In recent times it seems that many Disney assets and productions have not been doing as well as they were a decade ago, but why exactly is this? If you have at all been wondering about this sudden switch from being the box office breaker to losing billions of dollars in 2023, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. 

To start I wanted to see exactly how much Disney was losing since this downfall started. When it comes to Disney+, according to The Ringer it lost around $4 billion last year in 2022 and operating margins are down 75%. Over the past 5 years, Disney stock has dropped almost 20%, and the highest-grossing Disney film of 2023, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.” made only $358,995,815 at the box office. For the annual profit Disney has made in 2023, it only comes out to $8.992 billion, which according to Macrotrends is a 68.25% decline since 2022.

For recent Disney movies were from both critics and the audience. When it comes to their most recent movie “Wish,” reviews were generally not that positive. Many fans and critics share the thought that this movie was a disappointment as it was meant to be the 100th anniversary of Disney because the movie was bland and felt unfinished. As for the highest-grossing movies, reviews were generally mixed or leaning to the negatives, with the average tomato score by critics being an average of 61% and the audience score being an average of 87% which for Disney standards is not as high as they’d hope for them to be. Also, while these scores are not that close to each other, keep in mind that Disney does own Rotten Tomatoes, making these reviews not as biased as you may think.

Now why have reviews not been so stellar in the past year? Quite frankly, it’s because Disney’s gotten too popular. Ever since 2020 with the lockdown, the entertainment industry across all types has been highly expected to produce products for consumers, and with the many big hits such as “Avengers: Infinity War,” and “Avengers: Endgame” the bar has been set very high for Disney to produce high-quality movies and shows with the ever-growing Disney+ streaming service. With all their acquisitions and high demand for good movies, getting out lots of media along with the executive chairmen changes in the company, including Bob Chapek taking over as CEO in 2020, getting out timely movies and making them top tier had proven quite difficult for the company in recent years.