Disney has earned a record-setting $10 billion at the worldwide box office. With the recent success of numerous films including Avengers: Endgame, Aladdin and Toy Story 4, Disney has been growing at an astonishing rate. The recent growing success of Disney shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, given that the studio has always been a prominent player in the entertainment industry. But over the past few years particularly, Disney has begun to buy up and consume its competition at such a rate many have begun to question whether the day will come when all forms of multimedia are owned by Disney in some capacity.
What’s more, Disney’s most recent foray into the highly competitive world of video streaming via the Disney+ subscription service has created yet another avenue for the studio to potentially dominate. It seems like every other month a new blockbuster is arriving from Disney, and this summer alone brought some seriously major achievements to the studio, thanks in no small part to Avengers: Endgame’s box office dominance. The highly successful run of Avengers: Endgame culminated in the film knocking Avatar from the number one spot of the highest grossing films of all time list, and Disney’s worldwide recent success hasn’t ended there.
According to Variety, Disney is now on the cusp of crossing the $10 billion mark at the worldwide box office. This feat has never before been accomplished, and Disney’s current worldwide box office tally after this weekend sits at $9.997 billion, shattering its own 2016 record for global box office takings of $7.6 billion. The landmark is expected to be clinched within the next day or so for Disney, but what’s perhaps even more remarkable about this latest achievement is only a matter of weeks remain until Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is set to be released, as well as the fact that the current box office tally does not represent the number of movies acquired in Disney’s purchase of Fox. When those returns are included, the number grows to $11.9 billion worldwide.
It’s clear at this point the final installment of the new Star Wars trilogy is going to be another huge draw for Disney, and its box office numbers could very well be record-breaking themselves, even with current warnings regarding Rise of Skywalker’s potentially seizure-inducing sequences. Disney’s past year has already seen five films reach the billion dollar mark: Avengers: Endgame, Aladdin, The Lion King, Toy Story 4 and Captain Marvel. As the situation currently stands, Frozen 2 is also well on its way to becoming yet another billion dollar film for Disney.
For all the praise and excitement over Disney’s ongoing box office domination, the aforementioned concern by many that the studio is perhaps becoming too big does bear considering. Recent reports of Disney vaulting classic films such as Alien, The Princess Bride and The Omen and preventing theaters from screening them paints a grim future for cinema. At the same time, the possibility Marvel fans will be required to own a Disney+ subscription in order to keep up with the MCU comes off to many as more than a little manipulative. Yet, regardless of these questionable practices, the future remains bright for Disney, and 2020 will surely continue to illustrate that.
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Source: Variety
