Is Going Woke Killing Disney... we ran the maths

To clarify, the box office data is the profit/loss already. I don't think I made that sufficiently clear in the video, but it does say it on the y-axis and some movies are shown to lose money, so hopefully it's reasonably obvious - Jack

I think bad writing and poor use of legacy material is what's hurting disney.

Disney makes bad movies, then uses wokeness to deflect criticism. Disney's performative progressivism is as offensive as its disregard for entertainment quality.

I think there's something this misses… It's not discussion of these themes which makes a movie annoyingly "woke". It's the approach and the tone. A great writer might weave political ideas into their story with nuance and subtlety. But there has been a trend whereby good storytelling is sacrificed to prioritize political point-scoring. For instance by lecturing the audience in a heavy-handed and condescending manner. And dismissing any criticism as bigotry.

A couple of things that could be improved in your statistical analysis: 1. Include the cost of marketing each movie in their profitability rankings, as this figure is not included in the "budget" per se. I lot more of them would fall below that zero profit line if you included this, and not all marketing efforts are created equal. 2. Measure profit margin, not profit. Without this, you do not control for the relative size of each movie. You want to measure profitability , not overall profit. I was very happy when you sliced the RT reviews between critics and audiences btw. That is exactly what I was mentally begging for. I would have added an interesting dimension to your analysis if you had got some more data about your respondents too, so you could slice the data in other ways.

Disney is just making bad movies and remakes. It's Lazy.

Going Lazy kills Disney. A significant part of their content consists of remakes, sequels and spinoffs. The series "Arcane" on Netflix (to name a counter example) was a success in terms of views & reviews. It had a diverse cast with strong female leads, LGBT romance, etc. It did well, because it featured a compelling story, difficult choices, ambiguous moralities, and character growth through trauma and struggle. Disney right now just slaps the "You are perfect the way you are" and "you can do anything if you believe in yourself" tropes on their IPs and calls it a day. Most people don't hate diversity, they hate the garbage plot that so often comes with it.

It's not just about box office profit/loss TLDR, it's about how well a movie over or under-performed based on expectation. One movie that makes $50 million dollars might be seen as a success. Another that makes $100 million might be seen as a failure.

Let's be honest, Disney going "woke" is mainly a smokescreen to hide their lack of new ideas. They've been through a long period of sequels, reboots, and remakes, with very little in the way of actual new things.

There is also I think problem of, let’s call it „poor woke writing”, when companies try to bring more progresive audience to theatre sits by including in movies themes they are interested in, but doing it so shallow and poorly it ends up loosing audience on both sides of political spectrum. And Disney seem to master art od it in last few years…

Bad writing, poor marketing and treading on people's fond memories of their movies in remakes are what is really hurting them. It is also possible that the market is getting more and more saturated with movies.

We have gotten a FULL DECADE worth of movie FLOPS. If that doesn't send them a clear enough message then they are beyond redemption.

I think it's worth noting that just because the most woke and least woke movies made similar amounts of money, that doesn't mean the perceived wokeness didn't have a large affect. Consider: When comparing movies like Lightyear and Cocaine Bear, by all estimates Lightyear should have multiple times the amount of money Cocaine Bear did. If they made similar amounts of money, that's a BIG loss for Lightyear and a big win for Cocaine Bear. The same is true for many other comparisons like The Little Mermaid vs Puss n Boots 2.

No calculation of film success is going to be accurate without analyzing the marketing budget and counting it against box office.

For clarity though, "Go Woke Go Broke" is not just to do with a film or series 'going woke', but more that a studio would emphasise on this point before trying to actually make a good story or likable character. People want to see good story and characters that are relatable and fallible, it is why characters that follow "the hero's journey" are some of the most loved because it follows the formulaic fall and rise of what makes a film hero great. To top this off, yes the point of Disney rehashing their IPs into live action is now both stale and uninspired. It worked for the first few movies because people were not expecting it, so it had that 'wow' factor... now it is just showing its true a colours: Disney trying to cash-cow older movies to milk whatever is left of them (and to justify reselling old merch with high cash values)

It's not "So called" race swapping. When you swap races it is race swapping.

Since the theaters take about a 50% cut, the little mermaid lost money, and that's before you factor in advertising.

The problem is ESG focus is given as an excuse for bad writing or at least mediocre content. Don’t have a good idea woke up the characters then blame fans for not liking your bad script or character development. They just need to make good products

No, being boring did

What you are missing is that the bad story telling is happening because disney is carelessly dumping all these woke topics into their movies for what they think is an easy win while simultaneously wrecking the original story.