We all know that Disney stock has lost something like 20% of its total value in 2021 after the Disney+ subscriber numbers stalled. That’s already a huge amount of money that The Walt Disney Company saw leave its coffers due to a lack of interest in Disney+ content. But how much more money did Disney lost this year based on movie mistakes? After the success of Spider-Man: No Way Home, that’s a question I decided to check on…
Now that we know the box office was ready to roll if only there was a movie that excited everyone, and knowing that the pandemic was far less severe in the summer versus now… let’s take a look at how much Disney could have been making this year. To do so, let’s first start with Marvel movies. This year, Disney pandered to China with absolutely no success, not even able to get many of their movies into the country. Marvel put out Shang-Chi, The Eternals, and Black Widow (Spider-Man doesn’t count because it’s produced by Sony, not Disney). For the modern era of Disney-produced Marvel movies, the average revenue for those films has been $716 million — thus why these films have massive budgets! So how did the Phase 4 Marvel movies from 2021 fare?
Black Widow: $375,474,179 (Disney+ numbers put it around $500 million)… Approx $216 million below.
Shang-Chi: $417,952,233… $298,047,767 below average.
The Eternals: $399,713,147… $316,386,853 below average.
In just Marvel movies alone, Disney cost themselves approximately $830,734,620 due to Phase 4 films not exciting audiences. That’s nearly a billion dollars in lost revenue due to Kevin Feige’s strange selection of Z-list characters for the latest slate of comic book flicks. How much money would a reboot of X-Men films have done? Add Hugh Jackman via the multiverse and Disney easily could have been making a billion+ on a single new X-Men movie alone.
It’s not just Marvel that has struggled this year for Disney, though. Let’s take a look at Encanto. In the past fifteen years, Disney animated films have tended to net north of $400 million at the worldwide box office. Pixar films tend to do even better. Encanto is a Disney Animation film, though, so let’s check on its box office revenue for 2021:
Encanto: $175,003,848
Even if the movie makes another $5 million at the box office somehow (that’s difficult considering its free on streaming in a few days), that still puts it at $320,000,000 below the baseline expectation you’d have for a Disney animated movie. Needless to say, Moana 2 or even a new property along the lines of Wreck It Ralph, would have been far superior to a movie that focuses on the Latin American-derived magical realism genre.
It gets worse though. Twentieth Century, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, put out West Side Story just a few weeks ago. Directed by Steven Spielberg, you’d think that would be golden. You’d especially think it was golden considering Sony sandwiched the film with a profitable Ghostbusters movie before West Side Story and a record-shattering success with Spider-Man after West Side Story. Yet, this movie is so bad financially, that it legitimately will make studios think twice about hiring Spielberg again. Spielberg.
West Side Story: $27,323,218
West Side Story Budget: $100,000,000
Estimated WSS Advertising Budget: $25,000,000
Estimate West Side Story Loss: $111,000,000
What might have been the reason for West Side Story tanking?
“I don’t know if anybody really questioned it. I don’t remember anybody saying ‘You’ve got to subtitle it.’ I felt that subtitling the Spanish was disrespectful to the second language of this country.” — Steven Spielberg
Ya’ know, I speak Spanish fluently, but I can bet you there might be a problem with putting out a film that large parts of your potential audience can’t understand. When I’ve seen films in other countries, I didn’t think English was a dominant language because it was featured in subtitles so international audiences could understand. I, like many others, probably just assumed audiences would like to understand dialogue. How did the most successful director in history become so obtuse, except that this is some sort of Southern California and New York City specific mental virus that has infected some in the industry?
We can keep going. I can bring up Cruella, I can bring up Luca, etc. You remember Raya? It made a horrendous $116,865,473. I’ll leave it out of the list because the pandemic was a major issue back then. So let’s just stop with the movies that Disney has absolutely zero excuse for failure other than audiences saying “no”. For just those movies, here’s the cost Disney incurred for whatever this strange social push has been:
$1,464,665,380
In other words, Disney’s inability to excite audiences this year cost them an estimated $1.5 billion dollars in 2021. There’s a reason they’re sitting on pins and needles hoping The Book of Boba Fett brings audiences to Disney+. If you thought the last shareholders meeting was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet unless the company turns things around fast.
All movie revenue numbers for this article courtesy of The-Numbers.
