Disney Sucks

Disney’s hand-picked judge was forced to recuse himself from the Disney’s federal suit against Florida due to conflicts of interest. This judge has a history of making unprompted pro-Disney and anti-DeSantis comments in unrelated cases.

Across the Spider-Verse is currently projected to make up to $150 million in its opening weekend. As recently as Wednesday, that projection was $115 million.

@ANoobis
The world is getting too insane. A federal judge basically just pulled the “that’s bullshit, but I believe it” meme.

@ANoobis
Disney can’t win even when stacking the deck in their own interest.

Disney cut 75 positions from Pixar as part of its third round of layoffs, which saw 7,000 total jobs cut. The main thing people are saying is that the director of Lightyear and producer of Toy Story 2 were let go, but that many layoffs would be a decent hit even if there were no big names on the list.

I’m starting to get the feeling that Disney won’t be able to keep Mickey out of the public domain next year. They have lost a lot of influence recently.

@Havoc
Good. Screw the house and the mouse.

@Havoc
They have a trademark on Mickey, so they will never lose control of him. The public domain applies only to a few cartoons.

Mickey isn’t even really a character anymore. More like a corporate logo.

The tentative numbers put The Little Mermaid’s second weekend drop at 58%. That’s not quite the absolute disaster that a 60+% is understood to be, but it’s far from the 50% or less that represents a strong hold. The numbers are still speculative, and the adjustment could still make them worse. Also, the drop is just over the three-day weekend, not the four-day holiday opening, so it’s a 58% drop from a $95 million opening. If they had counted the whole opening, it would be a 66% drop.

@ANoobis
The fact China slaughtered them isn’t doing them any favors either. Pretty soon the media’s not going to have any choice left except to call them racist as well.

The biggest problem Disney is currently facing is the Hulu deal. Due to a lot of acquisitions, the current situation is that Disney owns 2/3 of Hulu and Comcast owns the remaining 1/3. If Comcast opts to leave, Disney has no option but to buy out Comcast’s entire stake in full. Due to the stipulations of the contract, the valuation floor for buying out the other party is $27.5 billion, meaning that Comcast must get an absolute minimum of $9.17 billion. Disney only offered Comcast $8.7 billion. Comcast responded by arguing that Hulu is worth at least $70 billion, making their demand $23.3 billion.

Comcast is all but certain to sell its stake in Hulu at the start of 2024. Disney currently doesn’t have the money to pay for the minimum valuation, let alone anything higher. The two companies have entered arbitration to hash out the value of Hulu. It most likely won’t be Comcast’s hardball number, but it also likely won’t be anything like as low as Disney wants. Part of Disney’s problem is that Iger regularly bigs up Hulu in the investor calls, so his own words will probably be taken into account against his position.

All of Disney’s other problems, serious as they may be, are relatively small potatoes compared to this buyout in just over six months. If the arbitration goes badly enough against them, we may see them sell major assets. Even at the lowest valuation, Disney is all but paying for the construction of Epic Universe, as well as the Zelda expansion at Islands of Adventure.

Wonder when they’ll make Tarzan black, it would be unfair to African American people of color to not give them a movie to star in.

@barabasz
Yeah, give them another movie that China will reject outright. Maybe this time they won’t even allow it in their country. Force Disney to come out and publicly call the entire country racist.

Elemental seems doomed to fail at this point. Disney released a promotional tweet that caused its selected audience to rail against it for doing its race allegory badly. I wonder what’s going to happen when Zootopia 2 comes out. The way they talk about the first film now, it’s clear that Disney’s audience has soured on it.

Even furries? How badly did they fuck up to alienate the furries?

Tenoch Huerta, who played Namor in Wakanda Forever, has been accused of sexual assault by a Mexican saxophonist. The circumstances around the musician’s accusations are strange, but it isn’t the first time Huerta has had allegations made against him. Who knows yet, but just having an accusation in the news is damaging for Disney. They already lost Jonathan Majors over his behavior.

The Polk County sheriff’s department did another high-profile cp bust. Predictably, another Disney World employee was caught in the net. Given the previous raids’ results, the biggest surprise is that it was only one Disney employee this time.

Wow, you’re absolutely right. I initially found it hard to believe it would fail that badly, but The Hollywood Reporter is predicting it might only make $40 million in its opening weekend. Which is worse than that movie with the rat that nobody ever talks about. Unadjusted for inflation. It might even head into The Good Dinosaur territory.

Disney seems to be delaying almost all of their big projects. It appears they’re leaning heavily on Avatar as a tent pole franchise going forward. The new Alien project from Ridley Scott caught my eye, but I’m not interested until some information comes out. There’s no guarantee it’s not another Prometheus.

Elemental opened to about $44.5 million global this weekend, with $29.5 million of that coming from the domestic market. Its run is already effectively over. The only question left is whether it loses more than Lightyear. Or even Strange World.

Disney isn’t alone in failure this week. The Flash opened to $55 million domestic, down from the already halved $70 million estimates leading into the weekend. With a $200 million budget, The Flash is going to need incredible legs to even stand a chance of breaking even. This bodes poorly for the remaining DCEU projects, which are even more pointless than this one, since they can’t even connect to Gunn’s rebooted DCU.

Indiana Jones 5’s projections are already down to the $55-$60 million range, and they have only ever dropped as the release date approaches. Come July, we may be seeing a financial disaster unfolding that makes the rest of Disney’s year-to-date look good.

@ANoobis
Let there be much dancing, rejoicing, and mocking Ezra Miller.

Another Disney exec is gone. The CFO, Christine McCarthy, announced a few days ago that she’ll be stepping down. Today, Disney fired their Chief Diversity Officer. McCarthy’s departure is pretty normal, and with her known history of health issues, the medical leave story might be true. With the DEI officer, she’s out the door today and there was no notice given to her or her staff beforehand. It’s as close to being walked out the door with a box as is possible in Disney’s upper levels.

This is an interesting breakdown. The estimates, as admitted, are likely slanted in Disney’s favor, but they’re still dire.

Disney is under fire for using AI to generate Secret Invasion’s intro.

Indiana Jones made $7.2 million in Thursday previews. The Little Mermaid made $10 million and The Flash made $9 million in their Thursday previews, and both of those were considered to be terrible preview numbers.

That’s gotta be a catastrophic low for Disney.

But still not low enough! Do harder!