In 2021 DIS was worth $175. It has since fallen to $112. In 2022, Bob Chapek was booted as CE0, and Disney's stock price has steadily risen ever since. Most market analysts blame Chapek's disastrous management of the parks, from which they are still recovering. In other words, you really do know nothing. Edit: In the meantime, Tesla dropped from 418 to 230, only starting to recover again when Elon shut the fuck up. But there are still concerns about Tesla's long-term viability. Go MAGA go broke.
A. Disney has been "woke" for a long time, certainly before 2015. B. There are a bunch of factors that certainly would have affected Disney's stock price more than its post 2015 wokeness, such as taking on debt to buy Fox, whatever's going on with their theme parks, Covid and the global recession it caused, the creation and maintenance of Disney+.... C. The 2015 point you're talking about is before two of the MCU's high points for both critical acclaim and box office in Infinity War and Endgame. The Internet tells me that Disney stock was about $142 in 2019. So there was growth, but then decline. To say that there was no growth in 10 years is either ignorant or a lie. Which is it? D. If we are going to talk about supposedly woke superhero movies, the 2015 point you are using is prior to two of its wokest and most profitable superhero movies in Blackety-black-black Panther and CaptainNotMs. Marvel (each earning about a billion in worldwide box office if I'm not mistaken) So much for woke going broke. E. To pretend its supposed wokeness caused an issue in stock price is laughable. At best, one might be able to argue that the supposed wokeness caused a drop in the box office, which then caused stock to go down. The trouble is that the box office doesn't really support that. There were clearly woke movies that were financial successes from Marvel and other companies, and there were woke movies that were not. There were non-woke movies during this period that were financial successes, and there were non-woke movies that were not. Let's see if you can point to anything from an actual expert to suggest that the dismal performance of The Marvels or the mediocre performance of The Eternals or Cap 4 or Thunderbolts actually hurt Disney's stock price. F. As a non-Disney stockholder, I don't really care about any of this except to point out how wrong you are.
P.S. Volpone, I think you got your Buckaroo Banzai sig quote wrong. I'll admit that it's possible that elsewhere in the movie he might have said it differently, especially since I probably haven't watched it this millennium. A good reminder to us all to not be mean.
At this point it doesn't look like Thunderbirds is going to catch Captain America. So it will likely wind up losing even more money for Disney.
I finally saw Captain America Brave New World and I'm struggling to understand the purpose of the movie. Why this story? It's not really interesting. Ross incarcerates himself at the end? Nu-Captain America seems as invincible as Steve Rodgers. The shield is some magic boomerang. He can take a hit from a hulk over and over again and walk away. Seeing it after MI:8 really made the CGI stand out as terrible. It's just the worst looking committee made MCU film in a long time. What's up with the tiny Israeli woman? They clearly had her lined up as Captain Israel given she's wearing a superhero suit under her jacket on the battleship. I assume they retconned her to a black widow but really they should have just cut her entirely. It was so lazy writing (by the way she's a black widow. oh, ok.). So believable. The opening sequence and the quips felt like I was watching an A-Train movie from The Boys. But that's what these movies have become. Movies from Vought.
She's Sabra; and in the comics, she's Wolverine level vicious, and has porcupine quill shooting powers. The reshoots toned her down to not piss off Israel in real life. Ironic, no? History unfolded lightning quick compared to how chuggily this movie finally came out.
I assume it was also to avoid pissing off Palestinians and their supporters as well, but that assumption could be super off-base. I don't think it's inherently lazy writing. I think it's bad writing that there was precious little that they did with the character and removing her from the movie could easily be done. And it's bad casting that she's so tiny. It is like they have heard the rantings of people who complain about waif-fu and women beating up men twice their size and they were like, "Hold my beer." Anyway, all they would have had to do was to make the Black woman character who was Sam's friend say her lines and do what little action that she did. That would have tightened things up. Or alternatively, they could have brought Sharon Carter back and put her in either the Sabra/Sam's friend role. There were probably a lot of tweaks that they could have done, from doing a better job balancing the need to acknowledge the developments from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier while accommodating the many people who didn't see it. (I'm still salty that they had Sam say "I should have taken the serum" when he never had an opportunity to do so, for instance.) Or if they had either just made it the Hulk movie that it clearly wanted to be, or at least got Mark Ruffalo to do a cameo or something. The common complaint of "Why don't they get the Avengers to deal with this Avenger-level problem" is often misplaced, but it seems like at some point Sam probably should have talked to old Bruce about the guy who hounded him around the globe, the gamma-irradiated pills that guy was taking, his ex, Sterns.
Ordinarily I wouldn't make a prediction when we can just wait a month or two for the outcome, but I know how much you guys enjoy telling me I don't know what I'm talking about/spend too much time on things like this, so I'll just say that at this point I suspect the final worldwide box office for "Thunderbolts*" is going to be around $388 million, losing Disney on the order of $62 million. As a frame of reference, the 2nd lowest grossing MCU movie was 2008's Hulk movie. Adjusted for inflation, it pulled in about $399 million.
Does Critical Drinker pay you cash money to be his spambot, or were you promised concubines in Heaven?
Huh. So, Thunderbolts is in the top ten box office of the year? And so is Captain America? AND Snow White? Clearly, Disney is doing something wrong, right @Volpone?
it begs the question of what is a good box office if these numbers are bad. Maybe the industry needs to reorient itself to no longer expect one billion in revenue.
They most definitely need to reevaluate things and stop expecting a billion dollars. They need smaller budgets, tighter scripts and more practical effects.
I've been saying the same thing for a long time. Horror films make shitloads of money because they keep their budgets low. Likewise romcoms and other popular genre films. Not every film needs a massive budget. Look at the first Iron Man, after all.
There's also "Hollywood bookkeeping" to consider. Each film is pretty much its own company/corporation. They'll say the budget was (for example) $100 million but that doesn't include marketing, so tack on another several million. So say the total spent was $150 million in reality. Their books will show a considerably higher figure, so that when the box office/total profit is less than that, they claim a loss and write it off, meanwhile having actually made a tidy profit because the real expenditure was quite a bit lower than the reported expenditure.
Thunderbolts* dropped out of the box office top ten this weekend and sadly has grossed more money than Volpone will ever see. That's it for Marvel. I'm sure Disney is closing up shop as I type this.
Variety had an article about Thunderrbolts allegedly losing Disney millions recently. https://variety.com/2025/film/box-o...t-millions-box-office-marvel-next-1236427994/ So the story put the production budget at $180 million and the marketing budget at $100 million. It then said that the movie needed to make $425 million worldwide to make its money back but "only" made $371. Even accepting the premise that its estimate for production and marketing are correct and that the movie needed to meet the sum of the two budgets to break even, that's $280 million. I'm not sure why it would need $425 million to be profitable in that scenario. Anything above $280ish million would do to break even. $371 million is a profit of nearly $90 million. The article also points out that the studio has other sources of revenue from the film but provides no estimate for how much those might be or if they are enough to make up the $50ish million gap.
Sad part is, Thunderbolts* wasn't just a good Marvel movie, it was an entertaining action flick, period. It's probably the third-best film in Phase 5, and beats the crap out of most of the Phase 4 films.
I really liked Thuderbolts*. It isn't top tier Marvel, but it's solid, fun, and surprisingly poignant in places. The Sentry is also pretty awesome, and the sequence where he uses all his powers against the team is one of those really great superhero film sequences. I sorta speed-watched Captain America: Brave New World when I had access to a free one, but I didn't experience it fully so have no real opinion yet. (I have the 4K and will watch eventually.) I like Anthony Mackie/Sam, but I think they need to give him the serum if he's going to do things like fight a Hulk and live.
It's been pointed out elsewhere but bears repeating that these advertising budget estimates are based on nothing real. It's pure speculation and conjecture. Those numbers are never publicized and have never been publicized.
If we're being candid, having the serum should not really make a difference in surviving an encounter with an out-of-control Red Hulk. The strength/stamina/speed it would help convey will not meaningfully help damage Red Hulk. dodge or withstand Red Hulk's attacks. The stuff that Sam already had without the serum -- the shield and the vibranium suit, but more importantly, character traits like bravery and empathy -- would still have to do the heavy lifting. The main way to beat a Hulk is exactly what Sam did -- try to appeal to the man behind the rage, Also, while I think it is utterly dumb, within the world of the show, there presently is no more serum to give Sam or anyone else. Falcon and the Winter Soldier IIRC had the creator of the new serum die, his lab got destroyed, and Zemo destroyed the remaining vials of the serum except for the one that Walker took. Of course, if they wanted to, they could come up with some way to give Sam the serum -- a newly discovered stash of it, or somehow the creator's notes are found, or someone reverse-engineers it from one of the Flagsmashers or whatever. Absolutely. With Variety, though, there's at least some reason to think that they may have a studio source who provided them with insider knowledge of what these expenses might be as opposed to fill-in-the-blank YouTuber.
Emil Blonsky had the serum, and green-Hulk still turned him into a Ziploc bag full of marinated chicken.
Actually, this raises a question. Is Blonsky STILL a super-soldier when he's not in Abomination form? In MCU, both Banner and Blonsky rely on a modified version of the serum for their initial transformations, but it clearly mutates further due to the gamma radiation. But Blonsky got the Rogers-type version first... so is that still active when he's not Abominating or is it superseded by it?
In The Incredible Hulk, Blonsky's pretty superhero-y in human form. Dunno how any subsequent shows have altered this, though. True, but if a guy with Captain America-like power is totally wrecked, a normal guy would last .001 seconds.
My biggest issue with the MCU is that in the comics, Steve Rogers is only peak human. Not superhuman. He's basically Batman with a shield. Which makes the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the "powerless" Sam Wilson cap extra silly.
Cap and his variants have had power-creep like Superman. I remember US-Agent going revenge bananas (saw his parents shot), and turning a bunch of militia nuts into ketchup with his bare hands like he was Toxic Avenger. That was the 80's.
