The Walt Disney Company: The World’s Most Versatile Entertainer (2024)

• From the 1930s to 2020, Disney produced about 433 movies. The 2019 remake of The Lion King is the biggest animated hit, with a gross profit of $1,657,713,458. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, released in 2015, collected the biggest profit with a worldwide gross of $2,068,223,624.
• The Walt Disney Company owns ABC, ESPN (80% stake), Touchstone Pictures, Marvel, Lucasfilm, A&E, The History Channel (50% stake), Lifetime (50% stake), Pixar, Hollywood Records, 21^st Century Fox Entertainment, National Geographic, Vice Media, and Core Publishing.
• In 2016, The Walt Disney Company generated over 40% of its revenue through its media networks like ESPN, Disney Channel, Hulu, ABC Television Network, and other TV brands.
• The Walt Disney World Resort of Orlando is the biggest, stretching over an area of 27,000 acres.
• The Karnival Kid, an episode of Mickey Mouse, was the first animated episode in which Mickey spoke, saying two words: Hot Dogs.
• From 1928 to 1947, Walt Disney himself was the voice of Mickey Mouse.
• Robin Hood was the first movie to be released on VHS, while Sleeping Beauty was the first movie released on VHS Hi-Fi and in stereo sound.
• Frozen was the first Disney animated movie directed by a woman.
• The character Eve in the movie Wall-E was designed by Apple’s senior vice president of Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive, who designed iPods and iPhones earlier.
• Mickey Mouse is not the first animated character created by Disney. The first was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. This character appeared in several animated cartoons until 1928, when Walt Disney lost the contract with the distributor.
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the world’s first feature-length animated film.
• In 2013, The Walt Disney Company exceeded $4 billion in box office receipts in one calendar year for the first time.
• Walt Disney World Resort, located in Orlando, Florida, employs more than 62,000 people, thus becoming the largest single-site employer in the country.

• Disney’s global revenue in 2021 amounted to $67.4 billion.
• Disney’s net income in 2021 was $2.02 billion.
• The revenue of Disney’s Media and Entertainment business reached $50.87 billion last year.
• The revenue of Disney’s Linear Networks segment was $28.09 billion in 2021.
• The revenue of Walt Disney’s Studio Entertainment business hit $9.64 billion last year.
• In 2021, the revenue of Disney’s Park and Visitors sector was $16.55 billion.
• Disney’s North American box office share in 2021 reached 25.5%.
• The number of Disney+ subscribers hit a new high of 152.1 million in the third quarter of 2022.
• Disney’s combined direct-to-consumer subscriber count, including Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+, amounted to around 221.1 million.
• An average number of Disney Channel viewers across the year in the U.S. was 233,000 in 2021.
• The most successful Disney movies in terms of box office revenue to date are Avatar ($2.85 billion) and Avengers: Endgame ($2.8 billion).

Source: Statista

• When Walt Disney was 16, he tried to join the army but was rejected because of his age. Working for the Red Cross, Disney was sent to France for a year to drive an ambulance.
• In 1919, after returning from World War I, Walt Disney started working at Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio, where he befriended Ubbe Iwerks. A talented animator, Iwerks made the largest contribution to Disney’s success.
• Walt Disney originally wanted to call his new character Mortimer Mouse, but his wife talked him out of it, suggesting Mickey Mouse instead.
• Flowers and Trees was the first cartoon produced in the three-color Technicolor process and the first short animated subject to receive an Academy Award.
• Disney decided to make a feature film in 1934. The project Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs went 400% over budget and required over 300 animators, artists, and assistants but was an immediate success when it debuted in 1937. Today, its total box office of $885 million ranks it as the tenth highest-grossing domestic movie of all time.
• Pinocchio, released in 1940, is considered Walt Disney’s grandest achievement.
• The U.S. and Canadian governments commissioned Disney to produce propaganda films during World War II. In 1942, about 90% of his company’s employees worked on Victory Through Air Power and Education for Death movies. Disney also produced several anti-Hitler shorts designed to boost people’s morale. One of them, Der Fuehrer’s Face, featured Donald Duck and won an Academy Award.
• The show Disneyland ran on ABC for 29 years.
• One of the last Walt Disney features, Mary Poppins, was the top-earning film in 1964.
• The last film Walt Disney personally oversaw was The Jungle Book before his death in 1966.
• Disney’s first film to exceed $1 billion in global box office receipts was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which reached $1.066 billion in 2006.
• Walt Disney won a total of 26 Academy Awards, thus holding the record for winning the most Academy Awards in history. Disney won a total of 22 competitive Academy Awards from a total of fifty-nine nominations.

Disney reported its 2024 second-quarter earnings on Tuesday, May 7, with EPS of $1.21, $0.11 better than the analyst estimate of $1.10. Revenue for the quarter came in at $22.08B versus the consensus estimate of $22.12B.

“While some Disney investors expected more fireworks, particularly on the future guidance front, I think this report indicates that the company has tilted its operation back to its core business model, which is more conservative by nature. This has certainly disappointed investors who expected the company to put its operation on a faster-growth model, particularly when we expect the competition in various segments to grow at a faster pace amid a better monetary environment in H2 and beyond,” said Thomas Monteiro, senior analyst at Investing.com. “However, putting expectations aside, the report has positive aspects that indicate the market may be overreacting. The company’s aggressive cost-cutting measures, along with improved margin efficiency, could position it back on the sustained growth path, albeit at a slower-than-expected pace.

“Moreover, it appears that Iger has finally managed to strike a healthy balance between the different pressures coming from Disney’s Board while still respecting the company’s long-term DNA. This should bode well for the several businesses the company has had trouble managing of late. This should again attract the type of investors Disney seeks: volatility-averse, income-seeking individuals,” he continued. “The big surprise of the day came on the streaming front, which finally managed to bring profits – way ahead of predictions – amid Hollywood’s massive strike period. This indicates that perhaps the more global, low-production-cost Netflix-like model is probably the way to go in an operation that needs to rethink its growth expectations as a whole.”

Thomas Monteiro, senior analyst at Investing.com.

In the fiscal year 2021, The Walt Disney Company generated total revenue of $65.39 billion. Disney’s annual revenue for 2020 was $65.388 billion, which constituted a 6.06% decline from 2019. The company’s annual revenue for 2019 amounted to $69.607 billion, celebrating a 17.12% growth from 2018. Disney’s global revenue for the quarter ending June 30, 2022, was $21.504 billion, which marked a 26.33% increase year-over-year.

The company’s revenue for the twelve months ending June 30, 2022, reached $81.106 billion, a 27.54% growth year-over-year. In the third quarter of 2022, Disney earned $20.150 billion, exceeding analysts’ expectations of $20.96 billion. Disney’s revenue reached $21.150 billion in the fourth quarter, jumping by 9% compared to the same quarter in 2021. This constitutes a yearly change of 23%.

In the fiscal year ending October 1, 2022, the Walt Disney Company generated total revenue of more than $82.7 billion. The company demonstrated an annual growth of 22%, compared to $67.4 billion made in 2021.

The upward trajectory of Disney’s earnings is demonstrated in the table below:

Disney Global Annual Revenue (in $US Billion)

Source: macrotrends.net

Net income is defined as a company’s net profit or loss after all revenues, income items, and expenses have been considered and taken into account. Disney’s net income for the quarter ending on June 30, 2022, was $1.409 billion, constituting a 53.49% growth year-over-year. Disney’s net profit for the twelve months ending on June 30, 2022, was $3.142 billion. This was a year-over-year jump of 179.04%. Disney’s annual net income for the last year was $1.995 billion, constituting a 169.66% decrease from 2020. In the first year of the pandemic, the company’s net income was $2.864 billion, a 125.91% fall from 2019. In 2019, Disney’s net income was $11.054 billion, a 12.26% drop from 2018.

In the first quarter of fiscal 2023, Disney’s net income soared to $1.28 billion, higher than the $1.1 billion earned in the same quarter last year. Its direct-to-consumer business again published an operating loss of $1.05 billion, which proved narrower than the $1.2 billion anticipated by Wall Street.

To understand how the Walt Disney Company fared in other years, study the figures in the table below:

Disney’s Annual Net Income since 2010 (in $US Billion)

Last year, the Walt Disney Company generated total revenue of $65.39 billion, nearly $17 billion of which was generated by its Parks, Experiences, and Products segment. This segment did comparatively worse than other sections of Disney’s business, shedding $10 billion from the year before. In 2021, the company’s most successful segment was the Media and Entertainment section, with annual revenue of $50.87 billion. This was a notable growth from 2009, when the Media and Entertainment segment earned the company $16.21 billion. The breakdown of Disney’s global revenue in 2021 is presented in the table below:

Disney’s Annual Revenue by Operating Segment in 2021 (in $US Billion)

Source: Statista

The Walt Disney Company launched its streaming services in 2019 to compete with Netflix, which had licensed some of Disney’s content. The enterprise immediately proved successful. In a short period of two years, Disney+ managed to attract 100 million subscribers all over the world. In doing so, the company beat its own expectations: its initial goal was to enlist 90 million users by 2024. Disney’s popularity with subscribers made Netflix look unsuccessful by comparison. The SVOD market leader had spent almost a decade reaching the milestone of 100 million subscribers.

In 2022, Netflix lost to Disney again. While the latter continues adding subscribers, Netflix reported losses of subscribers in Q1 and Q2 of this year. By contrast, the number of subscribers to Disney+ hit a new high of 152.1 million in the third quarter of 2022. The fourth quarter saw strong subscription growth with the addition of 14.8 million total subscribers, including 12.1 million Disney+ subscribers.

In the first quarter of 2023, Disney+ total subscriptions were 161.8 million, as opposed to the 161.1 million subscriptions expected by analysts. A recent price hike for Disney’s streaming services caused the loss of about 2.4 million Disney+ subscribers during the quarter. Yet these numbers were still lower than the 3 million lost subscribers foreseen by Wall Street.

To track the inexorable growth of subscribers to Disney+ in the past three years, see the numbers in the table below:

Number of Disney+ Subscribers Worldwide from 2020 to 2022 (in Millions)

Source: Statista

Together with its subsidiaries – the 20^th Century Studios and Searchlight – Disney generated a box office revenue of $1.17 billion in the United States and Canada last year. This was a tangible jump from the revenue reported a year earlier: over 165% above the $442 million earned in 2020. Between 2020 and 2021, Disney’s box office market share in the U.S. and Canada increased by 14%. In 2021, Disney was responsible for over one-quarter of the box office revenue in North America. The number of tickets sold climbed by more than 120% between 2020 and 2021. Coronavirus explains this significant increase. 2020 was the first year of the pandemic when people were locked down in their houses and could not go to movie theaters. The table below shows how much money Disney generated in the American and Canadian cinemas since 2000:

Box Office Revenue of Disney in the U.S. and Canada from 2000-2021 (in $US Billion)

Among all Disney’s Amusem*nt Parks, the most popular is voted to be the Magic Kingdom. Over 59% of people frequenting Disney’s entertainment sites said they preferred this park. In 2021, it welcomed, on average, 57,000 visitors a day. During the year, Magic Kingdom attracted about 21,170,000 people to its Cinderella’s castle and classic Disney attractions. EPCOT ranked second in 2021, daily welcoming about 34,000 people. Several surveys show that this amusem*nt park is preferred by adults who enjoy Disney attractions without children. EPCOT had 12,410,000 visitors in 2021. Hollywood Studios are liked by 19% of Disney’s fans. On average, 31,000 people attend Hollywood Studios on a daily basis. In 2021, the amusem*nt park entertained 11,315,000 visitors, which constituted an increase from 2019. Animal Kingdom came out fourth in popularity, with an average of 38,000 daily visitors entering it in 2021. See in the table below how often these Disney parks were frequented worldwide between 2019 and 2020:

Most Visited Disney Amusem*nt Parks Worldwide in 2019 and 2020 (in Millions)

Source: Statista

The year 2022 will be remembered as successful by The Walt Disney Company. Its dozen theme parks were crowded; its five cruise ships entertained thousands of passengers; and its multiple film studios produced eagerly awaited movies. The company also celebrated the opening of new attractions at its theme parks in 2022, created chart-topping films, and brought back former CEO Bob Iger to intensify its financial growth and recalibrate its theme parks. The goal of Iger’s return was to give joy to people through great storytelling.

In 2022, Disney prepared the soil for its new attraction poised to open this year. Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is planned to replace Splash Mountain at Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California, and Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida. The attraction will feature Disney’s first African-American princess, Tiana, from The Princess and the Frog, and will be based on her adventures.

Disney+ continued growing in 2022 and boasted 164.2 million subscribers. The company’s entire arsenal of streaming services, which includes Disney+, Disney+ Hotstar, Hulu, and ESPN+, had more than 235 million subscribers worldwide. Subscriptions to Disney+ are expected to increase this year.

New episodes of Marvel and Star Wars were aired every week in 2022, much to the delight of viewers. Nor will people lack entertainment in 2023. Disney will serve them returning series such as the animated Star Wars series The Bad Batch and the docu-series Magic of Disney’s Animal Kingdom. The company will also celebrate several debuts, including The Muppets Mayhem and eagerly awaited Agatha: Coven of Chaos, a spin-off of the popular WandaVison series.

Source: Forbes

The Walt Disney Company is the most successful entertainment giant that invented animated cartoons and continues bringing them to perfection for nearly a hundred years already. Despite its time-honored pedigree, Disney continues to be relevant and beloved across the globe, outclassing other entertainers and mass media companies. Disney’s movies continue breaking the box office, its animated cartoons are watched countless times worldwide, its amusem*nt and theme parks are crowded every season, and its streaming operations outperform those of Netflix. No wonder Coinpriceforecast.com foresees Disney’s growth over the long haul. Trading at $95.87 at the time of writing, DIS is predicted to hit $100 by the end of this year and climb to $125 by the end of 2023. Based on machine learning predictions, Coinpriceforecast.com also anticipates the price of Disney’s stock to soar to $150 in 2025 and surge to $250 in 2031. Whether or not these predictions come true, the Walt Disney Company will undoubtedly remain a vast entertainment empire drawing people worldwide to its magical attractions.