Why Disney is having its best year ever
How did the House of the Mouse dominate this year at the box office? Here’s why Disney is having its best year ever.
This year is the year of Disney box office domination. Together Marvel Studios, Disney, and Pixar have hit… $8,245,723,551 so far. You read that right. You can double-check my math on Boxoffice Mojo if you want.
The fact of the matter is that all six of the world’s top-grossing movies this year are Disney films. By the end of the year, I expect Disney to have eight of them.
This is more money than Disney has ever made before in one year. Even if you adjust for inflation, it’s a bigger percentage of 2019’s box office than any film studio has ever had, in any year. How did Disney pull it off?
Disney’s slate of films was a triumph of Intellectual Property Use
Avengers: Endgame. Toy Story 4. The Lion King, Dumbo and Aladdin remakes. Captain Marvel. The latest Spider-Man movie. If you were following the film industry, you knew at least four of those were going to make money.
Even if you weren’t, these were the movies you were most likely to hear about if you struck up a conversation with your friends or coworkers. They said they wanted to see how the Avengers came back from the snap. Maybe they were curious about how a modern CGI remake of The Lion King was going to look. Maybe they hated the idea. Love them or hate them, these were the films people were aware of, talking about, and planning to see.
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The way Scott Mendelson at Forbes put it in this excellent article, Disney was putting it’s best foot forward in 2019. Looking at the release schedule, I couldn’t help but agree. It feels like Disney assembled its own elite Intellectual Property squad with a simple mission: make bank.
You had three superhero films, two of them featuring Spider-Man. You had the latest entry of Pixar’s most consistent money-making franchise. You even had three remakes of Disney animated classics, two of them figurehead films from the Disney Renaissance.
Disney’s film slate of 2019 has succeeded almost beyond my wildest dreams. Remember that later this year, we’ll be getting Frozen 2, and Star Wars: Episode IX. Judging from all the buzz that got started over say, Palpatine’s laugh, they are going to totally crush it too.
The movies themselves made people happy
Disney’s strategy wouldn’t have been so successful if the audience didn’t like most of the movies themselves. Avengers: Endgame was a good movie, both by itself and as a “culmination” of the Marvel Universe so far. I recently took my wife to see Spiderman: Far From Home, and we both enjoyed it. A couple of months ago, I had a coworker go to the new Aladdin with her boyfriend, and they both liked it.
Disney is able to keep doing what it’s doing two ways: by effectively making movies that people enjoy, and offering the promise of further sequels or similar films following a similar formula.
That doesn’t mean that every film in Disney’s 2019 slate has been a slam dunk or a future classic. Most people seemed lukewarm to the idea of a Dumbo remake. Spider-Man: Far From Home isn’t in my top 10 of things I’ve seen this year, let alone of all time. I did buy a ticket to it though.
Disney’s rivals didn’t give the public alternatives they wanted
A total of 143 films have been released so far this year. It’s just that Disney has been hovering up nearly all the ticket money anybody has actually spent.
Part of the reason for this is that none of Disney’s rivals have released a movie that has the same four-quadrant appeal in 2019. Looking at Boxoffice Mojo’s yearly table again, the most successful movie this year so far that’s not Disney was a Chinese sci-fi film.
Corporate reach plays a role here. Disney films open everywhere. I would have seen John Wick 3 in theaters if it had ever opened where I live.
The biggest issue is something Scott Mendelson talks about in the Forbes article. Mass audiences have preferred seeing event films to everything else, to the point where not much else makes money.
This is the perfect marketplace for Disney. They own as many IP’s as they can, and gear their movies towards the whole family.
On one hand, companies like Warner Brothers have struggled to make franchise films those franchise fans actually like. On the other hand, Disney has spent the last 12 years finding its strengths. When they found them, they just kept playing to them, year after year until now.
What does it this mean for movie culture?
That this is the year of Disney dominance. That when Disney+ goes live next year, it’s going to have a huge library. That Disney+ will probably be the only streaming home for eight of the top 10 movies of this year. It means that one company has more influence on western culture and the kinds of stories that get told than any other this year.
It means that creators at Warner Brothers, Universal, and other companies have to manage their IP’s better, and create new ones that people actually want to see more of. It means that if you want to see more movies that aren’t four-quadrant tentpoles, you have to actually pay to see the ones that do get released in theaters near you.
Are you happy Disney is so dominant in culture this year? Do you think another studio has what it takes to dethrone Disney next year? Sound off in the comments below.