This is, of course, absolute bullshit. Disney’s made a godawful amount of money off it’s acquisition of Star Wars and continues to make more and more money.
Just the merchandising rights alone may equal that 4 billion dollars. Estimates from their annual reports say that each Force Friday is worth a billion dollars in sales alone.
For fuck’s sake people. Have your issues. Fine. But don’t make it more than it is. But doing so - by insisting that your dislike of the NT is someone, against evidence, reflected in the world as a whole - is to undermine your entire point of view. It makes you LOOK like nonsensical, overly-engaged fans when the actual money for Disney is not in those fans but in the newest generation.
Here’s a real citation for how Disney has done on the acquisition. It’s not some site that actively says in the article that they’re pulling their numbers from other sites so they can’t guarantee how accurate their article is.
That’s from 2018 and states that Disney’s made it’s money back and more in the first six years of ownership of Star Wars.
Remember, it’s more than the movies.
Box Office
Merch
Licensing
Television
Disney+
DVD
Theme Parks
Others as they think of them
All adds up to more money than anyone can imagine. There’s a REASON that Disney could pay $70 million for 20th Century Fox. Because with their major franchises - Princesses, Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars - they can essentially buy The Catholic Church is they wanted.
Good lord. you loved Star Wars because of how much it amazed you when you were a kid. You’re not a kid anymore, and Star Wars is not for you anymore. Get over it.
Also an unsupported position, Omni. Dude, all love. Truly. But this is just silly.
Here’s an article from THR - citing License Global - showing that Disney as a whole did $54B in licensing revenue. Those numbers include 2018 licensing revenue for Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar. Nothing from the other acquisitions.
By contrast, Time Warner did $11B in licensing rights. So Disney did 5 times was their nearest media competitor did.
And recall, that’s just the stuff they licensed. The stuff they produced for themselves would go into a different revenue bucket. Say Star Wars just did 10% of the 54B in 2018 - a doubtful assumption - that would mean that the licensing for a single year would have paid for the acquisition even if we adjusted the acquisition for inflation. Multiply that by seven full years since the acquisition that just on licensing Disney would have pulled in 37.8B in rights money without the other revenue streams.
The simple fact is that the movie’s box office is nearly irrelevant when you’re playing at this level of business. The movie exists as a means to promote a brand and line of products.
Example: The ‘Baby Yoda’ character from The Mandalorian is a dunk shot for licensing. I think we all know that. But Star Wars is bringing in so much dough Favreau could make the case that the plot reveal was more important that the revenue and Disney went for it. Tens of millions? Hundreds of millions? I don’t know but it was a lot to walk away from for Disney. They still did it.
Again, all love. But it’s not for us anymore. We don’t own it. We’re not the ones really consuming the content anymore. It’s our kids and grandchildren who drive it. We can’t say, “It’ll never recover” or “It’ll take decades.” when that’s clearly not happening. You can’t hold onto it or your memories of it. Your complaints…your cries of pain…are heard by no one and effect nothing.
It can’t ever be the same as it was. I was ten when the first movie came out. I’m 53 now. It’s not the same. I feel that in my bones.
But it shouldn’t be. And, in all honesty, is can’t be. The franchise has to grow with the times and change and be different. If it were exactly the same as it was in say, 1983. Six more movies. All about the same at the first trilogy, say. It would be stagnant and dead and likely forgotten or at least fading.
If it’s not for you, that needs to be fine. But that won’t change this juggernaut that it’s become. Those of us who are aging just need to adjust to that fact.
As a moderator, you should be deeply ashamed of the tone of that post.
It seems that you, and whoever wrote the 2018 article you quoted, don’t understand the difference between gross income and profit. That’s accounting 101, day 1.
I realise this isn’t GQ, and obviously you feel highly emotional about this, but it might help if you read the article I cited and considered the actual numbers and facts.
Rather than accepting Disney hype and creative accounting, it might be better to look at an analysis by an independent financial expert.
Amen. I’m really hoping for a whole new take on “Space Stuff” (that’s what Disney’s changing the franchise name to… you heard it here first). And I love the concept of The Next Waititi being handed a big check and the independence to make another compelling universe, filled with characters that we actually care about.
I guarantee you I understand all aspects of business, profit, loss, analysis better than 99% of people out there. I’ve owned, bought, sold and analyzed businesses for twenty five years. I’ve started six, sold three, lost one currently have two and I’m certified as a stockbroker and mergers and acquisitions analyst. I know what I’d talking about.
But sure, I’m just some guy on the Internet. I just provide real citations instead of someone who claims Disney’s merchandising profits aren’t large. That’s fine. You do you.
The problem wasn’t that they did a poor job of tying the three new films together, or that they got the wrong person for the job. The problem was that they didn’t even try. Maybe Johnson or Abrams could have tied them all together competently, but they weren’t asked to, nor given the authority.
As for profits, I don’t doubt that Disney is making a profit off of their acquisition of Star Wars. But I do doubt that they’re making a profit off of the new movies. I see a fair amount of Star Wars merch: The most common seem to be The Many Emotions of Darth Vader, those dorky images of stormtroopers on family vacations, and “Scruffy-looking nerf-herder”. Yoda dispensing various bits of sage wisdom is also not uncommon. Notice anything about those things? None of it is from the new movies. The only new character I’ve seen marketed at all is BB-8, and he’s still probably rarer than R2-D2. I’ve seen no Poe merch, no Finn, no Kylo Ren, maybe one or two Rey at most.
Um… you do understand that there’s a big difference between retail figures and wholesale figures, and that Disney only takes a royalty of about 15% on wholesale prices?
Wired estimated $2bn retail sales for The Force Awakens merchandise -> $1bn wholesale sales -> $150m profit for Disney. Probably a lot less for the other two movies.
While that’s true, that doesn’t mean the new movies don’t increase sales of the old characters. “Star Wars” is a brand, and anything that jacks up brand awareness moves product.
@Jonathan_Chance, are you even reading the links you posted? They don’t assert anything like what you’re implying they do.
The first, as others have noted, is about gross profits, not net. It concedes that point in it’s body. It conveniently downplays the massive production and marketing costs they took on for those movies, in reality at the time of publishing that article Disney maybe made back $2B in net profits on the films, but I would bet the net margin was quite a bit less than 50%. The second is about ALL of Disney’s merchandising profits…Marvel, Frozen, Pixar, etc. And it’s meaningless to say it excludes the stuff they produce themselves, they don’t produce anything themselves. They aren’t making toys. They aren’t making videogames. They aren’t making costumes. They make movies, TV and theme parks, that’s about it.
And you of course conveniently overlooked that I said:
Yes…Disney did not lose money on Star Wars. It would be idiotic to say they have. My point is that the executives who made the deal didn’t buy it to break even. They didn’t buy it to make a 100% return 10 years on. They bought it to be a massive growth channel. Let’s say they’ve netted $8B to date…what reason would anyone have to believe that the year-over-year numbers are going to GO UP at this point?
Since everyone seems to prefer WAGs to actually looking at the numbers, cites, and analysis in the original article I posted, or the 2020 update, I suppose I’d better post the results table:
So Disney is $2bn down on the movies - including the merchandise.
The Mandalorian will have improved that a bit.
If you have cites for more accurate figures I’d be happy to see them.
Your cite closely agrees with my assumptions…but you should be careful about calling it “actual numbers.” Their disclaimer is pretty clear on this point:
Disclaimer alert! We’re relying on various websites as sources for information, and we have no idea what is credible and what is not, so please treat this as a bit of fun rather than an authoritative analysis.
Unfortunately getting reliable data on this is going to be impossible unless you work finance at Disney, and even then EBITDA can be a fickle mistress.
It’s good seeing this all summed up however. Anyone sitting in the big offices at Disney, if they were able to speak in full honestly, could not say that the NT was anything short of disastrous for their investment’s long term health.
Because by telling everyone they’re excising the poorly-received final trilogy, they’re setting up to make and market another “replacement” final trilogy. And by the time the dust settles they’ll have raked in another $4+ billion from the audiences (comprised of 50% fanboys who decided to take a chance, 30% casual viewers who figured it was worthwhile, and 20% not-yet-born viewers who just won’t know any different).
–G!
It’s not that money is the root of all evil.
It’s that the pursuit of money has such a strong predilection for evil.
If that thirst, that hunger, that prey-drive is left unrestrained…
That’s fine. The idea that there’s still an Imperial remnant that’s at war with a reinvigorated Republic is great. The problem isn’t that the war is still going on in the new trilogy, it’s that the OT heroes accomplished literally nothing. Luke wasn’t the guy who re-established the Jedi order, like we thought he’d be. He tried, and it maybe latest ten years, and then all his students died and he went off to be a hermit. Han and Leia’s marriage produced absolutely nothing good. Their one kid grew up to be a monster, and then died. The galaxy would be better off if the central romance of the original trilogy never happened. The Republic that they spent so much blood and tears trying to restore? They turn out to be a bunch of incompetent dickbags who get entirely wiped out by a single sucker punch half way through the first movie in the new trilogy.
The iconic framing device of the first movie - “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” - was intended to give the impression that we were watching a legend. But given the new trilogy, why would anyone remember any of the characters from the first movie?
