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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

> It's got nothing on Turning Red [1], though. $20M on a $175M budget. Whoof.

It's hard to make anything at the box office when it was barely released to theaters[1]. Wikipedia says it ended up in three US theaters, some theaters in the UK and 12 overseas markets without Disney+. Otherwise, direct to streaming and discs.

[1] https://deadline.com/2022/01/turning-red-skips-theaters-disn...

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From the almost complete lack of theatrical release, might the goal of that release have been to drive Disney+ memberships?

January 2022 was the peak of Omicron, so probably not.

It's cheaper to just buy exclusive rights from companies that actually make good movies.

I don't believe it performed any better in disk sales, though I can't say what it did for streaming one way or another.

You can drop it from the data set and it doesn't change the argument, though. Disney's been dropping some impressive flops lately.

Really it's just a Disney+ movie, no one really buying it on disk.

The old world metric was how much money a film made. The new world metric is how much engagement a film provides a paid service. I think this is why Netflix often makes films that are critically panned but keeps making sequels, or why they drop critically acclaimed shows.

Disney will probably never want to share the truth about which of their films were business flops or not.

Disney has been making bad movies for a while, but for whatever reason Marvel sold well despite repeating the same storyline every time... Same writing, same style, same jokes, same flair.

After the MCU reset, I don't think Disney has any idea what to do.

They could probably use ChatGPT to make better scripts tho

> for whatever reason

kids _love_ violence. The story is simple (Disney TM).

Why would people buy it on disk when it was released onto Disney+? It has other metrics of success - it was one of the most streamed programs in March 2022.

I guess for some kids it's easier to pop a dvd in the player than navigating menus. Also, kids tend to watch the same movie again for ever, maybe it's safer for some parents to buy the actual thing, even more during the streaming war where parents switch from service to another.

Cars (vans mostly) with rear entertainment systems are mostly using discs, I'd guess.

> I guess for some kids it's easier to pop a dvd in the player than navigating menus

I can't speak for all kids, but for mine it's the opposite—the main TV remote they use controls our Fire TV Stick, and has a button for Disney+ built in. Plus, our iPads have Disney+ apps. Whereas our optical drive is a PS4, so they'd need to use the TV remote to switch to a different input, plus the PS4 controller. I'm not saying they couldn't figure it out if they wanted to, but for them, navigating menus to Disney+ is much easier.

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