead of good productions, and not controlling their costs. (Sucking up to the People’s Republic of China at the expense of Disney World isn’t helping matters)
Currently, there is a proxy fight going on between Nelson Peltz and Disney. He wants seats on the board of directors to restore Disney’s family friendly parks and content. The details of this are to great to go into here, so once again, hit up YouTube. Another problem for Iger and Disney is Elon Musk. Iger has managed to really piss off Elon Musk.
I’ve covered the Media Matters attack on TwitterX and Elon Musk. The short version is that Media Matters rigged “X” to show company ads next to racist and NeoNazi content. They then called up all of Twitter’s advertisers to get them to pull their ads. Disney was one of them. In the interview he gave at the DealBook Summit, among the other things he did, was attack Twitter and Musk. Elon Musk was next on the list to be interviewed and he blew the roof off the building.
Now people are wondering, or in some cases, hoping that Musk will dig out a few billion in loose change, give it to Peltz and tell him to go deal with Iger. There is no way to say if Musk might decide to jump into the proxy war now underway. I personally hope so. The problem with Disney is Bob Iger. When things go south, he blames others or situations instead of accepting the responsibility and learning from it. Blaming Covid 3 years after the fact is a case in point. You are a failure Bob. If Disney is to survive, then it’s time for you to go.
***POSTSCRIPT***
I wrote this post before the audit by the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District on it’s predecessor, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, was released. I’m working on a post regarding that right now.
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