On the heels of news The Walt Disney Company is working on a German series about a teenage girl who has a rendezvous with the devil, it has come to light the House of Mouse is hemorrhaging cash.
Despite a spate of theatrical releases — including four films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — one Hollywood analysis shows Disney has suffered revenue losses nearing $900 million. The analyst, Valiant Renegade, said Disney “continues to miss the mark with every studio that they have.”
The films that precipitated the reported cashflow crisis were, in order of release: “Lightyear,” “Thor: Love and Thunder,” “Strange World,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3,” “The Little Mermaid,” and “Elemental.”
According to Valiant Renegade, the series of movies cost Disney a collective $2.75 billion to bring to market. Altogether, the films earned $1.86 billion, leaving the entertainment giant with a $890 million shortfall.
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“Strange World,” which centered on a romantic relationship between two male characters, lost a staggering $197 million at the box office, while “Lightyear,” featuring a kiss between two female characters, lost $106 million at market.
The latest film from Disney, Pixar’s “Elemental,” is the brand’s first movie — geared toward children — to include a “nonbinary” character named Lake Ripple, who represents water in the animated story about the four elements embodied as living beings.
In addition to losing cash at the box office, Valiant Renegade argued Disney is forgoing a significant revenue stream by keeping all its content in-house, meaning that — instead of licensing films and series out to streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime — it’s all sent exclusively to Disney+.
That could all be part of the plan, though, according to Mike Signorelli, pastor of V1 Church in New York City. He recently told CBN’s Faithwire Disney could be intentionally ostracizing a significant segment of its fanbase.
“There’s a concept called an ‘offendable brand,’ and what that basically means is you make decisions that intentionally offend people that you do not want engaging with your company,” Signorelli explained. “Oftentimes, you’ll see this in barbershops or salons where they dramatically increase their pricing and they’re offending their existing customer base because they believe there’s another kind of customer that will pay an exorbitant amount of money for this haircut.”
Disney, he said, is potentially willing to lose a core audience because its leaders are betting on a future in which leftist ideologies about sex, race, and religion will be much more commonplace.
“I need every Christian in the nation to hear what I’m saying,” the pastor continued. “Disney is betting on the fact that the world is going to go into that direction and that they’ll lose finances on the short term but then they’ll gain on the long term.”
In November of last year, Bob Iger returned as Disney’s CEO, replacing embattled executive Bob Chapek, who oversaw the company’s costly attack on Florida’s parental rights bill barring public-school educators in pre-K through third-grade classrooms from teaching children about sexual orientation and gender identity.
The face-off between Florida and Disney ended with Walt Disney World — the four-park resort complex in Lake Buena Vista, near Orlando — losing its special tax status as well as its self-governing Reedy Creek Improvement District.
In February of this year, the company began undergoing what it called a “strategic restructuring.” Last month, Disney announced it laid off 7,000 employees, Variety reported.
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