Disney General - The saddest fandom on Earth

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Which is Better

  • Chicken Little

    Votes: 433 27.4%

  • Hunchback 2

    Votes: 57 3.6%

  • A slow death

    Votes: 1,088 68.9%
  • Total voters
    1,578
XYZpdq Jr. said:
I'd say they should include the merch sales, but iirc those were going so well that even Breyers Official Sequel Trilogy Ice Cream had to be clearanced out
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They did. They also included future estimated receipts.

The article (pdf attached) is largely a takedown of a Disney PR stunt in the recent Peltz proxy fight. Disney produced a lengthy and detailed presentation stating, amongst other things, that a 2.9x return on investment had been achieved by the Disney Star Wars trilogy (+ 2 spin offs, merch and disc sales). The general tenor was "we're doing really really well". There was however small print. Small print in the sense that it was so small that on the Disney publicised version of it you couldn't even read it by zooming in. It just pixelated to a blur. (It could be zoomed into and read on the formally filed version.)

To quote the article, "buried in the fine print is the revelation that the purchase price of Lucasfilm isn't even included in the ROI calculation. Instead, it is purely based on the box office performance of Disney's Star Wars trilogy, its two spinoff movies, merchandise, DVD and Blu Ray sales.
As revealed, the methodology is questionable as Disney based the ROI on the revenue generated by the movies, merchandise, DVDs and Blu Rays rather than the profit they made as it should have done. Using the revenue rather than the profit artificially inflates the result as it doesn't factor in the costs that Disney had to pay out.
Even this wasn't enough for the media giant so it also forecast the revenue that it expected the Star Wars movies, merchandise, DVDs and Blu Rays to generate over a ten-year period and based the calculation on that too. In other words, Disney hasn't actually received the revenue that it used to calculate the return on its investment."

It then goes onto justify the claimed loss in headline. That figure does not however include the marketing costs so even that is a significant understatement. (This journo is the one who for the last few years has been checking the financial submissions that Disney has to submit for those all important tax incentives. The usual outcome is that the budget figures that Disney (and others) put out invariably end up being exceeded (often dramatically) though Disney never seems to publicise that itself. Those financial submissions do not disclose marketing spend and her articles don't address that expenditure.)

The Disney presentation, which also covered other parts of the rat's empire in similar fashion, does not technically lie. It is however deliberately deceptive to the extent of using industry standard terms such as ROI but defining them in unintelligible small print in a different and self serving way. Unfortunately this Forbes article did get published before the proxy vote but only by a matter hours and too late to actually influence it.

It's a useful reminder to never take anything the Rat says at face value if nothing else.
 

Attachments

@Milkshake Sniffer
To quote the article, "buried in the fine print is the revelation that the purchase price of Lucasfilm isn't even included in the ROI calculation. Instead, it is purely based on the box office performance of Disney's Star Wars trilogy, its two spinoff movies, merchandise, DVD and Blu Ray sales.
As revealed, the methodology is questionable as Disney based the ROI on the revenue generated by the movies, merchandise, DVDs and Blu Rays rather than the profit they made as it should have done. Using the revenue rather than the profit artificially inflates the result as it doesn't factor in the costs that Disney had to pay out.
Even this wasn't enough for the media giant so it also forecast the revenue that it expected the Star Wars movies, merchandise, DVDs and Blu Rays to generate over a ten-year period and based the calculation on that too. In other words, Disney hasn't actually received the revenue that it used to calculate the return on its investment."
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This should have been really obvious to anyone looking at the data.

Of course the purchase of Lucasfilm itself would greatly inflate what Disney would need to "break even". Then add the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars Disney used for budgeting, merchandising, marketing, etc. And let's not forget about the Disney+ shows for which we can't even tell how many subscribers or how much money Disney gained doing so.
 
Mr. Zed da Robot Poon Fed said:
@Milkshake Sniffer


This should have been really obvious to anyone looking at the data.

Of course the purchase of Lucasfilm itself would greatly inflate what Disney would need to "break even". Then add the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars Disney used for budgeting, merchandising, marketing, etc. And let's not forget about the Disney+ shows for which we can't even tell how many subscribers or how much money Disney gained doing so.
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Seems everyone forgot that billion dollar disaster star wars hotel that failed miserably as well.
 
Chilson said:
Seems everyone forgot that billion dollar disaster star wars hotel that failed miserably as well.
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That Galaxy's Edge attraction at both US parks were also expensive as fuck and don't seem to be doing well. I actually thought that they had closed down until a google search proved otherwise. I remember seeing the initial posts about their openings in the Star Wars grieving thread right before Rise of Skywalker came out. Something about it all just rubbed me the wrong way despite always being a more casual fan of the franchise. Maybe they have gotten better, but I can't be assed to look. Disney did a far greater job at fucking up the franchise for casuals and normies than Lucas ever could.
 
Mr. Zed da Robot Poon Fed said:
This should have been really obvious to anyone looking at the data.
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It should have been and it certainly could be said that there was clearly something wrong but the data was hidden. We still don't have reliable data as to marketing. Remarkable for a publicly traded company but there you go.
Mr. Zed da Robot Poon Fed said:
And let's not forget about the Disney+ shows for which we can't even tell how many subscribers or how much money Disney gained doing so
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Despite the previous Wall St and streamer obsession with subscriber numbers that was never a meaningful metric in itself. Doesn't really matter if you add a vast number of new subscribers if you did it by offering free subs with other products of priced them so low it actually cost you money. It's the same vanity fallacy that so many other tech/internet businesses have had - millions of people using a service that has never turned a profit.

Disney streaming and Disney gaining money are two things that don't go together. Disney streaming is more than $11Bn in the hole. Arguably you can attribute part of that to artificial internal transactions with Disney paying itself for licensing content but D+ has never made money. (Just like the CW.) This is something worth keeping an eye on as Disney desperately tries to get to the point of saying it's profitable. Of course what Disney means by this is that in a particular fiscal period it generated more revenue than operating expenses. They will be pretending that the existing debt and the vast costs of servicing a debt in excess of $11Bn doesn't exist. i.e. it will be more lies.
Chilson said:
Seems everyone forgot that billion dollar disaster star wars hotel that failed miserably as well.
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Yup. And the really big one that never gets considered is the devaluation of the IPs. Very hard to put a number on but for Disney; almost everything flows from the IP including the parks and the cruise ships (the only things that have been reliable income sources for the Rat in recent years (exc lockdowns!)). Disney adults are a thing and do spend disproportionately more than the norm but are limited in number. If the vastly more significant general market has gone from considering Disney as must see family friendly entertainment to overpriced tedious product unsafe to let the kids see and lecturing with retarded politics that's going to impact everything. Severely. And the real killer if that this is a delayed action effect. It takes time for a change in market perception to take hold but when it does it builds up momentum the critical point being when it becomes a normie word of mouth issue. And it is very difficult to reverse if it even can be reversed. (And Disney has shown no interest in even attempting to reverse.)
 
starborn427614 said:
Not surprised, the sequel trilogy is boring more than anything else.
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If you're a fan of Space Wars, I genuinely do not understand how you could remain one after two trilogies of tripe destroying everything interesting/logical the basic concept brought in a New Hope... and when you research Jewish history and learn about Solomon (Jedi-diah), the Temple, and the predictable butthurt the Hollyjew tribe has against Empires (the things which historically have BTFO his levant kin) - everything else about it comes into place. I spit on Space Wars and I'm glad it got ruined.
 
toilet_rainbow said:
That Galaxy's Edge attraction at both US parks were also expensive as fuck and don't seem to be doing well. I actually thought that they had closed down until a google search proved otherwise. I remember seeing the initial posts about their openings in the Star Wars grieving thread right before Rise of Skywalker came out. Something about it all just rubbed me the wrong way despite always being a more casual fan of the franchise. Maybe they have gotten better, but I can't be assed to look. Disney did a far greater job at fucking up the franchise for casuals and normies than Lucas ever could.
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I never understood why they themed GE around a trilogy that hadn't even ended yet, and I'm someone who loved the first two films. It was a forced stunt to make people care while purposefully avoiding face characters that people who have grown up on Star Wars would want to see! There's no reason it couldn't have been set on a generic desert planet and let people run into Rey, Anakin, Luke, and Leia at various times throughout the day. They went so overboard on "immersion" that nobody gets to see anything exciting! It sounds like that was the same problem with the weird hotel idea; most people don't want to roleplay Star Wars, they just want to recognize a few things while they do normal park stuff.
 
Trianon said:
I never understood why they themed GE around a trilogy that hadn't even ended yet, and I'm someone who loved the first two films. It was a forced stunt to make people care while purposefully avoiding face characters that people who have grown up on Star Wars would want to see! There's no reason it couldn't have been set on a generic desert planet and let people run into Rey, Anakin, Luke, and Leia at various times throughout the day. They went so overboard on "immersion" that nobody gets to see anything exciting! It sounds like that was the same problem with the weird hotel idea; most people don't want to roleplay Star Wars, they just want to recognize a few things while they do normal park stuff.
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The "hotel" was doomed from the start. If they had just made a Disney resort with Star Wars influences, it would've made serious money. But they literally made a locked room "experience", where you couldn't just enter... no you had to pay $1000s to be trapped there for 48 hours. 48 hours where you'd have to have another hotel to check in and out of for the rest of your trip, or pay for an empty room otherwise. Where you had to drag your luggage through the whole park to get to it.

Logistics-wise the idea should've been shot down at first proposal. I wonder what the average occupancy was for its whole run.
 
neverendingmidi said:
I wonder what the average occupancy was for its whole run.
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Besides a few holidays it never had over 50% occupancy past the first few weeks and near the end they were cancelling days because it was dipping below 25%. What's even worse was that they were planning for the hotel as soon as they got the rights to Star Wars. I remember seeing the first concepts of it around 2014 or 2015 and even then it looked gay and retarded.
 
neverendingmidi said:
The "hotel" was doomed from the start. If they had just made a Disney resort with Star Wars influences, it would've made serious money. But they literally made a locked room "experience", where you couldn't just enter... no you had to pay $1000s to be trapped there for 48 hours. 48 hours where you'd have to have another hotel to check in and out of for the rest of your trip, or pay for an empty room otherwise. Where you had to drag your luggage through the whole park to get to it.

Logistics-wise the idea should've been shot down at first proposal. I wonder what the average occupancy was for its whole run.
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Didn't they also have a "shuttle" to take these exalted guests to and from GE which was simply a windowless panel van? The sort of thing that typically kidnappers might use!

Trianon said:
I never understood why they themed GE around a trilogy that hadn't even ended yet, and I'm someone who loved the first two films. It was a forced stunt to make people care while purposefully avoiding face characters that people who have grown up on Star Wars would want to see!
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The story doing the rounds was that fairly late in the process Kathleen Kennedy directly intervened convincing Bob Iger that the sequel trilogy was what people wanted and would flock to and the only people interested in the original trilogy were 50 year old white guys who are all dying off anyway. Is it true? Dunno and I doubt we'll ever know for sure. I want to believe it though.
 
iirc there's a shitload of takes pro and con about the hotel on wdwmagic

supposedly if you're the sort of person who digs star wars larping, didn't mind the sequels, and shit money everywhere then it was pretty cool
Unfortunately for Disney that's not a lot of people.
 

Kingdom Hearts Adaptation Reportedly In The Works At Disney​

A reliable movie and TV insider has claimed that an adaptation of Kingdom Hearts is currently in the works at Disney, although it's unclear which it is.

As we've talked about plenty over the past few months, it's been an incredibly dry season for Kingdom Hearts news, with the only exciting thing to talk about being the announcement (and delay) of a second closed beta test for Missing Link. Although it looks like we're going to be kept waiting to hear about Kingdom Hearts 4, there is at least some activity in the series.

That activity is probably going to come as a surprise to many, though. According to reliable movie and TV insider DanielRPK, Disney is currently working on some kind of adaptation of Kingdom Hearts, although it's currently unclear whether it's going to be a series for Disney Plus or an outright movie of some kind.

Yesterday, DanielRPK (who recently suggested that a sequel to Sonic Frontiers was in development, something that was then backed up by another insider) shared a post on their Patreon that reported that an adaptation of Kingdom Hearts is currently being worked on by Disney. They aren't sure if it's a series or a movie, but it does seem like something is being worked on.

Interestingly enough, this isn't actually the first time that we've heard about Disney making some kind of TV series or movie adaptation of Kingdom Hearts. All the way back in 2020, Vulcan Reporter's Emre Kaya suggested that a Kingdom Hearts series for Disney Plus was being developed and that Square Enix was asked to make a pilot using Unreal Engine.

The series was said to be CG animated and casting at the time of the rumour, so it's not clear if the direction was changed at some point or if this current rumour is about something else altogether. I'd place a bet on it being a CG animated adaptation, but one that has been tweaked and worked on in the four years since the rumour was first reported.

Over on ResetEra, one user suggested that this could be what Tetsuya Nomura was referring to when he said that the "direction" of Kingdom Hearts had been changed. We've not heard anything about the series since then, so it does seem possible that he was referring to some kind of adaptation being in development.
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Looks like KH rumors are still persistent and we may actually be getting a TV series/movie for Disney+
 
Kingdom Hearts Adaptation Reportedly In The Works At Disney
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can't wait for more memes to happen because of this but also for Disney.

.....
from the two news stories, I am not surprised with meme one of corpse puppetry.
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I understand that the second needs to be taken down and updated to the new Princess & the Frog ride.
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So the trailer for the Lion King prequel about Mufasa just dropped and it's as awful as it sounds.


“Mufasa: The Lion King” enlists Rafiki to relay the legend of Mufasa to young lion cub Kiara, daughter of Simba and Nala, with Timon and Pumbaa lending their signature schtick. Told in flashbacks, the story introduces Mufasa as an orphaned cub, lost and alone until he meets a sympathetic lion named Taka—the heir to a royal bloodline. The chance meeting sets in motion an expansive journey of an extraordinary group of misfits searching for their destiny—their bonds will be tested as they work together to evade a threatening and deadly foe.

I always joked that if Disney made an actual prequel about Mufasa they'd probably retcon it to make it so that Scar was totally right about Mufasa all along. I didn't actually expect them to be retarded enough to do that shit. For those who are unaware, Taka is supposed to be Scar's real name.
 
ArthuriusMartyrius said:
So the trailer for the Lion King prequel about Mufasa just dropped and it's as awful as it sounds.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=MjQG-a7d41Q
“Mufasa: The Lion King” enlists Rafiki to relay the legend of Mufasa to young lion cub Kiara, daughter of Simba and Nala, with Timon and Pumbaa lending their signature schtick. Told in flashbacks, the story introduces Mufasa as an orphaned cub, lost and alone until he meets a sympathetic lion named Taka—the heir to a royal bloodline. The chance meeting sets in motion an expansive journey of an extraordinary group of misfits searching for their destiny—their bonds will be tested as they work together to evade a threatening and deadly foe.

I always joked that if Disney made an actual prequel about Mufasa they'd probably retcon it to make it so that Scar was totally right about Mufasa all along. I didn't actually expect them to be retarded enough to do that shit. For those who are unaware, Taka is supposed to be Scar's real name.
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The funniest part? Taka basically translates into English as "trash/garbage" or "dirt". Yeah, no shit Scar turned out to be evil. If I named my child "shit lord" I wouldn't have a leg to stand on when he started selling crack.
 
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