Lightyear Is Sent to Streaming at Light Speed: A Likely $200M Loss

Lightyear is making a quick trip around the sun and straight to streaming. How short did Buzz fall and how fast did this film flop?

Disney Pixar’s Lightyear receives an official drop date for Disney+ and it is August 3rd 2022. That put its on the streaming service at 45 days following its initial theatrical release on June 17th 2022…exactly as we thought.

This has become the unfortunate norm for Disney (and some other major Hollywood studios) in the past year. While most folks will shrug this off as a non-event, those who have watched me discuss things like box office splits know there is a stiff price to pay for shanking theaters like AMC, Cinemark/Regal, Marcus, etc… with shortened windows.

Let’s examine a few basic concepts about “RENTALS”, which is the portion of each ticket sold that is returned to a film distributor by a theater.

Theaters pay rentals to Hollywood film distributors at rate primarily determined by the following factors:

1. Is the film a first-run, theatrically-exclusive picture?
2. What is the expected box office gross sales of the film?
3. How long a period of exclusivity will theaters enjoy with the picture?

A film like Lightyear doesn’t have a problem with the first criteria as, like most film releases, it’s a new property. However, with poor box office sales and a very limited window of 45 days, theaters have been harshly penalizing studios/distributors on rental rates as compared to 2019 (the last fully “normal” year at the box office) when most films enjoyed at least 120 days+.

They're back to finish the mission. Check out our epic duo Buzz and #Sox in #Lightyear, streaming only on @DisneyPlus August 3. pic.twitter.com/HJDMHVUMfC

— Pixar's Lightyear (@PixarsLightyear) July 19, 2022

Warner Bros suffered the most dire impacts in 2021 with former Warner Chief Jason Killar’s “Project Popcorn” whereby every WB film was released concurrently day-and-date in both theaters and HBO Max. Financial data obtained directly from AMC strongly suggests the net rentals afforded back to Warner for those films was down 30-40% from historical norms.

Companies like Disney who granted 45 day exclusivity to theaters certainly would have gotten a better deal, but even those were under 2019’s averages by about 20-25%.

Sony would have easily been King of the hill in 2021 not only due to Spider Man No Way Home’s huge success, but also the fact that it enjoyed a more traditional 120 days at the box office before the film was released to physical media and another 90 days after that before it found its way to Starz.

Lightyear’s pathetic global box office showing of $213M looks to have netted Disney rentals in the vicinity of $90M. Of course the problem here is that Lightyear came with a reported $200M production budget and likely another $100M in global marketing spends. That means in total that Lightyear lost around $200M+ at the box office, which makes it a VERY costly Disney+ addition.

Movies like Lightyear (and even Thor Love and Thunder) are just NOT making the returns to Disney at the rates many believe, and I just can’t see how this new 45 day model has any real long-term financial viability.

I’ll have a far more in-depth video on Box Office Rentals and the impacts of streaming in the coming days with financial data going back to 2015. Stay Tuned!

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