For most of my life and the company’s life, Disney was regarded as nearly infallible. They had the largest collection of world-renowned intellectual property on the planet. But things have changed.

Growing their empire using their creations, Disney Studios became successful enough to purchase Pixar, Marvel Studios, and National Geographic: studios and companies already thriving on their own, now funded by the largest media conglomerate ever. It seemed they could never fail.

For a while, they didn’t. Year after year, movie after movie, they made millions of dollars, right up until COVID hit. COVID had a very large effect on the movie industry; no one was going out to movie theaters and everyone was watching on streaming apps. It seems as if a large group of people realized, during that time, they didn’t need to go to theaters. Now, it’s not uncommon to see million-dollar losses at the box office from major corporations. Disney has had 10 major blockbuster flops since 2020, totaling up to a loss of around 2.16 billion dollars. Movies like Strange World, Dial of Destiny, Mulan (2020), and Turning Red all lost upwards of 200 million dollars. 

But why are audiences choosing not to watch these movies? One reason is Disney isn’t thinking about their audience enough. In the past, Pixar movies dealt with issues or ideas that almost anyone could relate to. Universal experiences. The pain of being forced to grow up, grieving a loved one, and chasing your passion even when it seems impossible. However, taking a more recent movie, Turning Red, for example, the projects focus on much more specific subject matter. Turning Red’s plot is, by the director’s admission, more of an autobiographical coming-of-age story about an Asian-Canadian girl in the 2000s. While there is absolutely a spot for that kind of story, you just can’t expect audiences to turn out in the same way.

Disney also seems to have too much money for their own good. I don’t have an inside look at Disney’s finances, but the amount of money they’re spending on these projects is almost unjustifiable. Continuing with our example of Turning Red, the film had a budget of 175 million dollars. To give some comparison, Into the Spiderverse, a film released three years earlier, which practically invented a new animation style, and won an Oscar, had a budget of 90 million dollars. Turning Red did not invent its art style. It used the same smooth 3D animation that Pixar has been using for the past couple of decades. So where that extra hundred million dollars or so went, I just don’t know.

But this isn’t just a one-off problem, and it’s not isolated to Pixar. Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny is a live-action movie produced by Disney, which had a budget of nearly 400 million dollars. In contrast, Oppenheimer, a film that has a nuclear bomb going off in a scene and outstanding visual effects, and won 13 Oscars, had a budget of 100 million dollars. Something is going wrong within Disney’s management, and it’s costing them millions.

However, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. It just means audiences are being more careful with their dollar. The movies that have been flopping have either been poorly made or poorly marketed. If Disney is making poor business decisions, they deserve to lose money. I do hope they get their act together, however, as they have many talented employees who deserve success. After all, the more good movies, the better.