Which studio, both celebrating their 100th anniversary in 2023, had the worst year?

Does the success of Barbie by default give Warner Bros. the win here despite all its other failures? It aside, Flash is their only other film to earn over $100m (barely) this year and well... that sure wasn't success.

Too early for Warner Bros. Have to see how Wonka, Aquaman and Color Purple do.

Other than Barbie cancelling out the bad ones for WB, I feel like Wish’s bomb is such a symbolic L that it’s got to to be Disney.

Disney easily.

Zaslav may be like a wrecking ball at WB right now but that's nothing compared to how Disney have shafted their audience across all their key sectors: Marvel, Star Wars, Disney Animated and Pixar.

WB at least had Barbie, The Nun 2 & Meg 2 + December films to release.

Disney films may have grossed more but more damage done. Only GotG3 can be considered a true success. The Little Mermaid and Elemental were solid.

Disney has had the worst year of any major studio since I've been following the box office. Even their one success, Guardians 3, came in under expectations.

Disney is 10X worse mostly because it was at a higher peak and 2023 concentrated vs WB which has been deteriorating in slow motion.

Disney had SEVEN of the top eight movies of 2019 with their SEVENTH biggest movie grossing $356M that year (Aladdin). With inflation that is $420M. Meaning Disney had SEVEN movies make $420M+ in a single year.

This year their #1 movie is GOTG3 with $359M (essentially where they had 7 of those 4 years ago unadjusted).

For comparison, WB didn't have a single movie make $100M+ in 2021. Disney had 3 of the top 6 and 5 of the top 12. In 2022, WB only had 1 movie in the top 10 (Batman), it's only movie to do $170M+. Disney had 4 of the top 8.

This year Disney still had 5 of the top 15 movies but none in the top 3. WB has Barbie but Flash is #2 movie of the year for them and The Nun #3 with $86M. Having a $1.4B movie costing $145M vs Disney having meh results for every movie costing $200M+ seems worse. WB also has high profit horror movies to help.

Disney needs some financial cost control. Minions 2 made $939M last year from a $80-100M budget. Mario had a $100M budget and made $1.3B+. Yes quality of the animation may go down but not every animated movies needs a $200M+ budget.

Disney is officially out of style

They key difference is that Disney itself is part of the brand of its biggest films and the perception of Disney has turned very negative in the last year and has torpedoed basically all their projects. Only the strongest brands like Guardians, which always felt a bit apart from the MCU due to the space setting, survived. Inside Out 2 will probably be a similar outlier next year. The strategy of branding everything as a Disney product first was immense for them because it allowed them to expand that brand into theme parks, TV, streaming, music, etc. but now it's coming back to bite.

Whereas to the public Warner Bros is just another studio. No one hates Warner Bros because the DCU sucks and flopped. They can still proudly put their logo in front of Barbie and Wonka and the Conjuring movies and no one will bat an eye. And as much as the film community hates the studio because of their CEO, the public doesn't care. They don't care that Christopher Nolan was outraged when they went day and date streaming with their 2021 films. No one cares that they cancelled Batgirl. No one was going to watch it, let's be honest. And WB just birthed what will surely be a multi billion dollar franchise this year. Expect Barbie 2, Ken centric spin off, Michael Cera's Allan surrealist comedy spin off, Barbie 3, Barbie does Christmas, Barbie vs. Polly Pocket, etc etc. They could even turn it into a Bond like franchise where they replace the Barbie actress every few films to keep her forever young. They've barely begun to explore the possibilities of a dolls-come-to-life Mattel cinematic universe. This will print money for a solid decade.

I don't believe Barbie will print money for the next ten years. It will get stale before then. But you're totally right about Disney's problems being because they tie the studio into and take ownership of every project. Warner Bros are able to skirt damage because they remain a traditional studio in the background.

People will try and pump the go woke go broke argument at Disney, but Barbie being the biggest movie of the year obliterated that argument. It really just comes down to the style of film Disney makes has grown stale and boring and smart. Unfortunately all of Disney has this sorta hyper self-aware subversive style and while that was popular in the 2010s, it is old hat now. Disney trying to bring all of their movies to feel like a Disney movie instead of branching out and taking more real diversity in their projects not just diversity in color and sex of the creators has left Disney feeling boring and uninteresting.

Disney is out of style and it needs a reawakening.

Warner Bros killed DCEU movies with the decision of reboot. Delaying movies from 2022 was fatal. Should have planned to release as many movies as possible before the reboot and then reboot the universe. That said Disney had so many big movies MCU, Indy, Mermaid and their animation movies. 1 movie(Guardians) did very well but no mega breakout like Barbie. So WB I would say did slightly better off. But both are losers overall.

If Aquaman 2 only does $300/350 million worldwide, or ~25-30% of the original, would it change any minds?

Although I suppose Wonka sort of balances out however low Aquaman 2 would go, doesn't it? Assuming they both combined for ~$850m or so.

Also kudos to WB for giving Wonka a reasonable $125m budget. If this had been Disney, it would have almost certainly been ~$200m I suspect (The Haunted Mansion was $150m...). That's what is also killing Disney lately, insane budgets. Maybe some of it was inflated from being delayed due to COVID, but sheesh.

Color purple also looks like it should hit 100m domestically so that’s another feather in the cap

WB had some great hits this year to make up for the bombs. Due to overbudgeting Disney only really had one movie that they can feel really good about its final gross compared to its budget in Guardians 3, and then the bombs were horrific.

I saw that 2005's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was $150M so this movie is $25M cheaper despite Covid procedures + 18 years of inflation on costs. WB should get props on cost controls even if they went overboard (everything else is a tax write off and not getting a theaterical release)!

Disney on the otherhand was printing $$$ in 2019 so everyone got what they wanted and then Covid added $50M+ to those budgets.

I think Johnny Depp probably cost them like $15-20M for the 2005 movie which explains part of the discrepancy. They also went all-out with the sets and CGI (in the last part especially where they're in the elevator) for Charlie, whereas Wonka seems less lavish in terms of huge visual effect heavy parts.