> It's got nothing on Turning Red [1], though. $20M on a $175M budget. Whoof.
Turning Red was surely a hit on Disney+. Hard to see from the consumer side what the impact was, but disney+ is a money machine and the can easily double the price.
Turning Red was surely a hit on Disney+. Hard to see from the consumer side what the impact was, but disney+ is a money machine and the can easily double the price.
The very same Disney Plus that lost 2.4M subscribers in Q1[0]?
That doesn't seem like "You could easily double the price" sort of performance. They still have plenty of subscribers, but they're not going "up and to the right" on the subscriber graph anymore.
It's hard to make the case that Disney is doing anything but "dropping flops on a public that doesn't want to see them."
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/08/disney-q1-2023-earnings/
I don't think that's a reasonable lens to be looking at how Disney's cartoon movies are doing.
I do think it might be worthwhile if you wanted to decide if Disney should have decided to keep the streaming rights, and whether the economics of that decision make sense.
...
"due to higher content and technology costs at Disney+ (with higher average costs per hour of programming, which included an increased mix of originals) as well as higher content costs and lower ad revenue at Hulu"
Not exactly the money machine I was envisioning!
For comparison, a recent movie that performed well at the box office was Top Gun Maverick.
$1500M box office on a $170M budget - that involved flying and filming an awful lot of hours in "rather expensive to run jets."
If they are going for a mainstream service, Netflix style, it won't be able to replace theaters.
Disney seems to want both, so they targeted their service at neither.
I personally liked the story of Turning Red very much (though I'm biased to like it because it's set in Toronto), but more objectively, the film is a step above Strange World and Lightyear in terms of ratings.
Turning Red's ratings: 95% on the Tomatometer of Rotten Tomatoes (RT), 7.0/10 on IMDb, and 3.7/5 on Letterboxd
Lightyear's ratings: 74% on RT, 6.1/10 on IMDb, 3.0/5 on Letterboxd
Strange World's ratings: 72% on RT, 5.6/10 on IMDb, 3.0/5 on Letterboxd
I don't know how it could've cost $175MM, but it's a quality movie and deserves kudos for giving us some diversity in protagonists.