Give investors in entertainment giant Disney (DIS) credit: they can take bad news surprisingly well. New reports suggest that Disney’s new release, Tron: Ares, will be a bomb of epic scale by the time its box office run is all said and done. Despite this word, however, Disney investors still clearly believed in the House of Mouse, sending shares up fractionally in Monday morning’s trading.
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The news was already pretty bad for Tron: Ares, and a new report out says that the news is even worse than expected. Earlier projections that said Disney sunk between $170 million and $180 million into making this latest installment of its video game franchise were actually lowball reports. The new reports suggest that Disney actually spent closer to $220 million.
This in turn means that, based on current box office projections, Disney will ultimately lose $132.7 million after all ancillaries, reports note. This is especially true after the second weekend figures saw total revenue just barely clear the $100 million mark. The post-mortem is even worse. One talent rep noted: “The idea that Disney would spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a Jared Leto film that is a franchise that hasn’t worked in four decades is insane.”
Why Disney Kept Hitchcock Out
While Disney is not exactly a stranger to darker themes in its films—just ask anyone who saw The Black Cauldron—it did ultimately rebel against one particularly dark director: Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock wanted to shoot a film, which would have been called The Blind Man, at Disneyland. But Walt Disney himself apparently heard the stirrings, and moved to ban Hitchcock entirely.
Apparently, reports note, when Disney saw Psycho, he announced that he would never let his children see that movie. Which is fair; children should not watch Psycho anyway. But Disney also went on to declare that he would never let its director shoot a movie in his park. This was despite earlier plans to actually work with Hitchcock on an animated adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story.
Is Disney Stock a Buy or Hold?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on DIS stock based on 19 Buys and three Holds assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 14.54% rally in its share price over the past year, the average DIS price target of $138.68 per share implies 24.35% upside potential.
