The Marvels , you know that new superhero movie

[Psyren]

Avatar 2 raked in a giant mound of money. I didn't care for it, but apparently plenty of people did.

You know that was a Disney movie right?

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.

I never said superhero movies were dead. And there's definitely some bias going on here. AtSV's 700 million is being presented as a success, while DS2's 955 million and GotG3's 850 million somehow mean Disney is hanging on by a fingernail.

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.

That's why publicly-traded companies have these things called external auditors. Having been one, I should know.

[Lemmy]

Disney+ lost almost 400 million dollars in the last trimester alone, as per the Disney shareholder meeting a couple weeks ago. And Iger himself said the plan is to cut costs by 2 billion dollars.

I sincerely doubt anything Marvel has put out in the last 5 years will make D+ any more profitable.

Oh, and Disney still has to pay *at least* 20 billion dollars to her main rival in January, all for the sake of acquiring Hulu, which they are already the majority owner anyway.

Will Disney go bankrupt? Probably not... But that doesn't mean they are doing well. Just like a person can get into serious financial difficulties (and maybe never recover) without becoming completely destitute.

I never said superhero movies were dead. And there's definitely some bias going on here. AtSV's 700 million is being presented as a success, while DS2's 955 million and GotG3's 850 million somehow mean Disney is hanging on by a fingernail.

AtSV had a much smaller budget: 100 million. That means anything over 300~400 million is profit.

Meanwhile, DS cost 300 million and GotG3 cost 250 million. Both were middling successes at best.

Still... Disney isn't "hanging on by a fingernail", but they are in VERY serious financial woes right now. Last year they lost 300 million just on their cruise lines, IIRC!

[Batcathat]

On the other hand you can give everybody access to everything you have for $15 a month and have no idea how much of your revenue is coming from that hot new thing you just released, your back catalogue, or people forgetting that the free trial expired back in August, while you have to pay for servers and bandwidth and tech support and all that nonsense.

While there are obviously drawbacks to releasing things on a streaming service, I doubt a lack of data is one of them. With a theatrical release, you basically just get "movie X sold Y amount of tickets", while I imagine every streaming service collects a truly ridiculous amount of data about their customers and what they watch.

[Psyren]

AtSV had a much smaller budget: 100 million. That means anything over 300~400 million is profit.

Meanwhile, DS cost 300 million and GotG3 cost 250 million. Both were middling successes at best.

So costing 200 million more offset by 250 million more in revenue is bad... I see.

Still... Disney isn't "hanging on by a fingernail", but they are in VERY serious financial woes right now. Last year they lost 300 million just on their cruise lines, IIRC!

They're still turning a profit overall, and have positive free cash flow. In addition, they're projecting streaming to reach profitability by Q4 2024, which they're on track for (they're down from 1.4B loss to 0.4B) so I guess we'll be right back here in a year's time.

[Lemmy]

So costing 200 million more offset by 250 million more in revenue is bad... I see.

Uh... No. Like I mentioned before, a movie has to make 3 to 4 times its production cost in order to break even... So if you increase its budget by 200 million, the movie now has to make 600 to 800 million more.

And sure... Disney is "turning a profit" as a company. That doesn't mean they are doing well (just like people don't have to be destitute to be considered to be in a bad financial situation)... The Hulu acquisition in particular, spells serious trouble for Disney. And that's on top of everything else.

In their last shareholders' meeting, they were celebrating having lost "only" 360 million dollars.

But, hey... If you think they're doing great, why not buy some Disney stocks? It recently hit a 10 years record low, so it's a prime opportunity!

[Ramza00]

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.

100% agree Disney+ lost money last year, but zoom out some (first we both agree how Disney + works now is a money loser.)

• 2011 Netflix Ted Sarandos orders into production House of Cards, Lillyhammer, and the other 1st Gen Netflix shows. Ted Sarandos is now co CEO of Netflix but at the time he had a different job title. House of cards airs in the last month of that winter (February 2013 aka 3 months after this next bullet point)
• 2012 Winter, December, Netflix and Disney made a deal where the Summer 2016 movies can be aired at specific prices in Fall 2016. This allowed Netflix access to Star Wars, Pixar, and so on where the users could stream for free. Note this deal did not take place until 3 years 9 months later for Disney uses deals like this to decide which movies get Greenlit and it takes 2 years sometimes 3 or 4 years, other times even more for the movies and shows to get made. We get numbers ever 3 months but it may take 36 moneys for the money-sacrificed plus spent to start before money-revenue and profit to start recapturing the initial expenses. But hey this is faster than the economy for banks expect turn around in the 6 to 7 years on average.
• 2016 Sept the Netflix deal with Disney starts benefiting customers
• 2017 August Disney announces to investors they are changing strategies and launching Disney Plus at an unspecified time in the future. Even if Netflix numbers are not available to the public both Netflix and Disney would know how often Disney content would be stream even if Disney can not see the streaming deals and numbers other companies have with Netflix.
• 2019 Novemeber Disney plus is launched for consumers, thus it took 27 months for those deals to go through and the custom content launched (and Disney opening their vaults for some products but not for others.)
• 2022 Novemeber Disney replaces their CEO 3 years after Disney plus launched, bringing back former CEO Bob Iger replacing Iger hand picked successor Bob Chapek.

As you can see moves take 3 to 5 years to realize. No one in 2012 could know how that years move and the 2011 move until about 2016. What is profitable and loss in a quarter may not be so in a decade. Remember when the whole Disney and ABC thing happened in 1996 it was a total money loser for a decade, and a money maker after that. ESPN and other things printing money right now with the cable bunny, while things we used to think was important (ABC over the air) is now seen as a money looser and their is discussions on selling it to produce revenue while Disney refocuses on assets it thinks is beneficial long term.

Wall Street is storytelling just as much as writers with their scripts for the Tinseltown.

[sktarq]

You know that was a Disney movie right?

Actually it was not. It was distributed by Disney but not made by them. Cameron makes them all by his lonesome and then Disney markets etc. In a deal they inherited from the FOX purchase....which makes a nice nibble in their $70BB payment for that.
Historically Disney will get about 1/3 the rentals (the money the theatre kicks back to the source...generally this is the studio but in this case it is split)
It is a quibble but is a point toward the idea that Disney is not performing up to level of its compeditors

So costing 200 million more offset by 250 million more in revenue is bad... I see.

Yes. If you have to absorb all of the cost and only get 50% of the revenue (ave). So $200mm addition cost and $125mm additional revenue at the studio level.

Now could a movie that doesn't make any profit at the box office be a profit centre for the studio and a good investment. YES. Firstly as Yogurt says "Merchandising! Merchandising! Merchandising!" which can be very nice. Next there are partnerships...McD's happy meal toys, product placement deals, etc. THese mostly are considered to ameliorate costs rather than generate profit per se but that is distinction without a difference in this case. Also secondary markets. Now for those studios who still license their product out that makes cash in the till. And those customers may be cable channels, streamers, etc. Plus there is home video, physical media, etc. Hell years back the standard was if the movie broke even on release it was a success as the profits came rolling in from these secondary markets. Now if the studio has their own internal secondary market it becomes more difficult since it is basically moving $$ from one pocket to the other (D+ to Marvel for example). And depending on which one you want to feature in your Wall Street narrative (and I agree with the above that they are...in fact I moved on from movies to these as my entertainment) you can say which part of the conglomerate is doing better or worse depending on the internal price paid. However even with all this supercilious nonsense you can still ask certain questions. "Did movie X make a profit from just its box office release" is an answerable question....Now ascribing value and use to the answer is more tricky and almost always lacks any real precision. (which is why I'd dispute "made bank" but would not stand behind any given specific amount of profit per se)

[warty goblin]

While there are obviously drawbacks to releasing things on a streaming service, I doubt a lack of data is one of them. With a theatrical release, you basically just get "movie X sold Y amount of tickets", while I imagine every streaming service collects a truly ridiculous amount of data about their customers and what they watch.

They certainly have plenty of data, but translating that into actual "how much is this worth" is not exactly obvious. You can tease some of it out - if an account signed up right after a show released, watched that show, then canceled it's probably due to that show - but ironically the more a customer watches the actual value of any given thing they watch becomes more and more diluted, while at the same time the customer becomes a greater and greater expense to the company. My fiancé and I watch precisely two things on Max, one of them is pretty much the reason we subscribe, the other we watch because it's there, given only our data you cannot tell which of those is actually responsible for revenue and which is, from Max' perspective, wasted money. If we added another couple "eh, whatever" shows to that rotation, the problem becomes even worse and the cost of servicing our account goes up some more.

I rather suspect this is one major reason why streaming companies are pivoting towards ads, because it makes the value of a show concrete (advertisers paid us this much for space on this show) and turns higher utilization into more money rather than less (we got to show them more ads). That said, as soon as I can't get an ad free version, I'm cancelling.

So costing 200 million more offset by 250 million more in revenue is bad... I see.

It's a lower return on investment, which isn't great.

[Lemmy]

Yes. If you have to absorb all of the cost and only get 50% of the revenue (ave). So $200mm addition cost and $125mm additional revenue at the studio level.

It's even less than that, actually. Closer to. 80~90 million in revenue to the studio... Due to marketing/distribution (which usually has a similar budget to the production itself) and taxes... And that's ignoring the costs that studios like to conceal, such as reshoots.

[Psyren]

It is a quibble but is a point toward the idea that Disney is not performing up to level of its compeditors

Which competitors would those be? WB? Universal? Sony?

But, hey... If you think they're doing great, why not buy some Disney stocks? It recently hit a 10 years record low, so it's a prime opportunity!

I could ask the same of you shorting their stock. Why not?

[Lemmy]

I could ask the same of you shorting their stock. Why not?

I've had a few Disney stocks since 2010... Believe it or not, I'd like them to actually be competent again. I do not enjoy seeing them release flop after flop and turn their most valuable franchises into failures.

But the main point of that comment, which you conveniently did not mention is that Disney stock hit a 10-year low. And there's a reason for that, no matter how much you insist that the company is doing just fine.

[Psyren]

I've had a few Disney stocks since 2010... Believe it or not, I'd like them to actually be competent again. I do not enjoy seeing them release flop after flop and turn their most valuable franchises into failures.

But the main point of that comment, which you conveniently did not mention is that Disney stock hit a 10-year low. And there's a reason for that, no matter how much you insist that the company is doing just fine.

1) In which post did I say "the company is doing just fine?"

2) There's a reason for everything that happens in the stock market, yes. Not all those reasons are rational, or indicative of long-term trends.

[TheSummoner]

Healthy companies don't abruptly fire their CEO. On a Sunday night. At an Elton John concert. And not let him know he's out until the day of.

As someone with absolutely no interest in actually watching this, there is one thing I'm curious about. I've seen some people criticizing the movie by comparing the villain's plan to the plot of Spaceballs. How accurate is this joke?

[Ramza00]

Dyslexia read that Healthy as Health and I was like why are we bringing HMOs into this?

=====

The villain has a name The Summoner, but she is more an “angry ghost” who wants vengeance. Haunting is the plot, along with body swapping. That is the plot, only like 15% of Spaceballs in there and that is more of your friend doing a reach, and the reach is accurate but also not really

[Carl]

Healthy companies don't abruptly fire their CEO. On a Sunday night. At an Elton John concert. And not let him know he's out until the day of.

As someone with absolutely no interest in actually watching this, there is one thing I'm curious about. I've seen some people criticizing the movie by comparing the villain's plan to the plot of Spaceballs. How accurate is this joke?

Never seen spaceballs, (seen meme clips but not the full thing), but quick spoilered summary of her plan:

Spoiler

Show

She gets her hands on one of the bracelet artifacts, those where used as a pair to create the jump point network, aka the teleportation network that allows FTL travel.

She uses them to open unstable, (stable jump points only open when somthing specifically makes them, these stay open Permanantly in one direction), jump points to siphon resources Hala needs after the civil war depleted them.

She steals the atmosphere from the skrull colony, (there's a scene showing the population being able to take their oxygen masks off, somthing they couldn't do since the civil war wreaked their atmosphere. She steal water from the singing and dancing planet, (we don't see the kree side of this, but were told they have a major drought problem, their water is used up), and she goes to earth to steal matter from our sun to reignite hala's dying sun.

Honestly the villain does suffer from being underdeveloped and it really exists as an excuse plot for causing the three leads tog et together and have an adventure, not in a bad way mind, it just isn't heavily fleshed out, the unexpected consequences in the finale it really doesn't matter all that much specifically 'what' the villain is doing, why yes, (because Carol feels responsible for the villain feeling they need to do this), but not what the villain is doing specifically.

[TheSummoner]

Never seen spaceballs, (seen meme clips but not the full thing), but quick spoilered summary of her plan:

Spoiler

Show

She gets her hands on one of the bracelet artifacts, those where used as a pair to create the jump point network, aka the teleportation network that allows FTL travel.

She uses them to open unstable, (stable jump points only open when somthing specifically makes them, these stay open Permanantly in one direction), jump points to siphon resources Hala needs after the civil war depleted them.

She steals the atmosphere from the skrull colony, (there's a scene showing the population being able to take their oxygen masks off, somthing they couldn't do since the civil war wreaked their atmosphere. She steal water from the singing and dancing planet, (we don't see the kree side of this, but were told they have a major drought problem, their water is used up), and she goes to earth to steal matter from our sun to reignite hala's dying sun.

The inciting event in Spaceballs is that the evil Spaceball empire has depleted all of the oxygen on Planet Spaceball due to the incompetent leadership of their leader, President Skroob. Their evil plot is to steal the atmosphere of the neighboring planet, Druidia using a superweapon called Spaceball One.

Spoiler

Show

So at least on a broad level, I can see the parallel.

[Carl]

The inciting event in Spaceballs is that the evil Spaceball empire has depleted all of the oxygen on Planet Spaceball due to the incompetent leadership of their leader, President Skroob. Their evil plot is to steal the atmosphere of the neighboring planet, Druidia using a superweapon called Spaceball One.

Spoiler

Show

So at least on a broad level, I can see the parallel.

Spoiler

Show

Yeah, very broad parallel, with that and the lighthearted tone i can see why someone might compare the two, but from the meme clips i've seen Spaceballs is much more slapstick, whilst The Marvels takes a more serious approach, and the consequences are treated pretty seriously too, people get killed by what's going on and it is 100% not played for laughs, neitheir is the state of the Kree Homeworld Hala. The kree themselves played a role, and arguably a lack of competence played a role in that, but the lack of competence isn't some comedy incompetence element but a direct consequence of Carol destroying the Supreme Intelligence which had handled all that previously.

[ArmyOfOptimists]

It's terribly unkind to use Spaceballs as a comparison, since the inciting incident is the least stupid thing about that movie. A corrupt organization depletes all their resources and seeks to steal more from a more peaceful neighbor is the plot of a lot of stories. For example, that's also the plot of Independence Day. Using the comparison as a cudgel - not that anyone here is doing that - would be like decrying all movies that have a pretender to the throne refuse to give up power because that's the plot of Men in Tights, too.

[Murk]

I've never understood why so many companies jumped on streaming. I mean on the one hand you can make money selling movie tickets and DVDs and know how much any given release actually generates in revenue.

I don't think there was any other option!
DVD's (or any other physical copy of movies/series) were dying. Between 2005 and 2015 DVD and Bluray sales dropped by 90% or so?
Physical copies turned into collectors' items that you bought to show support for a movie you like, not something people practically used to watch movies.

TV viewer numbers were also going down. Even before the explosion in streaming services I didn't know anyone my age or younger who still owned a television (except for console gaming), let alone a DVD player. And I'm not particularly young.

So any media mogul either had to offer their media digitally, or accept that they would not get revenue from their media beyond the initial movie theater showing.
They could start their own streaming services, or do this:

On the third hand you can just license your catalogue out to want to people who will pay you for the rights to stream it

But that had turned Netflix into one of the biggest tech companies on the planet, and would make Disney reliant on another company for their income.
Personally I think "I profit a little, my competitor profits a lot" is a win-win for everyone, but big companies seem to disagree. If Netflix profits significantly more from a deal than Disney, then it's a bad deal to Disney.

So the only option was always to get into streaming.

And that would not necessarily have been a bad idea!
For one, as much as we lament Disney's losses: Netflix has suffered far worse. So even if all else fails, the numerous streaming services have laid low their biggest competitor.
And second, I think an online Disney library (either pay-per-view or subscription based) would have been a fine money maker. Better than nothing, and probably better than licensing through Netflix.

Why Disney decided to go all out and invest billions into making new, Disney+ exclusive content, I don't know. That seems to have been the bad idea, not the streaming service on its own.

[Mechalich]

Why Disney decided to go all out and invest billions into making new, Disney+ exclusive content, I don't know. That seems to have been the bad idea, not the streaming service on its own.

Disney thought that the economics of streaming were more forgiving than they actually are, and, because of the globally low interest rate environment at the time, the risk of such expansions appeared relatively low regardless - a significant portion of Disney's woes, compared to any of its competitors, have to due with high levels of debt exposure (including debt to Comcast as part of the Hulu deal) in an environment where interest rates increased suddenly and rapidly. However Disney was hardly alone in this.

Basically every other streaming service has problems, whether that's AmazonPrime, Paramount+, HBOMax, Hulu, peacock, Youtube TV, or any of the many minor services like Crunchyroll or fubotv that focus on specific niche markets. Only Netflix - which has maybe, kinda mostly solved its problems and has a huge first mover advantage, and Apple TV+ - which is a vanity project that can lose all the money in the world and Tim Cook won't care because he still has more - are any kind of healthy in the streaming space right now. Everyone is suffering, Disney is just a notably large and obvious player.

One of the problems in streaming overall is that streaming balkanization hurts everyone with a service. Because so much content exits now between the proliferation of scripted and reality productions, extensive back catalogs, and the greater globalization of media (ex. Netflix is happy to let Americans stream as many K-dramas as they can possibly watch), a single service will quite easily fill up pretty much anyone's total quotient of screen time. As a result, even if there are things someone might want to watch more on a different service, why pay money for that when there's plenty to watch right now on the service they already have. Unfortunately, media companies seem to be slow to learn this lesson as they keep trying to buy subscriptions with single high profile shows, an extremely expensive strategy that is also very high risk since there's no way to guarantee a good show/movie.

Disney has been particularly victimized by this strategy because the high-profile franchises they control, Marvel and Star Wars, necessarily demand huge upfront outlays, to the point that even a well-received and critically acclaimed production like Andor simply costs more than it can possibly make back. This can be contrasted with something like Paramount+'s Frasier reboot, which is basically a traditional sitcom and can be made for cheap aside from whatever inflated salary they needed to throw at Kelsey Grammar.

[theNater]

Saw it yesterday, had a lot of fun with it. I'd say above average Marvel stuff.

Never seen spaceballs,

I recommend it if you get a chance. Star Wars spoof, lots of visual gags, puns, and other silliness.

[Trixie_One]

*Pleasantville is not exactly a thing everyone has seen.

They should. Brilliant, brilliant film.

I recommend it if you get a chance. Star Wars spoof, lots of visual gags, puns, and other silliness.

I came to Spaceballs late and I found it had suffered terribly due to cultural osmosis. I'd heard all the best jokes already, I'd heard about the cameos, and the merchandising mocking is something I'd seen so many others already take a shot at so it came off as pretty stale. Personally I found Young Frankenstein which I also came to late to have coped with that so much better.

[Carl]

Tried watching it many years ago and could not get into it. The individual skits that turn up in memes are fun and i enjoy them, but somthing about the whole just doesn't work for me. probably my tendency to be too serious, i can only handle so much absurdity in one go before it's off putting.

I'd probably have had big issues with the Water planet scenes if that section had gone on long in The Marvels. But at the length they did it made a good balance between too absurd and good fun.

[Psyren]

I don't think there was any other option!
DVD's (or any other physical copy of movies/series) were dying. Between 2005 and 2015 DVD and Bluray sales dropped by 90% or so?
Physical copies turned into collectors' items that you bought to show support for a movie you like, not something people practically used to watch movies.

TV viewer numbers were also going down. Even before the explosion in streaming services I didn't know anyone my age or younger who still owned a television (except for console gaming), let alone a DVD player. And I'm not particularly young.

So any media mogul either had to offer their media digitally, or accept that they would not get revenue from their media beyond the initial movie theater showing.
They could start their own streaming services, or do this:



But that had turned Netflix into one of the biggest tech companies on the planet, and would make Disney reliant on another company for their income.
Personally I think "I profit a little, my competitor profits a lot" is a win-win for everyone, but big companies seem to disagree. If Netflix profits significantly more from a deal than Disney, then it's a bad deal to Disney.

So the only option was always to get into streaming.

Exactly this. They would have looked like absolute boobs to continue just funneling all their content (not to mention creative control) through a competitor, even if it resulted in positives in the short-term. Netflix is already talking theme park experiences with physical merch of their own.

And yes, the red ink on the ledger has persisted longer than they wanted it to. That doesn't mean D+ was a bad idea. At the end of the day, the House of Mouse has deep pockets, and almost everything is a gamble.

[Tyndmyr]

Yeah, but it's the opposite game.

They want to officially not have made a profit so they can skip out on paying residuals and/or taxes. Return of the Jedi, for instance, has not officially made a profit despite taking over 12x its budget at the box office even before they rereleased it.

They are not constrained to using a single form of accounting for both PR and residuals/taxes. The accounting methodologies used for publicly claiming their films as a success are not the same methods they use when it is time to pay out. It's not quite lying to everyone, but it's not far off from that either.

I've never understood why so many companies jumped on streaming. I mean on the one hand you can make money selling movie tickets and DVDs and know how much any given release actually generates in revenue. On the other hand you can give everybody access to everything you have for $15 a month and have no idea how much of your revenue is coming from that hot new thing you just released, your back catalogue, or people forgetting that the free trial expired back in August, while you have to pay for servers and bandwidth and tech support and all that nonsense. On the third hand you can just license your catalogue out to want to people who will pay you for the rights to stream it, again making it worth an actual dollar amount you can bank on.

Initially, Netflix was really successful because everyone basically did the latter. Get a few bonus bucks from Netflix, zero hassle profit. Then Netflix boomed, and greed set in. Also, desire for control. If you sell media to people, they can watch it forever, resell it when they tire of it, etc. If you just license it to them, you can charge them for forever. There's some precedent for this. Disney has previously limited sales of media(per the ol' Disney Vault) to keep prices high, and deals to avoid media sales for a time after theater release was seen as necessary to drive ticket sales.

So, the idea of being the one in charge, getting all of the streaming profit, etc, is pretty attractive. Less so for the consumer, who now must contemplate a dozen different streaming services instead of just one. However, at this point media sales have largely dried up, so it's hard for companies to backtrack even if they don't particularly like how things turned out.

You know that was a Disney movie right?

Yes. It was a counterargument to the idea that Cinema as a whole was dying. It wasn't a claim that Disney can't produce any good movies. They had had quite a lot of bad ones lately, but historically, they've had many hits. Hell, the next animated movie looks decent. Wish, I think? It's at least a new story rather than a live action re-release.

I never said superhero movies were dead. And there's definitely some bias going on here. AtSV's 700 million is being presented as a success, while DS2's 955 million and GotG3's 850 million somehow mean Disney is hanging on by a fingernail.

Profit is relative to sales and budget. AtSV cost 100 million to make. The others ran a few times that, and accordingly, need to make proportionately more to enjoy a similar success.

So costing 200 million more offset by 250 million more in revenue is bad... I see.

Only about half of the revenue goes to the company because the theater needs money too, and advertising budgets are roughly proportional to production budgets, so yes, extremely bad.

They're still turning a profit overall, and have positive free cash flow. In addition, they're projecting streaming to reach profitability by Q4 2024, which they're on track for (they're down from 1.4B loss to 0.4B) so I guess we'll be right back here in a year's time.

They're not in danger of bankruptcy, because of sheer size, but that isn't good.

Also, that projection of profitability is being walked back by the executives. https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.co...al-impact.aspx

I could ask the same of you shorting their stock. Why not?

Because:
1. Bad investments are not necessarily good shorts. A stock can go sideways, or diminish slower than the premiums eat at you. A company can be a bad buy and a bad short at the same time.
2. Most people do not run margin accounts with the necessary permissions to even trade in shorts.
3. Risk management. I myself do a fair bit of options trading, but I don't touch shorts. Unlimited potential losses is the kind of thing one ought not play with casually.

So, as a counterargument, this does not make a very good mirror to the buying question.

As someone with absolutely no interest in actually watching this, there is one thing I'm curious about. I've seen some people criticizing the movie by comparing the villain's plan to the plot of Spaceballs. How accurate is this joke?

It's presented as somewhat less slapstick than the Spaceballs version, and the mechanism by which it happens is slightly different than the Megamaid, but broad strokes, yeah, it matches up. And this film generally leans a bit into comedy, so it's not even horribly far off in tone, but it's a different sort of comedy, not being an explicit parody of anything. The villain's plan is fairly similar, but the films are not identical.

[Eldan]

Healthy companies don't abruptly fire their CEO. On a Sunday night. At an Elton John concert. And not let him know he's out until the day of.

As someone with absolutely no interest in actually watching this, there is one thing I'm curious about. I've seen some people criticizing the movie by comparing the villain's plan to the plot of Spaceballs. How accurate is this joke?

Quite accurate. THey are opening space portals, through which they are stealing atmosphere, water and energy of other planets to restore their own, which is dying.

[Lemmy]

There's a reason for everything that happens in the stock market, yes. Not all those reasons are rational, or indicative of long-term trends.

And if the sharp decline in stock value were the only sign of Disney's woes, you'd have a point.

[Psyren]

Profit is relative to sales and budget. AtSV cost 100 million to make. The others ran a few times that, and accordingly, need to make proportionately more to enjoy a similar success.

They did make more. We can argue speculative proportions till the cows come home but that much is fact.

Only about half of the revenue goes to the company because the theater needs money too, and advertising budgets are roughly proportional to production budgets, so yes, extremely bad.
...
They're not in danger of bankruptcy, because of sheer size, but that isn't good.

If you say so, fellow forum poster. I'm happy to read an actual analyst projection if you have one (e.g. one like this from yesterday.)

Also, that projection of profitability is being walked back by the executives. https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.co...al-impact.aspx

"Some internal executives feel bearish" isn't exactly a smoking gun.

Because:
1. Bad investments are not necessarily good shorts. A stock can go sideways, or diminish slower than the premiums eat at you. A company can be a bad buy and a bad short at the same time.
2. Most people do not run margin accounts with the necessary permissions to even trade in shorts.
3. Risk management. I myself do a fair bit of options trading, but I don't touch shorts. Unlimited potential losses is the kind of thing one ought not play with casually.

So, as a counterargument, this does not make a very good mirror to the buying question.

It wasn't a counterargument, just an idle question. I'm certainly not planning to announce my portfolio here to score internet points.

[Ramza00]

What are people even arguing? I do not recall anyone believing Disney is going to be Bankrupt, and pretty much everyone agrees Disney is doing several shifts.

So what is being contested here? Is it just vibes?

[Dragonus45]

What are people even arguing? I do not recall anyone believing Disney is going to be Bankrupt, and pretty much everyone agrees Disney is doing several shifts.

So what is being contested here? Is it just vibes?

100% seems to be a vibes thing, mainly though every time I see "is Disney in financial trouble" arguments it feels like it's a lot of proxy arguing about whether the direction Disney has been taking the MCU in general with pushing stories like the first Captain Marvel or She Hulk is actually popular or not.