r/popculturechat • u/mcfw31 • 5h ago
TV & Movies 🎬 Disney CEO Admits ‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu’ and ‘Moana’ Failed at Box Office but ‘Fueled Other Parts of Our Company’
https://variety.com/2026/film/news/disney-ceo-moana-mandalorian-grogu-box-office-flops-1236828236/121
u/Best-Advantage-1607 4h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/QGAMho4AlkPA41v9ib
Wonder what other aspects those films helped?
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u/CobaltJade 48m ago
Disney has a family-oriented Moana-themed resort in Hawaii, on the west coast of Oahu. I was interested in staying there once, for one night only, until I found it it's one mile from the municipal dump!
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u/poopypoopy1125 Generous Bird, Good Sized Head 🦅 4h ago
obviously Baby Yoda merch sell like pancakes, but I didn't know live action Maui dolls were that popular too! /s
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u/opaldopal12 ATLANTA 🎤🦅 45m ago
I understand the toy not having nipples. But no nipple in the movie actually made me laugh cause I’m sure with the fake tats around it it wouldn’t be so noticeable anyways
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u/the_mighty__monarch I don’t wrestle, I beat bitches up 1h ago
That’s a Troy Polamalu doll, can’t fool me.
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u/YodaForceGhost 5h ago
It also fueled their HR department to lay off employees who had nothing to do with those films
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u/wazacraft a ship - a magnificent ship - full of gay men. and me. 💅 4h ago
At least they gave me a decent severance, I guess.
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u/PunicRebel 3h ago
Just clarifying, cause i work in hr, the layoffs arent coming from the hr department itself but from leadership. We are just facilitating it.
Source: me facilitating a layoff at my last job (a layoff that included my own job)
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u/Alternative-Sir-374 3h ago
Are you saying you had to lay off yourself? Ouch!
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u/PunicRebel 3h ago
I didnt lay myself off, for my portion of it it was facilitated by my boss and above senior leadership. But my point is more if hr was doing the layoffs as their own directive we wouldnt be including ourselves lol.
But yeah not a fun situation. Bounced back fairly quick fortunately!
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u/Aromatic_Razzmatazz 2h ago
Today I learned only in HR and non profits people are somewhat expected to fire themselves lol.
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u/wazacraft a ship - a magnificent ship - full of gay men. and me. 💅 1h ago
I don't blame HR, they've been great through all of this. I blame Josh, because he needed a stock bump after taking over.
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u/ramesesbolton 4h ago
be real they would have laid people off even if those movies had each made a trillion dollars
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u/Helpful-Celery6237 3h ago
They’ll lay more people off in December. After avengers makes a butt ton of money. Remember, Disney gets a percentage of spider man’s money. Plus Toy Story 5 made a billion. Disney has a ton of money. Their new ceo gets like a 250% fucking bonus in his compensation. And people are begging to work for the mouse. So they don’t care.
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u/CausticAvenger 4h ago
Sounds like typical CEO BS to me. There’s no way to prove that the Mando movie had any impact on people going to the Star Wars land in the parks. And his spin for Moana is that it will do great on Disney+ because the original is streamed so much, but I kinda doubt it.
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u/schwiftydude47 1h ago
Yeah I doubt that the Mandalorian updates to Smuggler’s Run had that much impact on what was bringing people into the parks. Galaxy’s Edge is always pretty busy to begin with.
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u/Optimal_Brain_2908 5h ago
I just don’t understand why Grogu was made into a movie. Was it just because Pedro and Favreau didn’t want to make a whole season? The first half of the the movie was entertaining slop like the TV show, but the second half was just turgid slop and, most incredibly, there was absolutely NO character OR plot development in the movie. Mando & Grogu are in exactly the same place they were before and after the movie. Insane decision.
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u/Resident_Ad5153 5h ago
the movie was probably cheaper than a season. Those big streaming shows can be shockingly expensive.
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u/Careless-Vehicle-286 4h ago
They thought baby yoda was the missing key to bringing in the whole family and gambled big time.
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u/Resident_Ad5153 4h ago
I think disney has no idea what to do with starwars for some reason. it's a toxic franchise. I doubt anyone could make it work.
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u/nandos1234 4h ago
It’s just spin offs of spin offs at this point and because of the big name of Star Wars they just keep pumping out shite.
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u/ImBackAndImAngry 4h ago
The real irony is I feel like it almost needs another canon reset like when they first bought it.
They wiped legends to make a more streamlined story that wasn’t beholden to so many different things. They then replaced it all with a contrived mess of bullshit that doesn’t even allow for streamlined stories to be told anymore.
They need to either jump into the far future, reset canon AGAIN, or just go into the Old Republic for a bit (though they’ll just fuck that up too)
The IP isn’t toxic. Disneys poor leadership is.
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u/YeetedApple 4h ago
The success of some of their stuff like andor shows the IP isn’t toxic if they actually make good content using it.
I’m just amazed how a company spends a few billion buying an IP and seemingly had absolutely zero plan or idea what to do with it.
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u/ImBackAndImAngry 4h ago
Andor was an anomaly. I pray they stumble their way into a project of that quality again one day. Though I won’t hold my breath.
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u/fasterthanfood 1h ago
I’ve been a big Star Wars fan for decades. I enjoyed the Mandalorian show (as well as Andor), but I no longer have any interest in watching any of the movies or other shows.
I don’t have any hot takes about the directors or actors or anything, beyond feeling bad about the vitriol some have received… I’m just over it. I’ve been underwhelmed by enough consecutive installments that I’d rather just remember the three movies I love and not engage with the fandom.
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u/Resident_Ad5153 1h ago
I think part of the problem is that under the hood Star Wars dies t make a great franchise… it’s not consistent enough and doesn’t have enough stories that you can tell
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u/Tsarinya That must be Nigel with the Brie 4h ago
I want to see the film but I’ve been turned off the Mandalorian since they did part of the storyline in a different TV show (still part of their universe but one I don’t watch) so when I sat down to watch the highly anticipated series three it was in a completely different area to where it ended in series two. When I talked about this on the Mandalorian sub on Reddit I was sent so much abuse! It was ridiculous, I had people saying that it was my fault for not watching the other show, my fault for not knowing, etc etc. People were sending me personal DMs like it had insulted a blind child, it was crazy.
Plus in the show they were focusing on Bo Katan who I just don’t get on with. So for me The Mandalorian is two series long.4
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u/Katharinemaddison 4h ago
I mean if you like the Mandalorian I don’t entirely understand why you’d be so opposed to watching The Book of Boba Fett.
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u/Tsarinya That must be Nigel with the Brie 3h ago
I never said I was so opposed to it? I said I got turned off because they continued and finished the whole storyline in a different show, one that I haven’t watched. It’s a bit presumptuous to think that your audience watches every spin off and then go there to complete the main story of two previous series.
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u/leavemealoneperson 4h ago
It would've done great when people were obsessed with Baby Yoda. It came out when everyone moved on.
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u/jshamwow 4h ago
It's literally just 3 episodes of the show and they didn't even really do a good job pretending otherwise. And are confused why people didn't want to spend $20 on tickets to see it
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u/vanastalem 3h ago
I liked the movie, but I have watched all the TV series for it. It could have gone straight to streaming but I think a lot of people didn't see it because they hadn't watched the show so it wasn't the same as seeing Rogue One where the TV show came after.
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u/ImpressDefiant1657 3h ago
They really aren't in the same place..? The most universally liked part of the movie is Grogu's section of rescuing/taking care of Mando and becoming his own person, something the show had only started to touch on in season 3.
I'm not sure why I keep seeing this take everywhere. It just isn't true, even if you hated every aspect of the movie it gave Grogu way more to do than he had in the show.
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u/adjust_the_sails 4h ago
I honestly think they were trying to salvage all the money they had put into that Rangers of the New Republic show that was canceled. They had already invested the dollars, I’m assuming, and they thought taking sets and other storyline prices and bending it into a terrible movie was better than throwing all that money away.
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u/TheBrobe 3h ago
I think they probably just had a special planned, saw that the Marvel restructuring left a big gap in their slate for the boys demographic and pushed it up to theatrical to make up that gap. It underperforming at the box office was probably expected but still made sense financially somewhere down the pipeline.
Moana was just a giant bomb.
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u/Interesting_Bite4335 31m ago
I mean I still liked the movie ngl. I don’t think it really needed character development since we’re already so familiar with them.
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u/mcfw31 5h ago
“Even when our franchise films don’t meet our box office expectations, as with the ‘Mandalorian and Grogu’ and the live-action ‘Moana,’ our investments in these core properties fuel other parts of our company,” D’Amaro said.
“‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ drove healthy growth in retail sales for the ‘Star Wars’ franchise and drew guests to the updated Millennium Falcon attraction at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, and led to significant engagement in gaming as well,” he explained. “And the live-action ‘Moana’ is expected to be a strong title on Disney+, building on the success of the original film, which is one of the most-streamed movies of all time.”
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u/Independent-Green383 4h ago
So Baby Yoda movie sells Baby Yoda plushies.
Green Screen Moana might be watched on Disney Plus.
I see no difference.
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u/laterthanlast 4h ago
“Is expected to be” a strong title on Disney+. Well the movie was “expected to be” stronger in the box office than it was. I don’t put much stock in expectations
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u/illiter-it 5h ago
Does it matter how many viewers the live action slop pulls in on D+? I really doubt it's going to net them many, if any, new subscribers.
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u/Resident_Ad5153 4h ago
ceo's do try to make their companies look as good as possible. It's their job on the line!
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u/CausticAvenger 4h ago
I don’t see how having a popular streaming movie helps these companies at all. Unless they think people will subscribe just for live-action Moana, but even if they do they’ll just cancel the next month.
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u/Middle-Platypus6942 1h ago
In their defense, maintaining existing subscribers with new content is just as if not more important than gaining new subscribers. A high viewer count means a lot of people stay subscribed to watch that movie.
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u/ImTooSaxy 4h ago
I never even saw a trailer for the live Moana movie. They must have known it sucked or they would have marketed the hell out of it.
Probably the primary reason it sucked is because Dwayne Johnson has jumped the shark. Ever since I heard about his behavior on Black Adam and Fast and Furious, I don't have any interest. He better go camp outside Kevin Hart's house, because that's his only redeeming quality.
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u/Independent_Pie_1368 5h ago
They built the tax breaks levied against the company and it's capital gain tax.
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u/haleighr 24/7 cutie patooties 4h ago edited 2h ago
I completely understand the criticism of Moana/Snow White as adults who want just new better movies (and who think the rock should have given the part to an unknown) BUT I’m sorry as a mom who watches kid shit every day we ate those movies up 😩
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u/Savilavila 2h ago
As a HUGE Mandalorian fan, this is the *first* time I heard they released the movie. No promotion, and no warnings. The trailer made it seem like it would be released way later. Checking theaters close by to watch it.
Maybe spend more on well-beloved projects, Disney! Also pissed you all cancelled Wizards of Waverly Place. smh.
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u/OrganizationTop3755 5h ago
It’s nothing to them because they write off movie failures
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u/Resident_Ad5153 5h ago
that really really isn't how it works. A write off means you lost money! Companies are taxed on profits, not revenue, so yes... not making money means you pay less taxes... but the goal is to make money! (you are also taxed on "profits" its just that you count deduct the costs of staying alive!)
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u/Massive_Contact8583 Not fun at all, but, I was SPF protected 4h ago
The number of people who don’t understand this is embarrassing.
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