Disney Backlash: How Much Money Are They Losing with Flop After Flop?

The Disney Backlash is real. It’s causing Disney to have flop after flop at the box office. We work to figure out the real cost for Disney to keep on this path.

Have you noticed how almost every movie other than the Disney-produced stuff has done quite well at the box office this summer? Whether it’s Jurassic World Dominion outperforming Thor week-to-week or Top Gun: Maverick having a legendary hold on theaters, there have been some big-time winners this year. None of them have been from Disney. Instead of riding that wave we’ve witnessed from other companies like Universal and Paramount, Disney has been falling farther and farther behind.

But how much is Disney getting hurt by whatever this backlash might be?

To find out, I decided to just check domestic first weekend tallies. Going with the international numbers can get tricky because people might claim that a ban in China or a Middle Eastern country is unfair for comparisons. Furthermore, Disney’s not finished with some of these movies at the box office, so I’m staying away from total tallies up until this point. If I did, it would actually be worse for Disney since all of these films have had a greater than 60% drop. For comparison, Top Gun: Maverick has never had a 50% drop weekend-to-weekend and has only topped 40% twice. Bottom line: Disney’s movies this summer have opened low and dropped fast.

To figure all of this out, I’m going to pull the projected numbers from Box Office Pro. What I’m doing is taking their best and worst case scenario numbers and going straight down the middle. On both Lightyear and Thor, the films actually debuted lower than the very worst case that Box Office Pro could imagine for them. Then, I’m using The-Numbers to check the actual amount Disney made in the first weekend. After that, we’ll check to see overall how much money Disney lost in comparison to what they were expected to make for the summer. It’s also important to note that this is the second year in a row that Disney is likely to have a majority of their theatrical releases flop. Both Lightyear and Thor are currently projected to fail at the box office to make back their production and marketing budgets (and that’s world wide).

Alright, let’s dive into the numbers…

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Debut Weekend Projection:
$210,000,000

Actual Debut Weekend:
$187,420,998

First Weekend Miss Percentage:
10.8%

Lightyear

Debut Weekend Projection:
$105,000,000

Actual Debut Weekend:
$50,577,961

First Weekend Miss Percentage:
52%

Thor: Love and Thunder:
$180,000,000

Actual Debut Weekend:
$144,165,107

First Weekend Miss Percentage:
20%

Disney Domestic Theatrical Miss Percentage for Summer 2022 Debuts:
27.6% lower than mid-level projections

Domestic First Weekend Real Money Potential Losses:
$22,579,002 + $54,422,039 + $35,834,893 = $112,835,934

So just looking at that, it seems to me that the Disney Backlash we’ve discussed, in which a portion of their audience has been alienated by their sociopolitical positions and narratives, cost Disney almost $113 million in debut domestic weekends alone. That’s not including the remainder of the weekends for these films, which again, are worse. It’s not including the world wide tallies, though they’re about this bad. If we start adding it all together, it can easily get into the hundreds of millions of dollars… perhaps as high as half-a-billion dollars… that Disney has failed to accumulate this summer as a result of whatever backlash their facing. That’s not a Bob Chapek backlash, that’s a Disney’s woke agenda backlash. I don’t always like to use the term “woke agenda,” but I’m sort of stuck doing that because Disney’s pain at least in part comes from leaked videos where they talked about a “not so secret gay agenda.” What am I supposed to do when the company’s employees are chatting about that with support from the company in company-sanctioned online events?

The not so secret gay agenda of Disney.

This woman likes to add queerness wherever she can.

If you haven’t already, boycott Disney. pic.twitter.com/V4pSh7R78F

— Awake in Belfast (@AwakeinBelfast) April 1, 2022

What do you want me to do when Dr. Jordan Peterson, one of the most influential thinkers in the world, is calling out Disney as being “woke”? I have to address it. Whatever you may think of Peterson and his teachings, he’s hyper-popular in many conservative and moderate circles. Full disclosure: I love most of his material. If Disney executives are curious why a highly influential figure and intellectual is calling them out, maybe in the future don’t let your artists malign private citizens as Red Skull.

So there’s a cost here. It’s a big cost. The question is how long Disney — specifically Bob Chapek and the Board — are willing to let this cost continue. There have to be brakes somewhere on this locomotive. And as much as we’ve seen some movement from Chapek and the Board to begin moving in that direction, the hard-stop has to be coming sooner rather than later. Businesses tend not to like leaving hundreds of millions of dollars on the table for an ideological movement.

It’s hard for some people to get their minds wrapped around just how bad things are going for Disney right now. Outside of the theme parks, everything is on proverbial fire. Let’s take a look real quick at how their last domestic box office results have gone:

In 2021:

Pos, Title, Date, Gross Revenue, Tickets Sold

In 2022:

It’s time to start recognizing that this is a huge problem for Disney. The pandemic excuse is done. It’s over. They played that card over and over until Sony came in with Spider-Man No Way Home and showed that was a farce the whole time. And it’s time for the major news organizations to start recognizing that the once-dominant Disney is on fire at the moment. That’s not in the good way. But before they start following our lead in putting out those sorts of stories, it might behoove them to figure out that there’s a Disney Civil War going on behind the scenes. This isn’t a situation where the whole company is behind what is happening. This is an Iger v Chapek situation where the Iger lackeys are determined to burn the company to the ground if it is required to push their agendas.

So there’s the cost of the Disney Backlash. It’s expensive. It’s getting more expensive every day. And not even Mickey is too big to fail.

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