The Marvels , you know that new superhero movie

[Tyndmyr]

3/5 made bank. We're not at doomsday yet.

I don't think Marvel is in as dire straits as some do; the real litmus will be the performance of things like Deadpool and X-Men, provided there isn't another strike muddying the waters before those.

Hollywood likes to play games with the numbers. They want to show success to the public, of course. This means some of these numbers are...dodgy.

Thor: Love and Thunder supposedly records 160m from streaming, for instance....because Disney paid itself for the ability to stream it on Disney+. Now, Disney+ is operating at a deep loss, so it is quite possible that Disney is still losing money on the affair. The streaming "gain" is certainly larger than the profit margin for the movie as a whole. In any objective sense, it's likely a loss.

Quantumania's a dead loss. It fell about $180 mil short of its projected breakeven point.

Black Panther 2 was generally reported as a profit, but you've got $170 million of padding for streaming. This again substantially exceeds the amount listed as profit, so it's possible that Disney actually had a loss on it. You've also got about a quarter billion dollars less revenue than from BP 1, so the trendline here is deeply concerning.

GotG 3 and Multiverse did fine at the box office. However, costs to make these films are rising. Multiverse ran about $350 mil to make, so it *had* to sell a fortune to make a profit. For comparison, the original Iron Man had a $140 mil budget. This means that the actual profits are getting thinner even as the amount risked grows higher.

Did those five films make a net profit in total? Perhaps. But not a great deal of it, certainly, and the net result may be an overall loss. The answers to that lie deep in Disney's accounting, and certainly they have a motive to make themselves appear successful.

In addition, the Marvels is projected to be a bad flop. This guarantees a net loss for the last six films.

And even if they underperform, the issue seems to be the entire superhero genre if not the cinema industry in general.

Cinema in general isn't doin' bad. Avatar 2 raked in a giant mound of money. I didn't care for it, but apparently plenty of people did. Mario and Barbie were both standalone films with a touch of nostalgia, but no giant cinematic universe to lean on, and they both broke a billion dollars.

There's an appetite there for good films. They don't even have to be particularly novel. Mario wasn't anything groundbreaking, but it was executed well enough, and people wanted a good family film. Result: Piles of cash. It cost them $100mil to make, and brought in over $1.3 billion dollars. That's way better than any recent MCU film.

The Superhero genre doesn't seem to be dead. Across the Spiderverse did fine, getting almost $700 million from a budget of $100 mil, several hundred million up from the prior entry.

It does not really matter for we will have not access to the real numbers

but Disney is not structured like other companies like Sony or Universal, they can make more money in other domains like Merch and Theme Parks

They're a publicly traded company, so yeah, we have some pretty good numbers. Disney+ lost 4 billion last year, so streaming is not really the holy grail for making these properties profitable, and a lot of the "earnings" pumped into these films from this source are essentially imaginary to make the films appear better.

Theme park attendance is also rough. It had a bump in the post-covid times, but attendance is dropping now, and Disney projects a continuation of this trend. They lost $120 million overall in 2022, so if theme parks are suffering, that's probably not going to be the thing that saves their other failing venture.