Monday Box Office Roundup 6/5/23
Well, the Monday morning box office is almost good news for The Little Mermaid. The foreign box office came back from the dead on the second weekend. The FBO didn’t decrease, and it is now sitting at $140 million. Domestic on the other hand dropped significantly at 60%, leaving a weekend total of $186 million. Grand Total so far: $326 million.
Forget what I just said, this is bad news for Disney.
The Lion King (2019) did much better than that on its first weekend. The Hollywood trade media is giving up even trying to make this sound like it’s any kind of success and is now holding out hope for Little Mermaid to at least break even. It won’t. Disney is willing to admit to a budget of $250 million. Assuming that figure has some bearing in reality, (the budget at this point is probably north of that given that resources were clearly cannibalized from Pixar’s Elemental), The Little Mermaid will have to clear $800 million and it won’t.
Into the Spiderverse 2 is probably responsible for Aerial’s domestic drop off. The total for Sony’s new animated sequel is sitting at $203 million foreign and domestic. Meaning they’ve cleared their $100 million budget and will have no trouble covering their marketing costs. My guess is that it will leg out somewhere between $400 – $500 million, this is a very handsome return on investment for Sony. And unlike Disney, Sony no longer has a streaming service to cannibalize its post theatrical income. Spiderverse 2 still has a life ahead of it on PVOD, Netflix, and hard media. The Little Mermaid on the other hand will be reporting the Disney+ content gulag in less than sixty days.
Mario has probably tapped out at $1.3 billion, it beat Frozen’s record but not quite Frozen II’s. Not that that really matters much because it also only cost $100 million to make, so Sony’s been laughing for a while now. It’s Disney ludicrous budgets that are killing the studio. There was no reason that The Little Mermaid live action needed to cost more than $150 million tops.
Iger has got to make some big moves soon. So, what he has apparently decided to do is piss off James Cameron. Disney has allegedly shredded the Alita scripts and is now rumored to be fighting Cameron on who is to be the director. After the Book of Boba Fett disaster, no one at Disney wants to hear the name Rodriguez. This is shocking to me because for once I have to agree with Disney, Rodriquez is inconsistent, he’s too hit or miss for a big budget movie. Although, what Disney will want for the director is a complete unknown they can strong arm into delivering a paint-by-numbers scrap booked POS like the rest of their catalog.
Although, Iger did make a big splash at Apple today.
You know those Disney+ shows you weren’t watching on Disney+?
How would you like to not be watching them on Apple’s new virtual reality headset? Because you are going to have that option next year! Disney appears to have fully committed to something that has completely and obviously failed for Meta. Apple is likely to survive VisionPro but I have real doubts about how well Iger is going to do with this Chapek era leftover project.
Okay, I’m done here.
