Disney Lost $1 Billion In 2023 Just at the Box Office

Let's start with the article from That Park Place. Box Office Analyst Claims The Walt Disney Company Has Lost Over $1 Billion In Just 2023

Disney is also losing money on streaming, but I don't know how much. It was 100s of millions of dollars between the last quarter of calendar year 2022, through the 3rd quarter of 2023. (That is Disney's fiscal calendar year.)

In a recent video upload discussing this past weekend’s box office hauls for various films including Wonka, Godzilla Minus One, and The Boy and the Heron, OMB Reviews asserted, “Right now, I’m saying Disney has lost over a billion dollars this year in just their theatrical releases.”

He went on to assert that Disney’s losses are “close to $1.5 billion … just in the last year 2023 and just based off of theatrical with the numbers we currently have available.”

It is a long article, but then it is based on a long video from OMB Reviews, a YouTube channel that covers box office, actuals and projections.

It is somewhat difficult to add up the cost of movies, because studios in general, and Disney in particular, does NOT like to report those numbers. However they do like to take advantage of the film production tax credits in the United Kingdom, and to get those credits they do have to publicly report the budgets numbers. Not the marketing budgets, but the production budgets. But those numbers for a lot of the movies, particularly the most recent releases, have not yet been published in the UK.

That said, Odin, the guy who runs OMB Reviews, has done a credible job of figuring out what the losses likely are.

If you give Disney the biggest benefit of the doubt, you get losses in the $1 billion range.

“So again, if that is going to be the metric that you want to use and the metric that maybe you have an issue with me on, guess what? We’re talking now of losses between $850 million to $1.2 billion,” he shared.

If you make a series of assumptions that take into account what the actual production budgets of these movies are - when we get the numbers next year - you get a slightly different range.

“When you take this into account, you go all the way from $1.2 billion in losses to $1.4 billion,” he detailed. “And again, this is using the metric here of 55% domestic cut, 40% international cut, and a 25% China cut.

There are other assumptions you can make, which push the losses all the way to $1.8 billion.

The OMB Reviews video is Wonka Starts Fine as Disney Loses Over $1 Billion for the Year. It is a 34 minute video.

The section of the video that details with Disney starts at about 26 minutes in. In case you don't want to watch the entire 34 minutes.