Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

Magic and entertainment – two maxims of cinema that once graced its screens – are now lost on Disney after a slew of attempts to incorporate wokeism into its films.

And this cost Disney nearly $900 million over the last 12 months on eight feature films, according to box office analyst Valliant Renegade.

He said the eight films – Lightyear (Pixar), Thor: Love and Thunder (Marvel Studios), Strange World (Disney Animation), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (all three from Marvel Studios), The Little Mermaid (Walt Disney Studios) and Elemental (Pixar) – cost $2.75 billion but only took in $1.86 billion for the company, for a loss of $890 million.

“Disney continues to miss the mark from every studio that they have, and they’re not even done yet for this year,” Renegade said, with the most recent release, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, having been deemed a box office bomb after grossing $295 million so far against a $300 million budget.

DEI Dreams

Some of these under-performing movies in particular stand out from the list, in terms of both storylines and financial losses, including Lightyear, Strange World and Elemental.

Lightyear featured a lesbian kiss, Strange World promoted a gay teen romance, and Elemental represented Disney’s first non-binary character.

Disney went on to lose $106 million for Lightyear and nearly $200 million for Strange World, according to Deadline. And while Elemental seems to be recovering at the box office currently, it bombed on opening weekend as Pixar’s second-lowest debut.

But the media conglomerate’s new propaganda-driven entertainment does not stop at LGBTQ-friendly additions. Disney also decided to rework existing stories and beloved children’s classics for the sake of political correctness and racial diversity.

In the new live-action remakes, Ariel from The Little Mermaid and Tinker Bell from Peter Pan & Wendy are African-American, and the Lost Boys aren’t all boys. In next year’s remake of Snow White, the princess is Latina and her seven dwarves may not actually be dwarves.

If Disney continues on this path, the numbers will continue to tell the hard truth.

Lost Opportunities

However, Renegade also explained that Disney’s losses do not end at the box office.

“One of the things that we always talk about here, that is the perfect time to remind everybody, is that Disney consumes all of its own content post-theatrical, meaning that Disney that used to license their big content out, like the entire MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe], to places like Netflix for years — those were billions of dollars’ worth of third-party contracts that have now been taken off the table,” Renegade said.

“So not only do we need to consider how much money Disney has lost at the box office, we also need to consider how much money Disney has lost in economic opportunity costs.

“That’s how much money they could have made had they actually taken these films and licensed them to Netflix, or Amazon Prime, or even similar to what Universal does with a split Pay 1 window – if Disney had just taken the Universal-type deal with those two major streamers, Disney would have a lot more money in its pocket, but they’ve chosen to keep it all home to support Disney+,” he said.

Renegade further notes that while Disney might just get by despite its box office failures – having generated most of its revenue in recent decades from theme parks, resorts and broadcast television – “that can’t go on forever”.

“It’s just simple numbers, folks. That’s where we are. The Walt Disney Company is just making all the wrong decisions, not only creatively, but in the distribution channels as well,” he said.

Is LGBT sexuality really necessary to the storyline? Is it really necessary to rehash classics just to make the characters more diverse? Are DEI strategies so important that entertainment value and a good plot should be sacrificed?

Mainstream critics will continue to ignore the impact of woke messaging on the figures, yet the figures reveal a growing number of people who are losing faith in Disney’s capacity for magical storytelling and clean, fun, family entertainment.

The creative ingenuity behind the films that once marked Disney’s success – from the princess classics to Pixar-original stories such as The Incredibles and Ratatouille – has been sidelined to make way for “progressive” ideas and remakes in a desperate, lackadaisical attempt to stay relevant.

And no, watching movies in the theatre as a family has not gone out of style, with recent films like The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Top Gun: Maverick garnering widespread acclaim and well over $1 billion in the box office without caving in to woke storytelling.

Will Disney ever learn its lesson?

___

Photo by Magda Ehlers.