Posted on 05/07/2024 8:53:35 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Now that Disney management has won its proxy battle with activist investor Nelson Peltz, let's take a look at the Big Lie the company told to help keep shareholders on management's side.
Last month, the Mouse House released a detailed, 67-page report for investors "singing the praises of its chief executive Bob Iger in a bid to convince stockholders to side with him in a battle with activist investors," as Forbes' Caroline Reid put it. I included the link because Reid did in her write-up, but the PDF file is no longer there, perhaps flushed down the memory hole.
Reid's article is a bit technical but the upshot is that when calculating the studio's return on investment for franchises like The Avengers and Star Wars, Disney didn't factor in the acquisition costs of buying Marvel and Lucasfilm.
"Calculating ROI on revenue rather than profit ignores the costs so artificially inflates the result," Reid explained. Well, yes. It's really easy to show a profit when you include revenues but conveniently leave out major expenses.
Reid concluded that "Disney hasn't misled investors as the methodology is in the fine print." But the methodology itself is a scam, a way to calculate returns on investment that no reputable firm would ever use. The Avengers movies made boatloads of money (at least until recent years) but Star Wars is probably still in the red — despite what Disney told investors.
This all goes back to a column I wrote right after the new year — Advantage: VodkaPundit™ — arguing, "If Disney has realized an actual profit on its $4.05 billion Lucasfilm investment, I'd be shocked."
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
I’m still trying to get my Spaceballs Flame Thrower.
Yep. I’m not a big SW fan, but I think the value of the franchise will be there for at least another 30 years.
Wrong. The last great Star Wars movie was “The Empire Strikes Back”. It’s been all downhill ever since they gave us Ewoks and another Death Star attack/destruction. And more recently, it’s not downhill, it’s a vertical nose-dive.
You think they would have moved on after their first Death Star disaster ,LOL
I just checked Amazon ... it’s available on blu-ray.
So many great gags in there ... the Wookie-monster is a perfect rip-off of the Cookie-monster, all the way to eating Princess Anne Droid’s buns.
Forgot all about it.
I’ll concede your point: Hardware Wars IS the last great Star Wars movie.
Except that Disney has killed the franchise. New Star Wars is losing money, NOT making any. Every new star Wars project is worse than the last and losses more money.
They stopped all Star Wars movies and made several crappy series for their streaming service. Only one of which, was any good.
Future profit for Star Wars looks bleak....
I’ve enjoyed Star Wars when I was a kid. It’s great escapism cowboy fantasy in space.
All the current offerings are female centric. Not interesting to a 12 year old boy
All are painfully woke. One recent show I watched with my youngest has a boy Jedi another Jedi kept calling “they/them”.
“Put a woman in it and make her gay” is not a winning business plan.
Closet Cases of The Nerd Kind, is great too.
Nah. It’s still a cash cow. Remember the movie theater a small chunk of the change Star Wars makes. Merch merch merch merch. And who’s to really say if the things on the stream are losing money? Just like premium cable subscriptions the revenue picture is vague at best. They make money month after month, even if people don’t watch anything.
The future profit of Star Wars looks just fine. Even the guy’s “back of the envelope” estimation, which he tries to sell as “bad” shows them making $730 million a year on Star Wars. Nothing bleak about that at all.
ROTF! What kind of accounting is that? You just ignore your acquisition costs? Well hell. I can make any financial model look fantastic and generate a stratospheric ROI if I get to just ignore the cost to buy the damn thing to begin with.
We went to the theater last weekend saw the fall guy great movie very little wokeness just fun great escape if Star wars came out with “ Star Wars the return of the orange being to power “
The merch is sitting on the shelves unbought, clogging up the toy stores shelves and costing the toy companies big bucks. The word going around is the toy companies are sitting out or drastically reducing future Star Wars toys and merc.
The demand is not there anymore. You can watch many stories on this on youtube.
No it isn’t. And those youtube stories are BS. Disney is still pulling $5 a ear in merch, with a good chunk of that Star Wars.
Star Wars toys are not selling. Go into any toy story and they are full of old Star Wars toys that are not moving..
Seen it myself. Sure they are still selling some toys and merch, but not like they used too. Baby Yoda was a fluke and is probably 1/3 or more of all the Star Wars sales the past 2 years.
If you don’t work there you don’t know how often they’re cycling merch. Meanwhile we know the toy industry is having a rough patch, sales are down across the board. BUT the area where sales are down the least is TIE-INs. Star Wars merch, Marvel merch, DC merch. This stuff is still selling well.
Also keep in mind the merch industry (especially the Star Wars part) isn’t just toys. Pajamas, shower curtains, books, comics (published by Marvel so Disney owns both sides of that), chopsticks (lightsaber chopsticks, I might need those), cutting boards, tumblers. The world of Star Wars merch is HUGE. They could ditch the toys entirely and still make a couple hundred million a year on Star Wars merch. I was out in nerd land on Star Wars day Saturday, I probably saw close to $1000 worth of Disney money on people, and that was t-shirts and socks and hats.
Disney is making money hand over fist on Star Wars, anybody telling you otherwise is lying. Don’t believe them.
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