2023 was not a great year for Disney. Several of its movies underperformed either critically or financially (sometimes both) and even Marvel Studios met more than its fair share of challenges despite the MCU round once being considered untouchable.
Now, for the first time in several years, we've learned that the House of Mouse was not the highest-grossing studio at the worldwide box office.
Instead, a series of hits for Universal - including The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Oppenheimer, and M3GAN - saw the studio score an impressive $4.907 billion in total. In fairness, Disney was only slightly behind with a still very impressive $4.827 billion haul globally.
They only really produced a single true hit in 2023 with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3's $845 million total (and, for the first time since 2014, not a single title which grossed more than $1 billion). The Little Mermaid, for example, was a moderate success but Disney largely produced a string of box office disappointments, including Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Haunted Manion, and The Marvels.
We'd be remiss not to point out that Disney would have likely sailed to #1 had the studio released more movies; Universal had 24 and Disney had just 17, better explaining the $80 million difference.
Still, this is troubling for Disney, particularly as it also didn't have one of the year's top three movies.
Those ended up being Barbie ($1.4 billion), The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($1.3 billion), and Oppenheimer ($950 million). Disney can at least take solace in the fact it had more top 10 titles than any other studio with a total of four.
As Variety explains, "The problem is that Disney movies are hugely expensive - typically carrying production budgets of $200 million to $250 million - so they have high bars to clear in terms of profitability. So while 'Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania' ranked as the 10th-highest grossing movie of the year with $476 million, it still ended up losing money for the studio in its theatrical run."
Warner Bros. nabbed third place with $3.84 billion, with Sony Pictures and Paramount rounding out the top five with roughly $2 billion.
It remains to be seen what 2024 looks like. Both Marvel and DC are only releasing a single movie each and while Sony has three of its live-action Spider-Verse titles scheduled for this year, we'd bet only Venom 3 stands a chance of being a true hit.
Stay tuned for updates.