The mega entertainment conglomerate has earned $7.67 billion at the box office this year, thanks to blockbuster successes like Avengers: Endgame and Lion King. The latter is still moving strongly after the opening weekend and is eyeing a $1 billion mark soon.
Easy money for Disney
With 5 months remaining on the calendar, Disney is becoming the most promising and profitable studio in Hollywood today. The company has had a record-breaking year with $7.67 total gross at the global box office. Of this, about $5.09 billion comes from the company’s massive overseas market. This is the first time any Hollywood studio has gone past the $5 billion mark in the overseas market. Interestingly, the previous record was also set by Disney in 2016 when the studios earned over $7.61 billion globally.
Disney has had three films crossing the $1 billion mark. It began with Captain Marvel which gained $1.23 billion at the box office. It was followed by Marvel’s biggest crossover superhero movie Avengers: Endgame which earned $2.79 billion and became the top-grossing film of all time. It left behind Avatar, another one of Disney’s biggest successes from the yesteryears. Aladdin, a live-action remake of its classic animated series also earned $1 billion at the box office last week.
Lion King and more
However, if the Lion King continues having one successful weekend after the other, it will leave at least one of the previous three films behind. The film, which is another remake of a classic Disney movie, has already earned $962.7 million (on Sunday close) within two weeks of release. It is still gaining great reviews and drawing crowds to theaters, which means that $1 billion won’t be a far cry.
One of the company’s unleased movies, Toy Story 4, is also expected to get both rave reviews and equally ravishing figures in worldwide collections. If these two movies make it, the company will break its own record of most number of films earnings over a billion dollars in a year. In 2016, Disney did the same with four movies.
The film studio already accounts for 45% of the total $16+ billion collected worldwide by movies released on over 1,000 screens. It includes the titles the company inherited after the Fox merger. Warner Brothers, the second-largest studio by this measure has barely $2 billion in the collection.
The number is expected to grow bigger for the year as Frozen 2 and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker are sure shot hits that may bring in another billion-dollar collection record for the studio.
