By Victor Ledbetter Jr.

Apparently, Disney movies aren’t really hitting like they used to. So I looked up all the major movies that have been published by Disney in 2023, their budgets, and their box office returns. 

After seeing all this, I was thinking, doesn’t Disney have multiple billion dollar hits every year? Barring 2020-2021 of course, there was always buzz around Disney movies, whether it was Pixar or Marvel, now its like fewer people are going out of their way to see a Disney product. So, what happened?

One answer is that the audience is aware that these are blatant cash grabs. If audiences are convinced that there is no soul in the trailer, there is no soul in the movie. Case in point, I went to see The Little Mermaid live action film earlier this year.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was not expecting the remake to be boring compared to its predecessor. The characters weren’t as interesting, the songs did not have the same impact, and worst of all, there was no reason to see it, especially since the 1989 original was so much better. I ended up walking out of the movie after just 30 minutes.

Another key component to Disney’s slump is that no one cares for superhero movies anymore. Other wise known as “superhero fatigue”, this phenomenon has taken effect over the past few years after Avengers: Endgame, where it seemed to wrap up everything surrounding the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

With the exception of Spider-Man: No Way Home, almost every Marvel movie was either good yet forgettable, or just non-essential. To make matters worse, there has been a massive influx of Disney+ shows that made watching anything Marvel a massive chore.

There are of course movies that get people in seats like Spider-Man(as mentioned earlier), Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol.3, and Deadpool 3 which is expected to make a splash next year. Those are franchises that people seem to care about, as they fair better critically and commercially than most of Marvel’s catalog.

To add on top of all of this, The Marvels ended up being the biggest box office performance in MCU history, with critics like Dan Murrell calling the move “an unmitigated disaster”. It performed almost as bad as DC’s “The Flash” which is one of the biggest box office bombs of all time.

One last problem that Disney has is that new releases will be on Disney plus 3 months later, getting rid of the need to see movies in theaters. Fact is that audiences don’t think the movies are interesting or engaging enough to make the effort to purchase a movie ticket. Especially not if it will end up getting thrown on to Disney+ anyway. 

If a company throws a property on a streaming service, it could take a while for a movie to catch on. Encanto for example took three months after its initial release of Thanksgiving 2021 to gain traction. That rarely happens to shows and movies anymore, as Disney cannot just create fodder, throw it on Disney + and call it a day.

To wrap up, I don’t think that Disney is going to go bankrupt any time soon, but if they continue down this path of mediocre movies and TV shows, the credibility will go down the drain.