Yesterday’s Disney shareholders call started with some great news. Studio boss Bob Iger said that the company had actually crossed $8 billion in global box office for 2019, setting itself up to become the first studio in history to reach $10 billion by the end of the year. That’s astonishing, to say the least. But from there, the news pretty much went downhill, with one major running theme — Fox is dead weight.
Yes, that’s a bit of hyperbole. During the conference call, there was no use of “dead weight” to describe the studio that Disney triumphantly purchased earlier this year. Instead, the executives at the Mouse House gave a detailed explanation about how the merger has resulted in an unexpected loss that is (right now) affecting Disney’s bottom line.
According to Variety, Disney chief financial officer Christine McCarthy specifically pointed out Fox when she mentioned that the subsidiary had an operating loss of $170 million during the last quarter, thanks in large part to the stunning box office disaster “Dark Phoenix.” She continued by saying that Fox is coming in “well under our expectations.”
CEO Bob Iger concurred with that sentiment and went on to explain how Fox’s performance has even sunk below where the studio was before the merger and even further below Disney’s lowered expectations.
“One of the biggest issues was the Fox studio performance which was well below where it had been and well below where we hoped it would be when we made the acquisition,” Iger said.
The end result of this massive loss is that Fox is going to be run a bit differently than what it was expected to be before. Everyone assumed that Fox would be added to the lineup of Disney-owned labels like Lucasfilm, Pixar, Marvel, etc, and would be able to pump out films, perhaps not as much as it did before. But now, with this loss, Disney is tightening its grip on the studio even more than was anticipated.
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Iger said Disney is going to take the label “in a new direction, with an all-new development slate that will focus on a select group of properties.” Long story short, Fox is going to be scaled back even more, with a focus on sure-thing box office winners and streaming films. That’s right, Fox will now be the premier maker of Hulu originals, according to reporter Adam B. Vary.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that Fox is now just a forgotten arm of Disney. The beleaguered studio has films like Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” the Amy Adams thriller “Woman in the Window,” and Brad Pitt’s sci-fi drama “Ad Astra” on deck, as well as the massive “Avatar” sequels from James Cameron.
However, in the future, it would appear that Fox is destined to become an afterthought.
Bob Iger says under Disney, 20th Century Fox will focus on "a select group of high quality movies" for theatrical release, as well as for distribution exclusively on Hulu and Disney+.
— Adam B. Vary (@adambvary) August 6, 2019