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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25679 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Disney is back where it started:

Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks Original IP to Win Back Gen-Z Men Amid Marvel, Lucasfilm Struggles

But we've been here before. Around the late '00s, Disney felt that it was shackled by its perception as a girl brand, and needed some boy-friendly properties. There were some that had had some success - Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars - but it wanted more. (Article 1, article 2 on marketing research in 2009 about this.)

They took a few gambles on intellectual property they already owned (or at least that wasn't too expensive) - Tron, The Lone Ranger, John Carter of Mars and so forth - but those didn't give them the wins they wanted.

So they bought Marvel and Lucasfilm and, over the 2010s, got a good many billions of dollars in box office returns from them both. But now both Marvel and Star Wars are sputtering at best, so it seems they think it's time to start up the search anew.

The obvious question is what happened to their last investments. The polite answer is that they stopped producing acceptable stories, or overexposed or overextended their franchises with TV shows and the like beyond general audiences' interest. But is that all? "To lose one strategic franchise may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness." What's to say that they won't make the same mistake again, whatever it was?

So there are less polite answers. That link leads to the /r/saltierthancrait discussion of the article (taken down now, by the looks of things. Too impolite even there!) where the poster summarizes their take on the story as "1. Buy new IP to have something for boys 2. Alienate them by pandering to girls 3. Repeat."

And even if it's so that both franchises' declines followed girl-power (or other identity-politics) pushes, that's still not a correlation that one's supposed to draw in polite company, not without a lot of throat-clearing. And true: the orthodox explanation of quality decline and overextension has much truth to it, and it's even possible to explain any alienation of target demographics as being due to such overextension: the same ambition that led Disney to want to give itself some appeal to boys also could lead it to try to make Marvel or Star Wars appeal more to girls. Maybe pure greed is the only explanatory factor needed.

Still, though, I have my doubts. I feel like there's a cultural undercurrent, much broader than just Disney, that it's a problem whenever anything is enjoyed by boys(/men) and not girls(/women). Perhaps there's an element of blank-slatism here: the belief that gender differences are all due to socialization, and in a perfect, prejudice-free world, male and female tastes would be the same.

That is: if there were any value to [something], then girls would see it. If they're not there with the boys, then either they're being kept away by something toxic or exclusionary, or there isn't any value to the thing and the boys shouldn't be having fun with it, either. Anything with predominantly male enthusiasts therefore should be either integrated or banned. (Going the other way, it seems much more easily accepted that boys are at fault for not being interested in something that girls are, for example.)

But if it's not true that, but for patriarchy, boys and girls would have the same interests, then the pursuit of this equalization can result in feeding a whole lot of interests or fields or value in general into the void. If lightsabers and starfighters appealing more to boys than to girls was not a problem that needed fixing, and Disney doesn't realize this, then they'll slide right back into this pit every time they try to escape. And if it is true, well - they'd better hope that they can somehow find fixes that work.

So they bought Marvel and Lucasfilm and, over the 2010s, got a good many billions of dollars in box office returns from them both.

Did they actually get a return on Lucasfilm? I know they made a decent profit on the first few films, but Lucasfilm cost them 6 billion, IIRC, I don't know if they managed to net that much across all their SW projects.

Probably not from a discounted cash flow perspective. Also you ought to factor in failures like the Star Wars hotel in WDW.

In 2020 there were reports that they were making $3bn a year in Star Wars retail merchandise, and plastic toys, T-shirts etc are an ultra-high margin business. They were making 25% of revenue from licensed games, and in 2021 EA suggested that had been $2bn between 2019 and 2021 alone, and that’s pure margin. They spent $2bn on the Star Wars parks but parks revenue has grown since 2021 (or 2019) even if it slowed recently. Money was very cheap through the 2010s, so they may well have made out fine.

They were making 25% of revenue from licensed games, and in 2021 EA suggested that had been $2bn between 2019 and 2021 alone, and that’s pure margin.

I can't really even remember any games from that time. Battlefront II (the second Battlefront II), the one with the lootboxes, I guess?

Jedi fallen order is the biggest game that Disney star wars has produced by far and that was released in 2019. That should only have been 1.2 billion in revenue though.

I’m struggling with the sale in that case if video games were generating 700m of FCF pa

As I recall he sold it well below what he’d have received in an open bidding process because thought Disney and Iger would be better stewards of the brand.

It seems like they are still pretty deep in the hole. They paid $4 billion in 2012 dollars, and the movie profits are nowhere close to this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/04/14/disneys-star-wars-box-office-profits-fail-to-cover-cost-of-lucasfilm/

Note those numbers also don't include marketing costs, which are often $100 million plus for a blockbuster.

Disney+ lost $11 billion, the theme parks have been a bit of a mess apparently, so I don't see how merch could come anywhere close to filling in the gap.

Merchandise is the biggest earner for IPs by a huge margin, indeed the value of Star Wars was probably 90% merch sales when they bought it

And judging by the size of the Star Wars toys section at Target compared to 10 years ago (or even when I was growing up in the mid-90s, more than a decade since the last Star Wars movie came out), it seems the golden goose is well and truly dead. When I was a kid, Star Wars had an entite aisle all to itself, literally every boy I knew had a lightsaber and dozens of action figures. I can't remember the last time I saw a kid playing with a Star Wars toy.

To be fair kids don't really play with toys at all anymore, they do the Roblox on their Kindles and watch 20something Influencers

Kindles? iPads

Kindles? iPads

The Kindle Fires (I don't know if they use the term "Kindle" for these anymore) are the cheapest way to get a kid a tablet and they went crazy coming out with various kid-themed versions and cases.

Edit: for instance, here's a $100 tablet advertised for kids and themed to the Avengers.

Phones.

Do you have any numbers on that? Like I said, from what I remember the Disney Star Wars merch didn't move at all. Star Trek had the same problem. Was it actually enough to cover the movie shortfalls, or were they making money with the legacy merch, or something?

https://www.licenseglobal.com/retail-news-trends/-star-wars-the-brand-saga-continues#:~:text=%E2%80%9CStar%20Wars%E2%80%9D%20is%20big%20business,at%20an%20estimated%20$29.057%20billion.

A quick Google bought this up immediately:

The franchise has raked in an estimated $46.7 billion, with merchandise sales at an estimated $29.057 billion.

So not quite 90%, but still a majority of earnings.

Whether this means Disney has made profits or a return on their initial investment I don't know, although some of the other Google results suggested merch was still bringing in around 1b per year for them.

Apparently they had a deal with Hasbro for a minimum of $225 million in royalty fees for the three new movies. Lucasfilm would get 20% of the wholesale price in royalties, which would kick in once the minimum threshold was crossed. For comparison their deal with Hasbro for the prequels had a minimum royalty fee of over $500 million, which seems to indicate that they expected lower merch sales.

https://www.jeditemplearchives.com/2018-09-16-the-cost-of-hasbros-star-wars-license/

Maybe not by box office receipts alone, but counting other revenue streams like merchandise, I wouldn't be surprised.

Sequel trilogy merchandise was also a complete dud from what I remember. So where the theme parks (which themselves cost billions to build).

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