> even some of the aggregators (e.g. Netflix) have their own struggles.
Netflix’s stock price is still pretty high considering their product.
Disney market cap is $180B, Comcast is $180B, Netflix is $85B, Warner Bros Discovery is $35B. Fox/Viacom/Paramount are in the $15B to $20B range. Everyone else is much smaller.
Disney and Comcast have other businesses than selling media, and Disney has particularly strong brands. Netflix’s content does not seem much more compelling than HBO’s (Warner Bros Discovery), but it does have global presence.
Netflix might be overvalued, but those other companies aren’t in great places.
Disney for example is in a tough place in terms of growth which really hurts their market cap.
Take say their parks, they can’t significantly expand, open up new locations, or significantly raise prices and those parks have the risk of another shutdown etc. ESPN similarly dominates their niche but as a middle man they could lose major contracts. Again profitable but not a lot of room for growth. Disney+ is what their 3rd streaming service and eats into existing profits. Why buy an MCU blue-ray when 3 months of streaming costs the same.
They executed their purchases of Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars reasonably well but audiences are getting saturated and there isn’t a lot of franchises like that to keep buying. Worse they can’t seem to get new franchises off the ground. Frozen for example was a big hit but they ran it and other promising IP into the ground.
Objectively they've bungled Star Wars, it remains to be seen if they can get out of the woods with the amount of hostility they've created. Without the Mandalorian the situation would be dire.
Pixar literally didn't miss for the entire independent era, the occasional lackluster movie isn't going to alienate their core demographic, which is parents. Marvel is of course printing money with no end in sight, but this is a two out of three thing imho.
I agree Disney’s handling of the Star Wars was a dumpster fire from a story standpoint.
However, the Star Wars acquisition has been extremely profitable financially and the IP is still quite valuable. 2.1% of the company + 2.21 Billion was easily worth it. Theme park attractions, toys, etc just let them leverage IP in ways few companies can match in the short term.
People keep showing up to spend a billion dollars at the box office for Star Wars movies. Internet discourse isn’t necessarily a good indicator for the success of mainstream movies.
The discourse surrounding Marvel is ten times as grumpy, Star Wars is simply underperforming. The Mandalorian was a decent save, but they're out of films that a bunch of people will go see no matter what, now that the core storyline is told.
There's time to turn the ship around, but if the next two cinema releases are duds the franchise is in real trouble. Marvel can blow a movie any time they like.
It's Disney, I expect they'll squeeze profit out of the IP for a long time to come, but that might end up dominated by short animated series aimed squarely at kids. Hard to say, Favreau understands what Star Wars is and hopefully they see that and scale it.
Netflix’s stock price is still pretty high considering their product.
Disney market cap is $180B, Comcast is $180B, Netflix is $85B, Warner Bros Discovery is $35B. Fox/Viacom/Paramount are in the $15B to $20B range. Everyone else is much smaller.
Disney and Comcast have other businesses than selling media, and Disney has particularly strong brands. Netflix’s content does not seem much more compelling than HBO’s (Warner Bros Discovery), but it does have global presence.