If You Were the Inventors of Facebook
Hi there! Yes, it’s true, I have a newsletter for you that has absolutely nothing to do with a Disney bracket. It’s still Disney-centric, of course; don’t let the headline fool you.
I’m dropping that Social Network reference here in relationship to the back-and-forth numbers and estimates connected to how well, or how not well, Mulan has performed on Disney+ as the canary in the Premier Access coal mine. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories. Mulan grossed over $260 million in its first two weeks!
…Or it grossed just over $33 million!
…Or it grossed roughly $60-90 million!
…Or none of those! Maybe!
You get the point. We don’t know how much money Mulan has made, because all we have to sift through are disconnected data points that may or may not tell the whole story. The title quote comes in because — while that initial Yahoo! Finance story seemed quite dazzling — it connected back to something I was thinking about regarding Tenet and how Warner Bros. has reported its box office: if the studio had something to brag about…they’d brag about it.
Yes, we will most likely get some harder data regarding how much Mulan made when Disney has its next earnings call in November. But especially considering how anemic the film’s box office numbers are overseas — fun fact: Chinese audiences weren’t terribly impressed with the 1998 animated film either — it seems safe to presume the following: if Disney had made over a quarter-billion dollars on this experiment in just two weeks’ time, we’d have heard about it by now. Because they’d be shouting it from the rooftops.
The rumors now persist about what will happen, if anything, to Black Widow and Soul, both slated to arrive in November. (Fun fact about November 2020: it starts in just over six weeks!) As of last week, the common presumption was that Marvel would push Black Widow back again, but potentially Soul may wind up on Disney+ — and maybe not even for $30 on top of your monthly subscription. For my own part, I hope both films get delayed. I’m curious enough about Black Widow, and very excited for Soul, and also not at all interested in going to a movie theater anytime soon. These movies can wait. (And if the box office of films like Tenet tell us anything, it should tell us that movie theaters are in trouble one way or the other.)
And box office data can wait, too. But data points aside, the truth is clear for both of the major, expensive, handsomely produced films that big studios tried to unveil to audiences over Labor Day Weekend: if the numbers were good, or beyond expectations, we’d know by now.
Instead, Wonder Woman 1984 is headed to Christmas Day, and Pixar’s latest film may head straight to streaming.
But, uh…hey, just over 1 month until Death on the Nile opens in theaters, right?