We know that Disney’s had a rough couple of years. Their stock is very shaky. Box office flops keep happening, and their streaming service is losing subscribers by the millions. They’re hoping that “Deadpool & Wolverine” will overperform this coming summer, which might very well happen.
Last June, an analysis of the company’s film sector revealed that Disney might have lost as much as $900 million on their 2022-2023 box-office flops, and that was before “The Haunted Mansion” and “Wish” got released.
Now, a new report from Deadline’s Anthony D'Alessandro is laying out the five biggest box-office bombs of 2023. Disney is responsible for four of them. That’s how bad things are at the mouse house:
The Marvels -$237 million
The Flash -$155 million
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny -$143 million
Wish -$131 million
Haunted Mansion -$117 million
“The Marvels” was the first ever MCU movie not to cross the $100 million mark domestically, and it didn’t even come remotely close to attaining that figure, finishing its run with a paltry $83 million.
As part of his damage control campaign, Disney CEO Bob Iger indirectly blamed the pandemic and ‘Marvels’ director Nia DaCosta, the first black female director to ever helm an MCU movie. When interviewed during the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Iger claimed that DaCosta needed extra help to make her movie better, but it never could arrive due to COVID:
The Marvels was shot during COVID … there wasn’t as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives [that are] really looking over what’s being done day after day after day..
Suffice to say, Disney needed a scapegoat for the massive failure and they decided that it was going to be DaCosta. We should also note that DaCosta admitted having had zero creative control on the movie. bluntly stating that “The Marvels” was very much “a Kevin Feige production” and that it was “his movie.”
We’ve read plenty of reasons, in an endless amount of think-pieces, as to why “The Marvels,” and Disney, for that matter, failed so gloriously in 2023. The usual excuses (“superhero fatigue,” “too woke,” “lack of promotion”) were touted as the reasons why, but maybe it’s much more than that. Call it “audience awareness.” Maybe there’s a desire from moviegoers for something different and Disney has just run its course.
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.