Disney Lost Over $300 Million On Lightyear And Strange World
Disney lost hundreds of millions of dollars with Lightyear and Strange World, which were two of the biggest box office bombs of 2022.
Back in the day, Disney had the Midas touch. Every story it touched turned to box office gold, and it retained this gift for decades. Recently, though, something has changed. Deadline just released a list of five of the biggest box office bombs of 2022, and two of those five spots belonged to Disney’s Strange World and Lightyear.
Part of the reason why both these movies tanked is that the Covid-19 pandemic got people too comfortable with the idea of watching movies at home on their couches instead of schlepping their potentially disruptive kids to the theater. But there were also faults with the movies themselves, and with the way Disney chose to tell these stories.
Toy Story is one of Disney’s most beloved franchises, which is why they keep continuing to make increasingly terrible sequels and associated films even though the third film was a perfect end of the series. Disney execs expected everyone to love Lightyear because they love Buzz from Toy Story, but they made some huge mistakes.
Lightyear is the “real” story of the astronaut that inspired the toy, Buzz Lightyear. This seems a bit unnecessary as it is (remember Buzz’s existential crisis about whether he was just a toy or a real astronaut in the original Toy Story?), but Disney then made it even tougher for audiences to like the film by having Chris Evans provide the voice of Buzz Lightyear the man instead of Tim Allen, who provides the voice of the toy everyone knows and loves.
To make matters worse, audiences went into the theaters expecting to see a light, fun story like Toy Story, but Lightyear is in a completely different genre. It is more of a science fiction story that kids just didn’t connect with, and that those who were already fans of the Toy Story franchise found to be too jarring of a shift in tone.
As a result, the film lost a total of $106 million at the box office, which, when added to the $152.4 million it lost on Strange World, adds up to a more than $300 million loss last year. Not good.
While Strange World didn’t have to worry about meeting expectations of the genre or franchise because it was a brand new story, it did run up against some other major obstacles. Some audiences felt that Disney was trying to stuff the film full of diverse characters just to boast that they had a diverse cast of characters, which turned off many people (even those who aren’t racist or anti-LGBTQ), and others say that, even if you can get past that, the movie just makes no sense.
Critics said that the plot was “clunky” and hard to follow, and that the animation was outdated. Yet Disney, while seemingly aware that they had a clunker on their hands, still gave the film the full “big release” treatment with tons of advertising and a run in theaters… but after just six weeks, the movie was underperforming so badly that they pulled it from brick-and-mortar theaters and released it on Disney+ instead.
Disney has been one of the biggest names in animated films for over half a century, but with flops like these becoming more and more common, it looks like the studio needs to rethink its strategy and think more carefully about the films they are releasing.
