The Disney Grooming Syndicate’s Wish is looking like yet another box office flop in a year filled with Disney flops.
Disney’s latest animated feature, this one intended to celebrate Disney’s 100th anniversary, was projected to do much better than it has over the five-day Thanksgiving weekend. As of now, it looks like Wish won’t even come close to hitting its worst-case scenario.
Early this week, we were told Wish could bring in as much as $66 million by Monday. The very worst case was $49 million.
Nope.
Not even close.
Currently, it looks like Wish will flop somewhere between $35 million and $38 million.
Tee hee.
Wish is shaping up to be another big bomb.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of groomers.
If that’s not embarrassing enough, Wish lost the weekend’s box office crown to another underperformer, the second weekend of the Hideous Rachel Zegler’s Hunger Games prequel, Songbirds and Snakes, which looks like it will gross $42 million by Monday. That’s a better second weekend than projected, but it will still only sit at around $110 million total — which is what the original films earned on their first weekends. With a production and promotion budget north of $150 million, Songbirds and Snakes will have to gross around $300 million to break even. At this point, it looks like the overseas box office will determine its fate.
Director Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is the one bright spot in this weekend’s box office. The 157-minute adult epic starring Oscar-winner Joaquin Phoenix and the exquisite Vanessa Kirby was expected to gross somewhere between $23 to $34 million over the five-day weekend. As of today, it looks like it is sliding into the high end with $33 million.
No final weekend numbers are available yet for the Disney Grooming Institute’s The Marvels, but it’s not even in the top five conversation. As of Wednesday, Captain Marvel 2: I Want To Speak to Your Manager had grossed just $68 million domestic and $164 million globally after 14 days and two weekends in theaters. That is a full-blown catastrophe.
The good news — and I do have good news — is that Disney has informed its stockholders it has no intention of changing course…
“Further, consumers’ perceptions of our position on matters of public interest, including our efforts to achieve certain of our environmental and social goals, often differ widely and present risks to our reputation and brands,” wrote the groomers in their annual SEC report. That was not an acknowledgement from the company that it has taken a disastrous turn and will now mend its ways. Instead, it was a warning to investors that things will not change.
Other than Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, everything Disney released in 2023 disappointed or outright bombed: The Little Mermaid, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumnobodycares, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Emasculating Indiana Jones, Elemental, Haunted Mansion, and now Wish. And just one year ago, Disney released Strange Gay World over Thanksgiving weekend and bombed harder than Wish.
Disney is no longer wholesome entertainment for small children. Decent parents understand this and will not expose their kids to the cinematic equivalent of a guy with no pants circling an elementary school in his Free Candy Van.
Disney is evil and will never change.
John Nolte’s debut novel Borrowed Time (Bombardier Books) is available today. You can read an exclusive excerpt here and a review of the novel here.
