Here's How Disney Already Lost Over $900M This Summer (and Counting!)
If the summer of 2023 was a game, Disney would’ve totally lost: by far, the company’s burned over $900M in box office failures, but how did it even happen?
Disney ’s a massive megacorporation that houses many of the world’s most popular and successful movie IPs. The company went into 2023 with films from many already-beloved franchises, but as of this summer, it only ended up losing a fortune instead of making the bank.
What happened and why did this year’s biggest Disney movies flop at the box office? Let’s go through the three main money-losers of this summer.
The Little Mermaid
The Little Mermaid was continuing the recent Disney trend with live-action adaptations of animated movies. For the company, most of these projects were working out nicely in terms of profit, and the Disney execs were expecting The Little Mermaid to cash in beautifully, so they spent no expense for this movie.
However, this became their downfall. The Little Mermaid ended up costing a whopping $250M in production, and even though it grossed over $561M worldwide, it was nowhere near even breaking even, losing tens of millions, instead.
Elemental
Quite like The Little Mermaid, Elemental was supposed to become the real moneymaker: Pixar’s animated movies tend to work wonders at the box office, and Disney really counted on that. Once again, the company allowed a massive budget for Elemental…but somehow, they forgot about marketing completely.
When Elemental was released, no one knew or cared about it. Though it eventually became known and ended up earning over $395M, its $200M budget prevented it from breaking even, so this Pixar movie, too, lost one too many millions for Disney.
Indiana Jones & The Dial Of Destiny
There was literally no reason to expect the last Indiana Jones installment to fail. This is a world-famous franchise with a beloved lead actor and it had an amazing marketing campaign… And cost a whole lot of money. After the previous failures, Disney really needed Indiana Jones to work, and everyone was sure it would.
However, The Dial Of Destiny ended up being an unbelievably huge flop. With the insane production budget of $300M, the movie only earned $356M back, effectively meaning it lost hundreds of millions of dollars to Disney. That’s rough, man.
Add Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania and Haunted Mansion to the picture, and it becomes rather grim for Disney… Good thing they at least had Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 this summer: otherwise, it would’ve been such a complete and utter loss!