Have You Heard the Scuttlebutt? Disney Has Another Woke Bomb On Its Hands as Little Mermaid is Projected to Lose Between $50 and $100 Million

A hundred million here, a hundred million there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.

I know we talked about the likelihood The Little Mermaid would flop on Friday, but we now have its second weekend box office. It dropped 58% from its first weekend to its second. That's pretty high. Not as bad as some of the worst-performing Marvel films, but high. And that second weekend drop kills any hopes that the Little Mermaid would keep generating millions every week consistently. In other words -- everyone has to do these dumb puns, it's the law-- The Little Mermaid doesn't "have legs."

Box office analyst and YouTuber OMB Reviews shared his analysis of the box office receipts for this past Memorial Day weekend and predicted that The Walt Disney Company's latest release, The Little Mermaid, "will end up being a box office flop."

In a recent video upload, the analyst began, "We're going to talk about The Little Mermaid, how it's doing okay domestically, but internationally, oh boy, this movie is in a ton of trouble. Seeing that it has had a simultaneous release in all of the major markets overseas with the one exception being Japan. However, if we are looking at the other markets in the East right now, it's not looking good at all for the prospects of this movie's international numbers. And the domestic really aren't that much better to be able to say it'll make up for any of its losses there."

He then asserted, "So what am I saying? I think there's a good chance that we'll see The Little Mermaid end up being a box office flop. And let's just say it couldn't happen to a nicer company."

Woke shill Grace Randolf admits the film won't make more than around $5-600 million, which isn't break-even considering its cost.

And also considering the fact that ticket sales are split between the studio and the actual theaters showing the film, which liberals always, always forget, or pretend to forget, when they're claiming the latest woke bomb isn't a bomb at all.

Disney booster and woke-ism champion Rudolph worries the movie will actually wind up making $400 million or so, which is a "disaster," she says.

On Midnight's Edge, they talked about liberal movie "journalists" trying to contrive some way for this movie to not lose money. One talked up the money it would get in television rights -- except that Disney no longer makes money by selling television rights. All of its properties turn into Disney Minus exclusives. To pump up Disney Minus and give people a reason to subscribe, they've chopped off one of the big secondary markets for movies, television.

They pointed out that there will be an internal payment of money from Disney Minus to the Disney movie studio to pay for the TV rights, around $75 million. But this is just a paper transaction moving money from one Disney account to another Disney account. That doesn't bring any actual money into Die Maus.

Relatedly, the leftwing shill media for years and years has been insanely protective of all woke movies, but especially woke Disney movies, routinely running Disney propaganda that the only people who don't like The Last Jedi, Lightyear, or The Little Mermaid are woman-haters and homophbes and racists. "Ists and phobes," as the shorthand has it.

But now Disney has scored so many bombs in a row that even "journalists" are actually starting to notice what the public noticed five years ago.

This article from Forbes, reprinted in Yahoo Finance, says "the Force has left Lucasfilm," and talks about Kathleen Kennedy's record of destroying one expensive IP after another.

'The Force has left Lucasfilm': What has gone wrong for the studio behind 'Star Wars' and 'Indiana Jones'--and how Disney's Bob Iger can salvage his $4 billion investment

by Christiaan Hetzner

Taking time out of his busy schedule running Disney, Bob Iger flew to the Cannes film festival in support of Harrison Ford's latest movie, even posting on social media snapshots of the aging action hero on the red carpet.

Lucasfilm Ltd. had just premiered the fifth installment in its Indiana Jones franchise and a lot is riding on the fedora-sporting, bullwhip-toting archeologist portrayed by the now 80-year-old Hollywood star. At nearly $300 million, Dial of Destiny is one of the most expensive films ever made and initial reviews suggest it could bomb big at the box office when it lands on June 30.

When Iger acquired Lucasfilm for just over $4 billion a decade ago, it paired the century-old animation company with the studio behind Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yet the match made in heaven now risks becoming an albatross around Disney's neck.

The third Skywalker trilogy started off with a bang in late 2015 with The Force Awakens, only to end with a whimper four years later as fans deserted the franchise. The studio hadn't produced a theatrical release of any kind since, allowing the Marvel Cinematic Universe--despite recent setbacks--to supplant it as Disney's cash cow.

"The Force has left Lucasfilms," said Eric Schiffer, CEO of private equity firm Patriarch Organization, in an interview. "That emotional connection it enjoyed with fans has been damaged."

The Los Angeles-based media industry investor and self-admitted Star Wars fan still counts the deal a success for Iger, but he believes it got lost producing too much subpar content for Disney.

...

Now that growth has faltered, with 4 million customers canceling their membership in the three months through March, and Wall Street is pushing Iger to end the scattergun approach of showering creators with money for new content. Instead, investors want him to end the over $10 billion in cumulative streaming losses since the launch of Disney+ three and a half years ago.

The Dial of Destiny will have to make $800 million just to break even. And that's assuming that Disney has been honest about the budget, which they almost certainly have not been. Disney is widely suspected of hiding their movies' costs, recording them as costs for other divisions, in order to hide just how poorly they've been doing under Bob Iger and Kathleen Kennedy's destructive leadership.

Film critic Pete Hammond recounted Iger's reaction when informed Deadline just published a rave review of the fifth Indiana Jones movie: "You could see the absolute relief on his face. 'You have made me very happy to hear that,' he told me, and he meant it.".

That's probably because first impressions have otherwise been dreadful, with a franchise-low 50% score on Rotten Tomatoes as of writing. Vanity Fair proclaimed it "not worthy of the whip", while the BBC felt Ford's globe-trotting adventurer had been relegated to a background figure in his own film, included mainly for the purpose of being upstaged by younger co-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

"I'm not sure how many fans want to see Indiana Jones as a broken, helpless old man who cowers in the corner while his patronizing goddaughter takes the lead, but that's what we're given, and it's as bleak as it sounds," the BBC wrote, branding it a "gloomy and depressing" final act.

With Disney needing to shell out $9 billion at least to buy Comcast out of Hulu as early as next year, the last thing Iger needs is bad word of mouth building over the next four weeks to asphyxiate any hopes of blockbuster success.

Right now, though, grim news is all that Lucasfilm has to offer the Disney CEO. An attempt to expand on the lore of its 1988 fantasy tale Willow flopped hard when the series debuted on Disney+ in November.

Not only was it canceled after the first of three seasons, but the show was banished entirely from the platform as part of a thorough spring cleaning. Critics argued Willow in retrospect would have been more valuable to Disney as a tax write-off than as actual content for subscribers.

At the heart of this mess is Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy....

Antagonized by the perceived shabby treatment of their childhood heroes, fewer and fewer fans showed up from one movie to the next. The third and final installment, Rise of Skywalker, only took in half of the $2 billion that premiere film The Force Awakens made for Disney.

It's perhaps no wonder that the company's $5,000-per-package Star Wars-themed hotel, the "Galactic Starcruiser", is shutting down. The tactical mistake of placing it in the timeline of the Disney sequel trilogy doomed it to a lifespan of just 18 months after opening.

I know that you know all this. Sorry about telling you a bunch of stuff you already knew.

But the news here is that the alleged "news media" has begun to piece this non-scoop together.

BTW, I had written earlier that Disney wants to buy Comcast out of their shared ownership of Hulu. This article says that Disney is required to do so -- and they need to come up with $9 billion (or more) in cash to do that.

Yes, the Hulu deal is a requirement... and Disney is panicking, so they are trying to devalue Hulu as much as possible over the next 12 months and negotiate an out...

Posted by: Nova Local

Oh, LOL. If that's true we should all sign up for Hulu!!!! Then cancel after Disney is forced to pay out $9 billion.

(But I don't know if it's true.)

Note that Nova made a mistake (which he pointed out) about how much this will cost Disney. Hulu is worth somewhere around $28 billion, and Comcast's one-third share is worth a bit over $9 billion.

I don't know if a Mass Subscription Effort -- the opposite of a boycott -- would jack up the value of Hulu and hurt Disney. I hope a geek media channel looks into this and gets us an answer.

More from Nova Local:

"Disney is the majority owner of Hulu, holding a two-thirds stake, while Comcast owns a third. Starting in January 2024, Comcast can use a put option to require Disney to take over its stake, while Disney can tell Comcast to sell it its stake. A transaction would be a multibillion-dollar affair. As per an agreement between the two companies, Hulu would get a fair-market value assessment from independent experts. However, the guaranteed minimum Hulu valuation of $27.5 billion means that Disney would have to cough up at least around $9 billion."

Hollywood Reporter on the exact current terms.
Link

Posted by: Nova Local

posted by Ace at 04:39 PM

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