After Wish's underwhelming opening this past weekend, the spotlight is on Disney once again and the rough year this once-incredibly reliable brand has had.
To specify, as Variety pointed out in a recent analysis of this troubling box office streak, Disney looks primed to end 2023 without a single movie crossing the $1 billion mark. To be clear, that $1 billion mark is not an easy one to cross - only two movies, Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, have done it yet this year - but that used to nearly be a given for Disney.
We're not going to count 2020 and 2021, which were wildly abnormal years for the box office amid COVID-19 lockdowns, but going back to pre-pandemic times, Disney had a whopping seven billion-dollar hits in 2019. Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, the live-action Aladdin and The Lion King, Toy Story 4, Frozen 2, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (which didn't cross $1 billion until early 2020, but was released at the end of 2019) all achieved the milestone, leading Disney to break its own record of worldwide annual gross.
At the end of last year, Disney just one billion-dollar movie in Avatar: The Way of Water, which grossed a whopping $2.3 billion worldwide. But as Variety points out, excluding pandemic years, 2023 will mark the first time since 2014 that Disney will fail to have a movie cross the $1 billion threshold.
Especially painful is the fact that this year marks Disney's 100th anniversary - so perhaps symbolic that it should find itself as a crossroads a century in.
Wishing for a Better 2024
This year has undoubtably been a tough one for Disney at the box office, with CEO Bob Iger even admitting in various earnings calls that the performances of some movies have been "disappointing," acknowledging that they were in a "period of fixing" after a year of flops and layoffs. Among the movies to pull in disappointing returns are Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and The Haunted Mansion.
The Little Mermaid, meanwhile, did decently with $569 million, but it was still quite the dip from other popular live-action remakes. Pixar's Elemental managed to make a comeback after an underwhelming opening to gross $495 million worldwide, and Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was a certified success with $845 million, but neither of those were enough to push Disney into the billion-dollar zone.
The Marvels, meanwhile, had the MCU's worst opening earlier this month with $47 million, no doubt impacted by the lack of a press tour with the then-ongoing actors' strike. Disney's latest release, Wish, struggled against middling reviews to pull in just $31.7 million over the Thanksgiving holiday.
However, as analysts point out in Variety's report, it's not just Disney as Hollywood at large adjusts to trends established amid the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the quicker moves to streaming. Disney in particular has invested a ton in streaming service Disney+, keeping a steady flow of Marvel and Star Wars series coming out for better or worse.
“Audiences became comfortable, and the value of the big screen dropped," David A. Gross, who runs the movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research, pointed out. "By the time Wall Street pulled the plug, the theatrical experience was damaged."
And, as noted, only two movies have crossed $1 billion in 2023, with Oppenheimer close to the milestone at $950 million. Still, it's not a good sign for Disney, which was once seemingly unstoppable at the box office.
If the problem is frequency of content (as Iger once recently hinted at in regards to Marvel in particular), next year might partially remedy that problem, if unintentionally. After the writers' and actors' strikes were both resolved, Disney announced a handful of major delays, leaving Deadpool 3 as the only MCU movie coming out next year.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
