Quote Originally Posted by sktarq View Post
Now I think that shows that Disney has been both relying on its big brands Princesses, Pixar, Star Wars, and MCU and all have been if anything stronger than its competitors for a time. Non Disney NA box office bounced between $8-9BB/year from 2024 thru 2018 and looking at $6.014BB in 22 and $6.725 in 23. So we have a roughly 78% recovery by non Disney studios and a 40% recovery by Disney. So even with noisy data and a large base effect these things are starting to matter. And all that is on revenue and ignores cost issues.
The interesting question is how that recovery compares to Warner Bros, Universal, Paramount, and Sony (and 20th Century Studios if they're still doing their own accounting), and how the box office has shifted with growth by Lionsgate, A24, Focus, and other non-traditional participants. 2023 had a sizeable pile of NA Box Office money go to tiny Angel Studios (Sound of Freedom) and directly into the pockets of Taylor Swift (the Eras Tour film was produced without a studio through a partnership with AMC). There has been a shift, but it's definitely noisy.

I agree that Disney is suffering from reliance on its large brands. It makes fewer movies and expects each movie to be bigger, so the flops count harder. Notably, Disney doesn't make any horror films, which tend to be major profit generators (while there are no horror films in the 2023 top ten, there are 10 in the 2023 top fifty). If, going forward, the success of blockbusters is going to be erratic and unpredictable compared to the previous decade, then Disney is badly positioned to take advantage of this.