I always saw Disney as a sort of "cultural center" of the country. The more Disney has become disconnected from the cultural zeitgeist, inevitably its products would become less valuable. We've seen this from Star Wars, Marvel, ESPN and other properties. The legal trouble in the state of Florida is another problem on top of "quality issues" in their brands. We'll see if Disney can turn it around, but the last 5 years have really been tough on the company.
Disney used to be a brand known for creating magical experiences for children and adults alike. You turn that into a factory churning out mediocre content in large volumes and jump on a moral bandwagon that appeals only to a minority of activists and your brand loses its magic very quickly.
> and jump on a moral bandwagon that appeals only to a minority of activists
Disney includes minorities because it pays off, what does not pay off is to create bad/mediocre movies. There are many movies even more progressive than the very conservative Disney that do better just because the movies are good.
I don't think it paid off.
Their latest movies are taking huge losses across all brands. They are closing their parks and buildings. They are continuing more rounds of layoffs.
Disney is designed to extract maximum value from its properties and has always done so. The long string of sub par Remakes of classic films alongside Marvel and Star Wars is exactly the same things as their long line of direct to video sequels to more popular films. Cash grabs like “The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea” or “The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning” have always been part of the formula because on average their profitable. There isn’t long term damage to the brand because they are so forgettable.
Give it 25 years and Disney can cycle a new generation through the next set of major Star Wars (etc) films as people will have forgotten about their flops and only recall their favorites fondly.
Meanwhile hundreds of millions more will have gone to their parks which make a billion dollars per year in profits. It’s crazy how wildly successful those things are.
Corporations are run by people and can absolutely be mismanaged to death.
If they are so profitable why are they cutting so many jobs at the parks and other places?
Why are they closing down the 300 million Star Wars hotel without trying to even salvage it ?
Why was Bob Chapek forced out and Bob Iger return ?
It's clear something negative is occurring at Disney that has spooked the executives to point they are saying things like they need to "right" the ship for all major franchises and cutting costs at the parks.
If they are so profitable why are they cutting so many jobs at the parks and other places?
Why did Google, Microsoft, Apple, SalesForce, and a bunch of other tech companies fire tens of thousands of people even though they're super profitable with crazy margins?
Disney's Parks division is hugely profitable. I don't know where you're getting your information from, but no Parks divisions jobs were cut in the first 2 rounds, and in the 3rd round the only positions from the Parks division that will be cut are related to the "Entertainment" group that includes Live Experiences like the Star Wars hotel.
Why are they closing down the 300 million Star Wars hotel without trying to even salvage it ?
Why is Google cutting products like Stadia that they invested hundreds of millions into without even trying to salvage the technology?
Disney is salvaging the Star Wars hotel. They're closing the current iteration and replacing it with something else much cheaper that will open up in a few years. This isn't the first time Disney has shut down an under-performing Orlando hotel, and it won't be the last.
It's literally in the article that the Parks division hasn't had layoffs yet, but that it might have layoffs in this round.
Given that it's now 5pm on a Thursday and the Parks division is still almost entirely unaffected by the this round of layoffs, I think its safe to say that any layoffs were minimal.
Buying Pixar, Marvel, and Starwars was a great investment, but it’s a giant old profitable company. You simply don’t see exponential growth at this point and their’s not that much IP available to buy at that scale. So, now the question becomes what’s going to be good value for money with their giant war chest?
Disney Parks division set a record last year for profits...They're planning a huge expansion for Downtown Disney (dependent on local approval).
Their latest movies are taking huge losses across all brands.
Avatar 2 broke several box office records and is one of the highest-grossing movies in history. GOTG3 is underperforming but is still profitable. DS2, BP2, and Thor3 all underperformed...their lofty expectations of $1 billion grosses but were still massively profitable movies. Quantamania is one of only two Marvel films released in the Disney era that did not make a profit at the box office.
They are continuing more rounds of layoffs.
So are Google, Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce, and a number of other profitable companies...
I think you need to read the articles and not just the headlines.
Eternals, Shang-Chi, and Black Widow were all profitable movies. They were flops for Marvel considering that the majority of its movies are huge blockbusters that come close to or surpass the $1b mark, but any other studio would have loved to have a "flop" like Shang-Chi. And considering that all 3 came out during the pandemic when movie attendance was severely depressed around the world, $400m is an amazing number. (For comparison, Godzilla vs Kong made approximately the same box office as these 3 films, had the same sized budget including marketing...and is considered a huge success.)
I don't understand what you're trying to say with this reference? At any rate, The Incredible Hulk predates the Disney acquisition of Marvel (TIH was released by Universal) and is the last Marvel film not to make a profit at the box office.
I don't think you understand "hollywood" accounting.
Because of the manipulation of the numbers, the easiest things to do is watch what companies DO not what they say.
I am part of the Hollywood Accounting system... I know how it works better than you do.
The numbers are not manipulated; that would be fraud and most Hollywood studios are publicly traded, so there are constraints on the accounting methods they can use.
What people refer to as "Hollywood Accounting" is actually just dividing up accounting line items across multiple entities. Production costs are put in one entity, rights (and licensing profits) in another, and marketing is handled by a third company owned by the distributor to extract profits.
I don’t think the moral bandwagon really has anything to do with it, to be honest.
They keep firing or abusing the talent, and the people left over make poor decisions.
For instance, Disney+ launched without any content that would appeal to parents, then went all puritanical on Daryl Hannah’s butt. In top of that, it was a middle-of-the-road offering for the under 10 crowd. I’m not really sure who that product was supposed to appeal to. Maybe teenage boys like watching angsty superhero dramas?
Roughly partitioning kids cartoons from a gen-x / millennial perspective, we have:
- loony tunes (thankfully torrents still exist)
- Disney movies up to and including Beauty and the Beast
(Most of the above are somewhat culturally dated, but more kid appropriate than, say, adult swim)
- Pixar up to the Disney acquisition and third party American animation.
- Kid’s Anime
- Whatever garbage Disney produced more recently (yes, there are a half dozen exceptions, but it is almost all direct to DVD or mediocre theater releases, and I am too busy to sift through the large library of “meh”).
Disney+ is still missing third party and anime. At launch, it was missing a bunch of older Disney and Pixar stuff.
The remaining category in my list is “mostly crap, with a few gems”.
Hell, even HBO+ has more/higher-quality kid-friendly content.
Corporate ethics for the two companies in recent years have both been dismal from a red and blue perspective.
I wish we’d go back to having reasonable copyright expiration windows, so that there was some ethical and also legal means to procure movies for the kids.
The Star Wars Hotel was a bad product. They could’ve just made it a normal hotel themed as a Star Wars ship, price it say 20% more than a normal hotel, and it would’ve done well. Instead it was some crazy cruise ship type experience (and price) that people didn’t really want.
I wonder how many contractors they have cut, and if these numbers include any. When I worked in tech at Disney, the number of contractors was quite high. All new people would work minimum 2 years as a contractor. Then move to a new contract within Disney, or get converted to FTE.
