Disney sowing: ‘Haha, fuck yeah!!! Yes!!’ Disney reaping: ‘Well this fucking sucks, what the fuck’
Lightyear is shaping up to be a flop.
Not a disastrous one; Disney will still make their budget back. But Lightyear is not shooting into the stratosphere in the way studio execs hoped.
Perhaps ‘disappointment’ is a better term than ‘flop’, although with such huge numbers at play (Lightyear is thought to have a budget of $200m), what’s the difference anyway?
It is not going to be a gargantuan hit in the vein of Toy Story’s 1 through 4, the last of which grossed just more than $1bn worldwide.
Lightyear, a film based on the origins of the Buzz Lightyear toy (but voiced by Chris Evans and not Tim Allen) failed to knock Jurassic World: Dominion off the top spot on its opening weekend in the United States, an inauspicious beginning for a $200m animated film from Pixar — who can largely do no wrong at the box office.
Lightyear’s failure to launch is Disney, at long last, reaping what they sow.
It is Pixar’s first film to be given a full cinema release since Onward in March 2020 which dropped just as Covid-19 was spreading worldwide and suffered accordingly.
Soul (winter 2020) was put straight onto Disney+, as was Luca (June 2021) and, in March of this year, Turning Red.
There was increasing disquiet in Pixar at Disney’s decision to eschew a theatrical release schedule, especially for Turning Red as that had been earmarked as the studio’s return to cinema… until Omicron.
At the time of the decision to pull Turning Red one executive was quoted by Insider as saying: “The huge upside for Disney+ in its effort to land more subscribers and keep existing ones.”
Therein lies the rub.
As Netflix are perhaps learning, there’s money to be made in cinemas and money to be lost if your customer base sees no need in dropping a significant fee to watch something immediately.
Disney’s streaming service, which launched less than three years ago, already has 137m worldwide subscribers — less than Netflix’s 222m but still expanding as Netflix faces cutbacks, lay offs and a haemorrhaging share price.
But Disney have gone so all-in with streaming that parents, facing an extreme cost-of-living squeeze, are unlikely to fork out roughly $10 a ticket for a film that will probably drop on Disney+ before the end of the summer.
Unlike Marvel there is no captured market for Toy Story ‘IP’, no clamour to see the latest instalment before getting ‘spoiled’ online.
Lightyear, a hugely unnecessary film produced solely to make money (and retconning a stupid back story into the origin of a child’s toy) will not hold the same demand for parents or kids.
As Forbes writes:
“When you offer acclaimed, high-quality Pixar flicks at home but then offer the one that (while well-reviewed) is generally considered to be inferior and pitched more at adults in theaters, families might just decide to wait until Minions: The Rise of Gru in two weeks or Thor: Love and Thunder in three weeks.”
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