Disney's Value Plunges $20 Billon After Iger's Earnings (Losings) Report

The Disney shills at CNN have to admit: Disney stock just had its worst day in eighteen months.

Even though Iger claims, through recherché numerical manipulations unknown outside of Bistromath*, that Disney Minus is now profitable, the rest of the news was so bad that Disney's share price dropped 10% and its overall market cap fell by $20 billion.

Walt Disney's (DIS.N) surprise profit in its streaming entertainment division was eclipsed by a drop in its traditional TV business and weaker box office, sending its stock tumbling 10%, on track for its deepest one-day drop in 17 months. Like other media companies, Disney has been trying to adapt to consumer migration from cable television to streaming entertainment, and had promised Wall Street that its streaming operation would become profitable by September.

The division has been losing money since Disney+ debuted in 2019 in a major push by the company to compete with Netflix.

However, revenue from the traditional television business declined 8% to $2.77 billion and operating profit fell 22% from a year ago.

...

"The initial market reaction is showing that there are more questions than answers for earnings over the next couple of quarters," said Brian Mulberry, client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment Management.

The direct-to-consumer entertainment division, which includes the Disney+ and Hulu streaming services, reported operating income of $47 million for the January-March period, compared with a loss of $587 million a year earlier.

I imagine Hulu is responsible for almost all of the increase.

By the way, the Hulu deal is going to cost them more than they want to pay. I think their own banker -- who is paid to do their bidding -- offered a laughably low estimation of Hulu's value. Comcat's banker figured a 1/3 stake in Hulu is worth $40 billion plus. The matter will go to a third bank to figure out whose valuation, the ballpark accurate one or Disney's, is correct.

Valliant Renegade noted that Bob Iger, uncharacteristically, stayed a long time to answer (or "answer") questions. His surmise is that Disney's big investors called Iger and told them they wanted some answers.

However, his answers -- "answers" -- seem to not have appeased the investors. Probably because while he was technically "answering questions," what he was actually doing was filibustering to avoid actually answer difficult questions.

Midnight's Edge has an example of this -- a questioner wanted to know what Iger was doing to get Star Wars and Marvel producing money again, and Iger filibustered for five minutes blabbing about how pleased he was with ESPN's performance, before then listing a handful of upcoming movies he claims he has "confidence" in. Then he repeated his bullshit that all Star Wars and Marvel need to rehabilitate themselves is fewer projects with a focus on "quality." Listen starting at around 8:00 for that.

So the investors, having told Disney they wanted some reassurance, got none of it at the question and "answer" session, and Disney's shares dropped.

The news that Disney's shill corporate partners want to push is that everything is good now that Marvel is producing fewer movies and Star Wars is producing none at all.

Disney will release no more than three Marvel films and up to two Disney+ shows each year going forward as it works to place more focus on quality output.

The announcement by CEO Bob Iger comes as Disney shares plunged 8% in Tuesday trading following the release of the entertainment giant's quarterly earnings. ...

"I've been working hard with the studio to reduce output and focus more on quality," Iger said on the company's earnings call Tuesday.

Disney produce 4 of the 5 biggest money-losing flops of 2023. The only non-Disney megaflop on the list was WB's doomed Flash movie. The others were The Marvels, Indiana Jones and the Annoying Mary-Sue, Wish, and The Haunted Mansion. Ant-Man: Quantumania also lost money, but, thanks to applying the Bistromath operation known as the Finageler's Constant, it supposedly only lost $38 million.

Sure, Jan.

Oh, and Bob Iger lied in his last disclosure to Con the Rubes into keeping him in the CEO's office.

Now that Disney management has won its proxy battle with activist investor Nelson Peltz, let's take a look at the Big Lie the company told to help keep shareholders on management's side.

Last month, the Mouse House released a detailed, 67-page report for investors "singing the praises of its chief executive Bob Iger in a bid to convince stockholders to side with him in a battle with activist investors," as Forbes' Caroline Reid put it. I included the link because Reid did in her write-up, but the PDF file is no longer there, perhaps flushed down the memory hole.

Reid's article is a bit technical but the upshot is that when calculating the studio's return on investment for franchises like The Avengers and Star Wars, Disney didn't factor in the multibillion-dollar acquisition costs of buying Marvel and Lucasfilm.

"Calculating ROI on revenue rather than profit ignores the costs so artificially inflates the result," Reid explained. Well, yes. It's really easy to show a profit when you include revenues but conveniently leave out major expenses.

Reid concluded that "Disney hasn't misled investors as the methodology is in the fine print." But the methodology itself is a scam, a way to calculate returns on investment that no reputable firm would ever use. The Avengers movies made boatloads of money (at least until recent years) but Star Wars is probably still in the red -- despite what Disney told investors.

The board won its proxy battle against Peltz, so I guess it was all worth it.

During his terrible earnings report, Bob Iger highlighted Disney's slate of films coming in 2024 and 2025. For some reason he omitted mentioning the Rachel Ziegler disaster-in-the-making Snow White.

Has it been Quiet Cancelled? Or are they planning to release it on Disney Minus, so they can charge the film's losses against Disney Minus, and not against the film division? It may seem like six of one half a dozen of the other but everyone expects Disney Plus to be a permanent loss anyway.

Alan Ng reviewed the Disney Minus show "Tales of the Empire." He said that last season's show featured ten episodes about women in the Star Wars universe solving women's problems with women's wisdom, and this new series offers six episodes of women fixing the galaxy with stronk and brave womanhood.

I don't know if he's counting the They/Thems as women. This is a real scene from the new season, in which bad guys -- I assume -- cut down a They/Them and debate "letting Them die."

Even though they're killing this pyrsyn, they sure don't want to misgender Them!

WDW_Pro has some news: he has it from multiple sources who are in a position to know that Disney is finally admitting -- well, admitting internally -- that the push to turn Star Wars and Marvel into female-focused girl brands is a disaster. He says that when Marvel was still profitable, Disney shrugged off the collapse of Girl Star Wars, telling themselves: "Well, Marvel's still bringing in money. If we take both studios together, we're still grinding out a profit."

But since Marvel has also collapsed, Disney cannot reassure itself that all is well. Now they're forced to confront the fact, that they had long pretended away, that Star Wars is dead, and the M-She-U is almost dead.

WDW_Pro said he has not heard anything about Kathleen "Kockroach" Kennedy being fired, but Disney now accepts they will have to retool both studios to make them entertainment studios, not Unceasing Feminist Propaganda and Morality Plays studios.

But here's the even better news: This won't work, and both brands are DEAD and not coming back.

The magic of both Star Wars -- pre-1990 -- and Marvel was that they took something that was inherently childish and silly and gave both a small dose of plasubility. So that even though viewers know that watching very expensive Juvenile Boy Power Fantasies is pretty dumb and indulgent and that the whole premise of the movies they're watching is just dumb, pre-1990 Star Wars and pre-2020 Marvel made their silly boys' adventure stories just barely on the right side of the plausibility (not to mention "coolness") line, allowing people to actually buy into these fantasies and have a great time with them.

But since the prequels and certainly since the Disney sequels, Star Wars is just stupid and, as the kids used to say, "gay." All of it's coolness -- it never had much coolness, just enough to cross the line so that you didn't feel uncool for liking Star Wars -- is now gone.

The same for Marvel.

This kind of magic is like a soap bubble -- it's delicate and easily popped.

And there is no way to put a soap bubble back together after it's popped. The terribleness of Star Wars and Marvel is now making everyone reevaluate what they found so charming in the pre-terribleness franchises -- were they always this uncool? This stupid? This preachy? This gay?

It reminds me of Members Only jackets. Not that I remember them. I'm not even 29 years old yet. But I've heard tales.

I've heard that Members Only jackets were ubiquitous for a couple of years in the 1980s. Men -- well, very young men, like middle schoolers to 23 year olds -- bought those Members Only jackets and wore them around and thought the were so cool. And other people seemed to think they were cool too, because no one laughed at the guys wearing them.

Until they did. Until Members Only jackets suddenly became the lamest, cheesiest, stupidest, gayest things a guy could wear.

And I'm sure Members Only tried to "retool the brand," maybe "focusing on quality." Trying to put the soap bubble back together.

But they didn't. Because one a soap bubble is gone, it's gone forever.

Huh, according to that, there's been a nostalgic revival of the brand.

So I guess Disney only has to wait 30-40 years before a much-smaller form of the soap bubble can be reconstructed.

* Per the Hitchhiker guide series, Bistromath is an exotic branch of mathematics based on the fact that waiters in bistros enter different numbers on checks than what the menu specifies. It's an area of math based entirely on human imagination and the reality-bending power of grift.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:18 PM

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