Cost $105 million to make. Marketing normally figures at least 1/2 of the production cost. Theater owners get 1/2 the ticket price. There is also the distribution cost.
Go into a Disney Store and the only time you see any Princess and the Frog merchandise is when she's a part of the Disney Princesses.
It was definitely a bust.
Disney can certainly absorb that kind of loss, but they don't like it.
It wasn’t a loss but it didn’t make enough. The articles said it was profitable but not profitable enough. I think Lasseter had a nostalgic attachment to 2D animation due to his previous work. Audiences except for a few weren’t coming to see the movie for the art method. And as you say the thing cost a lot to make. That and AFAIK 2D Disney animators were mostly old guys with no one coming up the ranks to replace them sealed the fate of the medium.
“It was the movie that killed Disney traditional animation.”
Eh, that’s not quite true. Princess & the Frog did deal damage towards Disney traditional animation, but it didn’t really kill that medium. That “honor” goes to the 2010 Winnie the Pooh movie, the actual last Disney traditional animated feature film to ever be released. Though in Winnie the Pooh’s defense, the only reason it did so poorly was because it was stupidly released the exact same week as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2’s first week (which would never have ended well regardless of whether it was CGI or traditionally animated). Also, to be fair, P&TF also ended up released around the time Avatar was released and that movie being a box office hit (allegedly regarding that last bit, anyway).