> ...but disney+ is a money machine and the can easily double the price.

The very same Disney Plus that lost 2.4M subscribers in Q1[0]?

That doesn't seem like "You could easily double the price" sort of performance. They still have plenty of subscribers, but they're not going "up and to the right" on the subscriber graph anymore.

It's hard to make the case that Disney is doing anything but "dropping flops on a public that doesn't want to see them."

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/08/disney-q1-2023-earnings/

If you dig into those numbers, they lost 3.8 million subscribers in India due to losing streaming rights for cricket matches.

I don't think that's a reasonable lens to be looking at how Disney's cartoon movies are doing.

I do think it might be worthwhile if you wanted to decide if Disney should have decided to keep the streaming rights, and whether the economics of that decision make sense.

"Disney’s Direct-to-Consumer revenue for the quarter rose 13%, to $5.3 billion, while its operating loss increased 78% to $1.05 billion"

...

"due to higher content and technology costs at Disney+ (with higher average costs per hour of programming, which included an increased mix of originals) as well as higher content costs and lower ad revenue at Hulu"

Not exactly the money machine I was envisioning!

Nope.

For comparison, a recent movie that performed well at the box office was Top Gun Maverick.

$1500M box office on a $170M budget - that involved flying and filming an awful lot of hours in "rather expensive to run jets."

That’s a movie that performed in the top 5 all time domestically, so probably better not to use it as a target.

I think the GP's point is to compare the costs. At least, that the most interesting point there.

Well, for it to be a replacement for the theaters, it would have to be quite expensive and wouldn't ever become mainstream.

If they are going for a mainstream service, Netflix style, it won't be able to replace theaters.

Disney seems to want both, so they targeted their service at neither.

Crucially, Turning Red was _not_ released in theatres in most countries due to COVID-19. It may or may not have been a money loser, but there's very little reason to believe executives think it's anything about the movie that made it that way.

Yes, Turning Red's low revenue was primarily a cause of the film not being in theatres, rather than the quality of its story.

I personally liked the story of Turning Red very much (though I'm biased to like it because it's set in Toronto), but more objectively, the film is a step above Strange World and Lightyear in terms of ratings.

Turning Red's ratings: 95% on the Tomatometer of Rotten Tomatoes (RT), 7.0/10 on IMDb, and 3.7/5 on Letterboxd

Lightyear's ratings: 74% on RT, 6.1/10 on IMDb, 3.0/5 on Letterboxd

Strange World's ratings: 72% on RT, 5.6/10 on IMDb, 3.0/5 on Letterboxd

I'm neither Canadian nor an immigrant, but I absolutely loved Turning Red. I felt it was 10x better than Encanto. But the latter has catchy meme-worthy tunes, so here we are.

According to Wikipedia it did pretty well: ...the most-ever for a Disney+ original title... the most watched program across all streaming services in the U.S. ... continued to hold the top position ... the second most-watched movie on U.S. streaming services in 2022.

I don't know how it could've cost $175MM, but it's a quality movie and deserves kudos for giving us some diversity in protagonists.