Disney has already made more money this year than any studio ever
By Dan Selcke
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