Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games(cnbc.com) |
Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games(cnbc.com) |
I bet Zuck never ever played an actual video game in his whole life https://compote.slate.com/images/760b74a3-7156-4dbe-90bd-b02...
There is a growing graveyard of games/devs suffering from bespoke engine woes instead of just using Unreal...
Is there? I can't think of any examples that come to mind. Most indie devs I know that roll their own engine have no regrets. I am curious who comes to mind that says otherwise publicly?
The metaverse is real, and it's called Second Life. Which is a niche. It is a profitable niche. A "cash machine", one of the owners has said. So it stays around. Everybody else in the metaverse space lost money. Now that zero interest rates are over, and there's no more free money, this is even more true. Heavy Disney investment in a general-purpose metaverse seems unlikely. It doesn't fit their IP-based business model.
Already exists and it's called Fortnite
In a real metaverse, you have neighbors. A very large number of people can each contribute to building a big world. Such systems are very rare.
That's not in line with Disney's business model. "The media giant will work with the Fortnite studio to create new games and an entertainment universe where consumers can “play, watch, shop and engage with content, characters and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar and more,” Disney said in a press release." Think of this as an expansion pack for the Marvel Overextended Universe.
- Halo Infinite's slipstream engine turned into spaghetti code due to 343's terrible employee cycling, most of the directors left around the same week, and now they're rehiring a brand new team made up of devs with Unreal Engine experience because the old engine would take too long to fix.
- The terrible console performance and engine woes of CD Project Red's Cyberpunk 2077 that almost led to the company being sued into hell led to them abandoning their own engine and switching to Unreal Engine for their next game.
I guess at the low end (indies), you can design something lean that fits one specific use-case, and at the high-end (AAA) you really can afford to build/maintain something competitive. The middle-ground might be dangerous.
That being said, there are literally dozens of abandoned game engines out there from solo "game devs" who never actually got around to making the game.
Bethesda Game Studios is getting there.
I don't know about indie games as much, but I know Distant Worlds 2 got bit by its exotic engine.
I'd hazard a guess at flat. Unity (a peer) got crushed by the market but they also don't have Fortnite which is a money printer and has only gotten bigger.
Keep your Fortnite away from my Kingdom Hearts.
I realize this is from a ground level but: The games getting made by the Unreal Engine today are of such high quality and graphic fidelity.
They've really hit critical mass for the AA and AAA games, and paying the piper is looking like a smarter and smarter investment.
Do film companies write their own editing software, or 3d pipelines, or design and build their own cameras? Some of them, sure. But most of them are purchasing and customizing off-the-shelf solutions. It just makes sense.
A circle is around the island that slowly becomes smaller. If you're out of the circle you take damage. This essentially speeds up the later parts of the game.
Disney can bring a LOT of content, so long as they can actually make it half decent content and not shit the bed like they did with EA.
Same thing with tencent letting Grinding gear games basically make poe 2 which is huge financial risk when they already had a succesful game that could have kept going, just for the sake of making it better for their players over time.
Disney however? yeah, now people will actually see what unrestricted capitalism does to a company, I really hope this is mostly just aimed at the fact that Disney probably uses unreal engine and doesn't want it going down, but the cynic in me thinks that disney as a corporation will try to squeeze as much as they can out of their money.
Even if it’s just Fortnite its massively profitable to run it
I would not be shocked if future star wars, marvel, disney games are epic exclusive, and that could be the thing to get people to care beyond the weekly free game and fortnight.
Collaboration skins are massive for revenue. However, I'm concerned this relationship will force uncool collaborations with Fortnite and reduce it's appeal. Disney has had some flops recently. Long term the trick for Fortnite is to become the most sticky online videogame in history, with most games bleeding audience over time. Epic is more than just Fortnite, but I imagine this deal is entirely about Fortnite.
https://www.dexerto.com/fortnite/every-fortnite-collab-cross...
Disney is definitely at risk of becoming irrelevant with their stale IP.
https://www.ilm.com/vfx/the-mandalorian/
> For season one of the series ILM StageCraft utilized Unreal Engine to perform the real-time render
https://www.ilm.com/vfx/the-mandalorian-season-2/
> The real-time render engine called Helios was specifically developed by ILM engineers
> Ctrl-F "Unreal" - no results
It’s an obvious and huge opportunity for game engine experts to grow their influence.
All other Media and Entertainment companies are either owned by Comcast/AT&T or are Tech companies (netflix, amazon,apple,sony,youtube,tiktokk) that have carved out a chunk of the media and entertainment sector.
Disney is basically on the back foot here, at a time when the attention economy is wrecking chaotic unpredictable havoc on the the media sector.They had to do something cause shareholder revolt has been brewing for a while.
Also, there is still Paramount.
Sony Pictures started in 1987, so that should qualify as old media too.
And there is also Lionsgate.
Disney is by far the biggest and most relevant, though.
Perhaps.
Perhaps, also, it's the old media playbook interpreting what young people want as "jam advertisements in front of them".
>Long term the trick for Fortnite is to become the most sticky online videogame in history
They might achieve this (certainly World of Warcraft holds the title). But I think video games are inherently faddish.
If I had to go one way or the other, I'd bet this is a bit of a desperate move by Disney who are becoming less relevant and whose cash cow (Marvel) is withering.
It's hard to get accurate data, but Fortnite has roughly 100x more users than World of Warcraft. Counterstrike is an even smaller userbase.
WoW and Counterstrike have large loyal fanbases, but I'd be surprised if the age of the average user didn't increase by around 1 year per year.
I bet you can expect more content on fortnite to be with Disney IP; skins, events, maps, everything. It’ll be a great way to promote new movies/TV shows with cross-platform events. Fortnite has already had great luck with this sort of thing, so it makes sense for Disney to want access to it. Maybe you’ll even see IRL Fortnite experiences in theme parks or a Fortnite IP based movie or TV show.
[1] Sept 28, 2023 https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/layoffs-at-epic
In both instances, the game end of the deal had peaked already, and there was nowhere to go but down. Nothing a few billion dollars can’t fix, maybe some “new content,” says the business guys.
Meanwhile their product becomes worse by the month. The magic is fading. All the people who made it great move on, not wanting to deal with the business parasites who showed up to squeeze a buck. Repeat.
Take a look at how The Mandalorian (a Disney production) was filmed. Epic Games’ software played a large part.
It goes beyond just film & television. They offer solutions for the automotive industry, aviation simulation industry, mining sims, trucking sims, medical sims, architecture, live broadcast, …
Hmm, I think I might invest if I can!
It means more of what we experience will have to adhere to more of the same rules, patterns, and decisions.
Uniformity is prevailing.
Disney investing in the company that has been the biggest thorn in Apple's side is... interesting. Obviously, the immediate motivation is "we wanna jump on the Fortnite zoomer bandwagon", but I can't help but wonder if Tim Sweeney's days are numbered here.
There's a Wikipedia page dedicated to the subject with extensive references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_acquisition_of_Disne...
Naturally since their CEOs were on the board of the other company and also Pixar.
That said, I would like to see how much equity Tim Sweeney still has left when all is said and done because as far as I know he only had 51.4% prior to today. A controlling share, sure, but somehow I doubt Disney gave him $1.5B for ~1.3%.
He owns a controlling interest in the company.
The announcement video:
Apple and Disney are themselves competitors in the streaming market.
I think an appearance of friendliness mainly came from Steve Jobs, and he’s been gone for a long time now.
Unreal tech powers EVERYTHING at Disney now ever since the development of virtual production leveraging real-time rendering.
On top of the that the Fortnite demographic is growing up and videogame based IP moves are making bank (Sonic, Mario, Last of Us).
If the cogs are turning in Bob Iger's head, it's that videogame IPs are the next Marvel/Star Wars.
It makes sense that on the heels of Disney's collaboration with FOX and Warner Bros. Discovery (via ESPN), they would also get into the other market with fans as committed as sports fans.
Considering that the future of TV is streaming and being successful in this market has proven to be no slam dunk (no matter how big you are), Sports/Gaming is the hedge (for those who can swings these deals).
The first thing I could think of as to why is because they use Unreal Engine for their CGI background and effects in TV shows and (perhaps as well) movies.
I do remember seeing BTS of one of their TV shows (likely Star Wars) with giant TV's all round the set which creates backdrops, all in Unreal.
I will admit it is impressive but I noticed camera shots are looking limited. Start of something grander, I guess.
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/02/disney-epic-interoperable-...
Roblox should start sweating. Then again, so should anyone who's created Disney-themed fan content on Rec Room, VRChat, etc.
Corporate leadership needs to start understanding that once they've saturated the market they need to loosen up or they're at risk of becoming a populist target.
https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/sony-and-kirkbi-in...
Also monocrhomaticaly violet and with mandatory genderconfusionist characters.
Disney got themselves a board seat, one assumes, and some IP sharing.
This is what everyone said about Lego, and a bunch of other collabs that came before. It was never true and it's not true now. Turns out people don't want a "virtual world", they want a fun game.
Arguably, there are people who want a "virtual world" -- and they currently just play Roblox to get it. Enough of them like it, that every major retailer stocks "Robux" gift cards
It turns out that when you can't even get audio synced up so that everyone is hearing the same music, the vast majority of the artists bail or drop a pre-recorded set because they weren't informed how a hypothetical live playback mechanism would work, and you don't even have the rights to the game it's based on... you don't have a polished experience, you have a metaverse scam.
“Virtual Disney world” doesn’t mean VR roller coasters, it means Disney themed digital experiences (eg fun games). Disney and Epic have a decent track record building fun and profitable experiences for people.
Nit: It was all of Marvel not just Avengers and I think they did Star Wars too already.
I miss Unreal and Unreal Tournament.
Unfortunately all we get is content now. Even games have started to become pure daily content.
How? EPIC doesn’t have a VR platform at the moment.
The deal still makes sense though. Disney needs to control a video game platform.
2.) Virtual worlds don't need to be VR
The "Fortnite creative engine" is roughly a Virtual Worlds editor / generator along side the Fortnite Virtual Worlds marketplace.
That neither needs nor is easier with NFTs.
Also if the intention is to limit the use of the property to epic games, why not use a plain old database? Nft seems like overkill
Details here and elsewhere: https://www.engadget.com/the-mandalorian-season-two-stagecra...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/5/23905082/epic-unreal-engi...
FTFY. They had their own game publishing arm since 1988, Disney Interactive Studios, and owned first-party studios like Avalanche Software, which was sold off to Warner Bros.
They shut it down in 2016.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/09/bob-iger-remembers-s...
There was some analysis/chatter also that basically Disney's entire strategy the last 5-8 years also was to pump up its valuation as large as possible and then get acquired by Apple.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/apple-previews-new-en...
acquisition day 2: call off all lawsuits.
But they have a competing product… for now?
Skydance is trying to buy National Amusements to take over Paramount and arguably be a similar new media in old media clothing if that deal goes through.
> Sony Pictures started in 1987, so that should qualify as old media too.
I know objective that's almost 40 years ago and probably does qualify for old, but that still seems too recent in Hollywood Empires. But Sony Pictures also has the advantage it bought truly old media Columbia/TriStar and didn't seem to kill them and kind of left them to continue to do their thing, so maybe Sony gets more of a pass too.
> And there is also Lionsgate.
Lionsgate was formed in 1997.
Maybe you are thinking about MGM (and its famous Lion logo), which Amazon has been trying not to kill since it acquired that ancient studio brand, but also is very much appearing to be Amazon still being Amazon just wearing that brand (which was on life support or already a zombie when purchased) like a skin at this point?
It's so much worse than you can imagine.
Hell, Valve literally already did this with all CS:GO skins carrying over to CS2, it required zero blockchain, doesn't actually give you "control" over the item, and was only done because players have spent literal tens of thousands of dollars on skins and Valve needed to throw them a bone so they would be slightly less upset about CS:GO being essentially memory-holed.
;)
Sure, but even in 2024 this 20-year old game has a paid monthly player count well into the millions. Extremely successful by any measure. And perhaps one of the most profitable game franchises of all time.
There’s a lot of hope and desire for “forever games” particularly from investors but there is no such thing. They will all have a peak and a steady decline at some stage. Social networks exhibit this pattern as well.
Existing players keep playing but you rarely hear of new players; at best they may convince old subscribers to return.
Minecraft is also old but seems to be collecting new players decently well.
World of Warcraft is probably the stickiest game in history. I can also see how an investment in Blizzard in the year 2010 might have been overly optimistic about WoW's future.
Apple is trying to maintain its draconian grip over the app store because of the sweet revenue it brings. With worldwide regulatory pressure, that dam will eventually burst. But they'll keep it going as long as they can.
Apple is happy to engage in backroom deals. There's a future where Apple could acquire either or both of these companies.
Maybe they’d want to, but would regulators really let those mergers happen unless apple makes some big changes?
/s
Hell, RUST is an old, mediocre, "Cursed runes" survival MMO crafting-them-up and it has 100k people playing right now, despite tens of better versions of the exact game formula having been released since.
100k players mid-day is "has-been" multiplayer video game territory. It's "also-ran" MMO territory.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 has 30k people playing right now
All these options are more than the people playing Cyberpunk lol
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft
ILM used Unreal Engine to make StageCraft and kept iterating on it until it’s the awesome tech that it is. They have a vested interest in seeing the underlying engine continue to prosper.
https://www.ilm.com/industrial-light-magic-to-expand-stagecr...
This 2021 article mentions that external productions using StageCraft services can choose to use either Unreal or Helios for rendering, so the Unreal integration may still be available for those who want it, but obviously ILM didn't write a brand new renderer for the fun of it. Unreal must not have been cutting it for their own productions.
What is Helios?
/? Helios StageCraft https://rebusfarm.net/news/ilm-stagecraft-a-virtual-producti... :
> StageCraft leverages Helios ILM’s real-time cinema render engine. It is a set of LED screens that work as a 360 extension digital set, allowing filmmakers to explore new ideas, communicate concepts, and execute shots in a collaborative and flexible production environment.
Is there a way to vary the [UE] AutoLOD for longer shots? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38160089
That's not even cinematography! Because there aren't lenses, there are presumably Camera matrices.
Cinematography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematography
Computer graphics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_graphics
"Ask HN: What's the state of the art for drawing math diagrams online?" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38355444 ; generative-manim, manimGPT, BlenderGPT, ipyblender, o3de, how do we teach primary math intuition with the platforms that reach them, how do we Manim in 3 or even 4D?
Manim > "Render with [Blender and/or od3e]" https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim/issues/3362
FWIU Disney Games are often built with Panda3d, which works with pygame-web/pygbag in WASM now
Research: "Fabric of the Cosmos", "Cosmos", "How the Universe Works",
Thank you.
They're actually expanding their use of it with more virtual sets, mainly because they're now leasing them out a fair bit and need the capacity.
The core plot is asking "Why are we stuck in this loop?" It does get convoluted, but it's there.
Various agencies are involved, the Zero Point (which causes the looping behavior) has manifested as many things over the seasons. Aliens and inter dimensional being seek after it.
Maybe you had to be there, but the first batch of seasons and even chapter 2 had many online theorizing and trying to guess what's next.
It's like a digital Lost.
UE5 (and other 4d graphics and physics simulators) automatically reduce the LOD Level-of-Detail for objects in the distance.
Is that LOD parametric with StageCraft software?
(For example, reportedly Cities Skyline 2 is bad slow because they included meshes for characters' teeth and expected AutoLOD to just make it work on the computers kids tend to have. It doesn't work on reasonable machines because the devs all have fast pro GPUs to develop on, so they don't know what the UX is for the average family (that would be happy to turn down the polygon count themselves for what we can learn from the gameplay). Having game devs dogfood with real-world devices that families afford would be good for these firms too.).
Hopefully they'll continue to sell games through non-Epic stores that people have already invested in.
And hopefully, they'll make sure their products work with Proton and thus popular Linux-based handheld gaming devices.
A HUD-like [spinning ball trajectory] with observations and symbolic model fitting
Hopefully they will invest in Games that cause STEM (and SEL) learning;
And hopefully they will apply great CGI tools for STEM education
I know that analysts have had recurring fantasies about Apple raining money on Disney, but has there been any real evidence of Apple considering that?
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/13/bob-iger-resigns-from-apple-...
Idk man, none of us had a drink at a bar with "Apple" and "Disney" to confirm the cozy relationship, others have provided business partnerships, what would satisfy you?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/net-inc...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/profit-...
Doesn’t look so hot for the last 4 or 5 years. They went from earning near $10B per year to less than $3B per year.
https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/app/uploads/2023/11/Q4_FY23...
Also they've over saturated the MCU with a million movies and TV shows every year. People have just been burned out on it and they've only recently decided to cut back production on those and be more focused.
Because it's drastically cheaper in an obvious dumping exercise, and has some interesting IP kids and grown ups that used to be kids want to (re)watch. However there really isn't that much content on it, nor is new content coming that quickly, so at some point after everything of interest has been seen, people will start unsubscribing.
This is why Netflix is constantly churning out new stuff of very varying quality (utter shit next to masterpieces) - you need to keep people paying the subscription.
I had D+, Prime, and Netflix at one point and now have none.
The DVDs at the library are free, too.
The primary thing you do in Roblox is pick a game you want to play, which is largely isolated from the other games. Plenty of people will never touch the social features.
Its because its fun to shoot things in video games, and wreck cars, and building forts and demolishing entire buildings and trying to keep up with my kids.
Why are spiderman, darth vader and predator there? Money. There's no coherent story telling, which is fine, the game is still fun. People play it for the fun factor, not the story.
Apparently the song itself was written for the rides in 1967 [1] and I assume is based off even older pirate shanties. Certainly reminds me of songs from the book Treasure Island (1883).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_Ho_(A_Pirate%27s_Life_for_M...
"The Platform" in this context is a position that allows you to collect ~30% fee of revenue generated. Unreal Engine's position is much much smaller. Using my definitions Epic gamestore technically counts as a VR platform, but isn't positioned to become market leader.
> Virtual worlds don't need to be VR
Yes, but flat pancake games are even poorer at simulating a Disney theme park IRL than VR. It doesn’t even come close to a substitute, especially for the rides.
Virtual worlds as in a digital experience built around Disney’s cinematic universe. Like video games.
All so Disney can increase market share. This is why you cant just point to subscriber count as a success indicator.
[0] "Simple and clean is the way it should be..."
surprisingly one of the simpler questions to answer. The Keyblade is the key that can open (or close) any door. And that was the theme of the first Kingdom Hearts: doors. the big villians plan is to destroy all worlds by opening the door to the Dark World and flooding the existing Light dimension with hoards of monsters. you also spend a lot of time closing off the doors to the heart of the world to protect their cores (monsters destroy core = destroyed world).
In addition to bashing enemies and being a large narrative hook, it's a nifty explanation for why you are able to simply tap on a chest and open anything you want. Or break and enter into a bunch of buildings (although the game forgets constantly that it can do that).
IP don’t make the game. The game makes the game.
There's a ton of people who apparently really liked Kingdom Hearts.
It's pretty elitist to consider some IP too sacred to remix.
I was amazed.
Heh, not sure if pun intended but this made me giggle
If you're a teenager that may be much easier... or much harder, in cases such as yours.
Funny enough Disney also recently launched their own TCG: Lorcana. A whole new way to leverage that IP!
As if all the Disney Adults in the world are just going to snap out of it. As if all the children who love Disney stuff currently are going to grow out of it. In what world is this considered an informative and knowledgable take?
Even at its lowest point financially, Disney IP has never been irrelevant at any point.
KH3 also made me realize that they can start to target child and adult fans via recently popular titles (e.g. Frozen) and ~30 years ago popular titles (e.g. Toy Story), respectively.
I'm sick of them being allowed to increase their entertainment monopoly on children instead of being told to just create new original works. It's not like they have a shortage of talented people...
Presumably not adjusted for inflation, but still impressive.
are we really gonna make up things that are easily disprovable?
It was supposed to kick off a Marvell-style universe of infinite blockbusters. It didn’t.
If I had a nickel for every time I've heard someone singing that one song from Encanto I'd be able to buy Disney.
When you create a new work based off a public domain work, you own what you added to that work. If your adaptation happens to be extremely successful, that effectively recopyrights the character, because the version people care about is the one you own. If someone else wants to use the public domain character, they have to aggressively distance their use of that character from yours.
Disney spent decades re-imagining Europe's folk tales[0] through his lens. Their movies are the ones people think about when you mention Snow White, Cinderella, Pinocchio, etc. Notably, the visual designs are unique enough to get independent copyright protection. So independent uses of those characters don't look like themselves.
This, BTW, is why anyone who wants to renounce copyright over their creative work should opt for CC-BY-SA and not a public domain dedication. Share-alike clauses prevent this sort of gradual appropriation.
[0] as filtered/censored thru the Brothers Grimm
I doubt that Disney would take this kindly or lightly.
That's the entire point of the post that you are responding to.
Outside of their reimaginings/reboots, I can't think of a single recent movie that isn't an original work.
And that doesn't include things like LucasFilm, Marvel and Pixar which are, obviously, original and still part of Disney.
The most recent movie Wish - is just callbacks to other Disney movies, so does it count as original IP?
And this excludes their reboots - but also excludes Pixar which has done some original albeit lacklustre stuff recently.
This only applies to the first game, though. After that I have no idea what's going on.
Turning Red and Teenage Kraken have a superficially similar plot and the Pixar one is much “better made” in many ways, but neither is earth-shattering.
Disney sued nobody.
Well, I agree with that. But very likely not for the same reasons you do.
Stephen Sondheim had a pretty succesful musical based on Grimms tales.
But yeah, if you want people to care about your version, you have to bring something new to the table.
I only know enough about what “Aqua got ‘Norted” means to put an apostrophe in front of ‘Norted. (Xehanort possesses people or whatever.) I also literally never saw Aqua in any game I played before KH3, except maybe as an extra I didn’t notice.
I think they should be compared to how well a literal rerelease of the original would do.
I think part of the evidence is just how absolutely long lived Frozen 1 has been. Nothing has been able to even come close to unseating that, not even its sequel (they were very smart to keep everything similar enough so that Frozen 2 merchandise can substitute for Frozen 1 in a kid’s eye).
It’s very indicative that people jump to movies that have been out for a decade or more, and probably can’t even name most of the more recent releases.
So again, "no hit movies" is easily disproven with 10s of time to look into it.
So in your example, it potentially lost money for Disney. The wikipedia article almost says as much [2]
"Although it underperformed at the box office ..."
[1] https://gizmodo.com/how-much-money-does-a-movie-need-to-make...
None of the recent Disney animated movies have been “direct to DVD” terrible but they haven’t been exceptionally better than everything else.
It used to be that everyone basically considered Disney (and upstart Pixar) to be at the top of the class, and even extremely successful movies like Despicable Me to be a tier or two below.
"The film grossed $2.07 billion worldwide, breaking various box office records and becoming the highest-grossing film in the United States and Canada, the highest-grossing film of 2015, and the third-highest-grossing film at the time of its release"
"It grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of 2017"
and part 3:
"grossed over $1.077 billion worldwide, making it the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2019 "
Cannot really be called flops either. And the Mandalorian is highly succesful as well. And probably some other movies, I don't know, I do not follow. My point is, that I share the criticism of how bad Star Wars became under Disney, I dropped out, after they seriously introduced yet another death star. But commercially they were highly succesful.
Disney has also produced some of the most recent highest grossing box office films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films. Again, this is relative. We've just had a pandemic followed by writers and actors guild strikes.
To be fair, I saw "Wish" with my family and we all enjoyed it, but it obviously didn't come close to "Frozen 2" numbers. They're not all hits. With animated film taking years to produce, those perhaps aren't the metric to use. It'll be another few years before the next major animated film by Disney is released.
The Marvel movies release more frequently and seem to print money. "Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3" came out last year and has done $845MM¹.
Keep an eye on the clearance aisles for a feel on how merchandising is going; wish is doing exceptionally bad.
Until you can answer one or both in a repeatable, predictable way, we can wave our hands and say "it makes money later!" or "it doesn't make money later!" and neither is provable.
One other aspect that we CAN prove: streaming kills DVD sales. That's a revenue stream that is gone and won't be coming back so we have yet another deficit to fill.
Until then, Box Office and merchandising are the ONLY numbers that we, analysts, and stockholders can point at where "You put in $X and got out $Y" for their movie business. And as of right now, that puts Disney's 2023 numbers deeply negative.
However, trying to balance this critique with some fairness to their strategy, it is difficult to disambiguate "the strategy isn't working" from "the strategy is helping us float across some mediocre years until we chance upon the next Frozen". It's kind of like VC returns, where it's 10 "%" of their IP (Star Wars, Mickey, Frozen, Toy Story, Marvel, etc.) that drive 90% of their performance. 2023 was definitely a poor "vintage" for Disney IP.
That being said, Disney has rebounded from many spells of mediocrity, and their theme parks, merchandise, and old IP (now monetized through Disney+ as you say) have kept them afloat through those poor periods.
Most recently they've only been able to jump-start the IP engines through acquisition (Pixar 2006, Marvel in 2009). I'm not a Disney shareholder myself, but I agree that the IP tap seems to be running dry and that's very concerning. I don't think Epic Games has anywhere near the value ceiling that Marvel and Pixar did.
Which is why Disney+ is its own streaming service. Keeps all the eggs in the same basket.
Not everything can be Frozen, but the pallet of Wish merchandise at Walmart is still there and now all marked down (except the Lego because they know that someone will buy it eventually for parts).
Elemental merchandising was completely non-existent and that was a mistake, people enjoyed that.
A business can do something that makes a ton of money and still tarnishes their brand and their relationship with their fans. So those fans thinking its a flop, even if it was a financial success isn't quite wrong.
Force Awakens? Everyone who had ever seen Star Wars went to see it (extended family had a tradition of seeing Star Wars movies when they came out). Later ones didn’t have that, and we’ve never seen the last one.
Elemental obviously outperformed expectations but was no Toy Story. Wish is not doing well and looks unlikely to recover.
We’re long gone from the era of every single Disney (or Pixar) animated film being an absolute instant classic and powerhouse.
(Part of this may be the huge number of live action remakes - even if financially successful they seem entirely forgettable).
There have also been many, many original movies released in that time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Pictures...
The vast majority of recent Disney content is original.
You're thinking of Mulan, not The Little Mermaid.
Edit:
Apparently the pavillion was only partially funded by the Norwegian government. Your comment made me curious.
https://www.disneyfoodblog.com/2021/08/13/who-actually-owns-...
I wonder if anyone has worked out the actual dollar effect it is has had on Norwegian tourism.
The second part is the problem - if Pixar releases a movie that is good, more than recoups costs, and otherwise is a fine addition to Dreamworks lineup, it could still be considered a complete flop by most everyone.
E.g., "The Good Dinosaur" which (apparently) eventually made enough that it was "worthwhile" - didn't break any records and didn't really make money, so it's a flop (Onward even more so).
It's complicated even more by a movie being able to be a flop, cult classic, and widely loved at the same time.
That said, licensing to other streaming services often does work. You get revenue for the cost of a contract vs having the infrastructure costs and nebulous ROI. You get the added benefit of direct attribution because you can tell "we licensed [movie X] for $X for Y years".
