Disney Stock Plunges To 9-Year Low As Box Office Bombs Pile Up…
Shares of Walt Disney dropped 3.9% on Thursday, closing at their lowest levels in nearly nine years.
The latest drop comes despite chief executive Bob Iger’s turnaround plan, which includes price hikes for Disney’s streaming services, increased ads and a mixture of cost cuts/layoffs. In Disney’s August 9 earnings report, Iger acknowledged that the company is faced with a “challenging environment” in the near term.
The gameplan has seemingly failed to convince investors, however, as Walt Disney shares have dropped by more than 5 percent since Iger’s announcement.
The earnings report revealed troubling numbers for the company’s flagship streaming service, Disney +, which lost more than 300,000 subscribers between the U.S. and Canada last quarter. Total domestic subscriptions fell to roughly 46 million in the fiscal period. By comparison, Netflix boasts roughly 76 million domestic subscribers.
When factoring in international numbers, total subscriptions declined by a whopping 24 percent. This has largely been driven by the end of Disney’s deal with Hotstar in India.
Disney has also suffered a historic run of box office bombs. The company’s last nine film releases — a run that includes The Little Mermaid, Lightyear and Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny –have cost the once top of the industry company more than one-billion-dollars.
A number of the film’s, including Pixar’s Lightyear and Elemental, failed to generate interest after interjecting left-wing social agendas into children’s movies. Lightyear contained a same-sex kissing scene while Elemental featured a “nonbinary” character and tackled themes such as systemic racism.
In addition to lack of interest, Disney’s latest film releases have come with sky-high budgets do to expensive re-shoots. The company has also spent hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing costs — particularly on Indiana Jones and The Little Mermaid — but have still failed to turn a profit.
