Disney is one of the most iconic brands across the globe.
But Disney is now facing a backlash it no longer wants to endure.
And now Disney waved the white flag of surrender in this fight over going woke.
Disney plunged headfirst into the culture war when previous CEO Bob Chapek announced the company would like to defeat legislation in Florida banning teachers from sexualizing young children with inappropriate lesson plans about gender identity.
This sparked a major fight with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who signed legislation stripping Disney of its special tax and governing privileges in the Reedy Creek Improvement District.
The ferocious pushback against Disney trying to bully a red state into accepting the left’s woke cultural values foretold the coming protests against Target and Bud Light for marketing transgenderism to young people.
One year later CEO Bob Iger – who steered the ship at Disney prior to Chapek taking his place – announced on an investor call that Disney was done with the culture war.
“Our primary mission needs to be to entertain … and to have a positive impact on the world,” Iger declared. “I’m very serious about that. It should not be agenda-driven.”
Like Target and Bud Light, Disney learned the hard way that going woke means going broke.
Disney plowed tens of billions of dollars into its Disney+ streaming service only to see it lose hundreds of millions of dollars as the platform failed to meet subscriber goals.
“Disney’s streaming operation lost $512 million in the most-recent quarter, the company said, bringing total streaming losses since 2019, when Disney+ was introduced, to more than $11 billion. Disney+ lost roughly 11.7 million subscribers worldwide in the three months that ended July 1, for a new total of 146.1 million,” The New York Times reported.
Disney’s film division, which owns juggernaut intellectual property like Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar, also found out that woke movies that pushed left-wing social agendas flop at the box office.
YouTube financial analyst Valliant Renegade estimates Disney lost nearly one billion dollars on movies that came out between the summer of 2022 and 2023.
The Daily Wire reported that in a recent video uploaded to his channel, Valliant Renegade ”measured the performances of ‘Lightyear,’ ‘Thor: Love and Thunder,’ ‘Strange World,’ ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,’ ‘Antman and The Wasp: Quantumania,’ ‘Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3,’ ‘The Little Mermaid,’ and ‘Elemental.’ The last two films are still playing in theaters.”
These flops lost money hand over fist as audiences rejected content designed to proselytize woke ideology as opposed to entertain.
“Using stipulated budgets from places like ‘The Numbers’ and leaving out the costs associated with production overruns and reshoots, he noted that the production budgets of the eight films amounted to $1,735,000,000, while global prints and ads came to an additional $1,015,000,000,” The Daily Wire added.
“Thus, he estimated that the total costs amounted to $2,750, 000,000, acknowledging that he was probably ‘lowballing this in a few cases, which is favoring Disney,’” The Daily Wire report continued.
“He estimated that for the eight films, Disney’s total returns amounted to $1.861 billion, which would mean that for the eight films, they suffered a loss of $890 million,” The Daily Wire also reported.
With red ink running down the balance sheets, Iger had no choice but to at least pay lip service to the idea that Disney is tapping out in the culture war.
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