Strange World Is Disney’s Biggest Flop Of The Year
Strange World was Disney's biggest flop of 2022.
It’s a strange world indeed where a Disney cartoon loses money. The corporate monolith is used to making dough hand-over-fist with its animated offerings–preferring to leave the bombing to live-action duds like Tomorrowland. As WDW News Today reports, however, last year’s Strange World flopped so hard that it cost Disney nearly $200 million in lost revenue. That’s enough to make it the biggest loser of 2022.
Strange World, an adventure comedy about a family of explorers, was released to theaters last Thanksgiving to little fanfare. The movie proved to be so unsuccessful that Disney quietly slid it over to Disney+ before Christmas–less than one month after the movie landed in theaters with a quiet thud. Reports are coming out now about just how abysmal the film’s profits really were.
According to reports, Strange World cost Disney over $317 million. If that sounds high, it’s because that figure includes advertising and other incidentals not accounted for by the film’s already large $180 million production budget. Strange World only recouped approximately $120 million of that $317 million–only $35 million of which was earned during the brief time the movie was in theaters. To call the movie a bomb is an insult to explosive devices everywhere.
Why did the movie do so badly? Some would point to Strange World featuring Disney’s first-ever openly gay main character, Ethan Clade, played by Jaboukie Young-White, as the reason the film performed so poorly. For that to be the case, however, people would have had to know the film existed, let alone featured an LGBTQ protagonist.
Despite spending half the film’s budget on advertising, a hefty $90 mil, the buzz for Strange World was practically non-existent. Many people didn’t even know it had been released theatrically and assumed Disney made it specifically for Disney+. And the people that did know the movie was coming out didn’t know much about the movie, thanks to Disney’s lack of focus when promoting the film.
Meanwhile, Strange World didn’t even see a release in China–one of the most lucrative foreign markets for Hollywood productions–due to the country’s firm anti-LGBTQ stance when it comes to media. Between the lack of a cohesive advertising strategy and the reluctance to release the movie in all countries, it almost seems like Disney wanted the movie to fail.
Did Strange World only get greenlit so Disney could prove that a mainstream movie with a gay character wouldn’t make any money? It sounds like an unlikely conspiracy theory until you realize that whether it was intentional or not, Disney now has the ability to tell activists, “No, we totally tried making a more inclusive movie, but it didn’t make any money. It’s not us. The public didn’t want it!” On top of that, Disney now has carte blanche to continue to churn out uninspired live-action remakes of their animated classics.
Again, it might not be intentional, but thanks to Strange World completely sucking at the box office, Disney has the opportunity to justify its lack of originality by pointing to the last original story they tried and how badly it did. At least remakes like The Lion King and the upcoming The Little Mermaid make money.
Ultimately whether the failure of Strange World was some secret act of internal sabotage or just plain bad luck doesn’t matter. What matters is that the movie lost a lot of money for Disney, and the repercussions will most likely be far-reaching. Can’t wait for the eventual live-action Oliver and Co.
