It’s…let me check…yes, it’s July, the seventh month of the year, with five left to go. It’s at this point, a little over halfway through 2019, that Variety reports that noted entertainment conglomerate Disney has made $7.67 billion worldwide, meaning it’s already made more money in a single year than any studio before it, and this is before Disney movies like Frozen 2, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker hit theaters.
Deep breath.
As Variety points out, since Disney absorbed Fox’s film assets earlier this year, it now controls a whopping 40% of the domestic marketplace, with its closest competitors — Warner Bros. and Universal — holding about 13% each.
Basically I have two options here — I can rail about monopoly and anticompetitive behavior and the danger of popular culture being boiled down and homogenized into a gelatinous blob, or I can accept our new entertainment overlords and eagerly lap up anything they put in front of me. Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home were good, right? Who cares if live-action Simba is stuck in the uncanny valley? Live-action The Great Mouse Detective or bust!
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Seriously, the notion of one company having so much control of the market does unsettle me, but then again, I can’t say that Disney hasn’t been putting out good stuff…mostly. I’m not a big fan of some of Disney’s uninspired attempts to remake its classic animation catalog, but the Will Smith Aladdin just crossed the $1 billion mark at the box office, so what do I know?
What do you all think? Is Disney only reaping the bountiful harvest it planted, or is this an Evil Empire situation?
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h/t The A.V. Club