70 billion dollars and what really do they have to show for it?
The purchase gave them an insane amount of debt so they immediately laid off a lot of former fox employees and recently laid off 7000 employees to save them 5 billion.
They also haven’t done much of anything with the Fox catalog.
Most of the new 20th century films were unceremoniously slapped onto Hulu streaming.
- Hellraiser 2022
- Prey
- New Mutants
- No Exit
- Barbarian
- Boston Strangler
- Crater
And more were all put on streaming and forgotten. Some of these movies were pretty good and could have made some money in theaters. I really liked Barbarian myself and Prey got a ton of praise.
What exactly did they get that was worth 70 billion? Avatar? The Simpsons? They could have just licensed those for Disney+ and saved a ton of money. Most of Fox’s properties don’t fit Disney. What are they even going to do with Alien, Predator, and Planet of the Apes? If Prey is any indication they aren’t interested in putting them in theaters.
Before someone says X-Men what the hell have they even done with them? Some lame cameos. I’ll never forgive them for the quicksilver gag in Wandavision. They got beat bad by Fox in the who has the cooler quicksilver so they make him a dick joke. Great.
They aren’t going to do anything with the X-Men anytime soon. The 3rd Deadpool movie seems to be the only thing even cooking and that seems to be more because Ryan Reynolds is pushing it. If you’re an X-Men fan you must be disappointed. Remember when we had an X-Men movie about every year? Say goodbye to those and Alien, Predator, Planet of the Apes.
FX seems to be doing alright but all to adult for Disney so to Hulu it goes. Why did they make a big deal out of Disney+ anyway? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have one app? Put it all on Hulu. Why are their two apps with very different interfaces for one company?
Now that Disney is losing money in streaming and with recent flops I think this deal needs to be scrutinized more. Blame Capitalism or streaming mania but I have to say even from a business standpoint it makes no sense at all.
What do you think? Was this the beginning of the end for Disney’s box office dominance? A bad play to kill Netflix? Or is Disney planning something that will take years to bear fruit?
Disney doesn’t really care all that much about box office dominance (except insofar as they want to be number one in everything because capitalism). Streaming is their biggest revenue source by far, with the second biggest being the parks.
No, for real. Disney makes more money from parks than they do from movies. Even with the billion dollar successes from Marvel, movies are still a solid third on their balance sheet.
yes, the parks pull in big cash for Disney, but it’s what they sell there that’s the real money-maker for Disney and always has been: merchandising.
I have a brother who lives in Orlando and works for a contracting company as a civil engineer. He did some work for them maybe a decade ago and they are working on this one building in the Magic Kingdom, on Main Street near the entrance that had this huge shop in it. One of those gift shops that everyone stops at right before they leave that has souvenirs and merch from every franchise, of every character, of any damned Disney thing you can think of just so they can shake you down one last time before you leave the park for the day.
So, they’re doing some hurricane repair to the building and it’s some major work. They’ve shut down the entire building to do major structural repair, and he’s one of the engineers telling the park manager team that they need to shut the store for a day or two in order to replace some critical support something or other. Well, the Disney people weren’t having that. They made it clear that the store could not be closed, not for a day, not for an hour, not for a minute because it, by far, was the best moneymaker at any of the parks, reaping just titanic amounts of cash— far more than all the parks or hotels combined, in fact. My brother and the other engineers are trying, pleading, with the Disney guys telling them that not only may it not be possible to do it any other way than going into the store to do the work, but that if they could do it another way, it could triple the work time and budget. They didn’t care.
The Disney guys basically told the engineering team, and later the site mangers and up the chain at the contracting company, that they didn’t care how the long the project took or how much it cost or even if they had to tear down the whole structure around the store and rebuild it— they were not, under any circumstances, to disturb the smooth operation of the store one tiny bit. One single day of operation made so much money that it’s ridiculous, so the Disney people just didn’t care what had to be done to keep it open. They were like, “we’d close all three parks before we’d close that one store. Get it done.” And they did, several months and a crazy amount over budget, but Disney was happy, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
so, yeah, the parks make tons of cash, that’s true, but nothing compares to the money they make selling Disney-branded merch.
edit: spelling
True about the parks, but besides Avatar none of Fox’s properties really fit the Disney parks.
No, but they do fit streaming and TV, which as I mentioned above is their number one money maker by far. Like, to be clear, streaming and TV make 1.5x as much as parks, merchandise and movies combined.
What about their animated TV catalogue? I reckon The Simpsons would fit well in a Park. Definitely Futurama too - especially now with the reboot. The Seth MacFarlane projects maybe not so much.