Outposters, imagine a world. A world where you, as a senior business leader, can take the most important product that your company produces and not only destroy that brand in the eyes of its most important customers, but you then attack those customers, pushing them away from your brand forever. This leads them to flood the marketplace with negative feedback and ensures every subsequent product variant fails.
Then imagine that you followed that up by taking your company’s second most important product and, after a prolonged period of indecision over the direction product development should take, you lose the parent company millions of dollars with a completely bungled product launch.
Think of any industry. Automotive. Retail. Financial Services. The writing would be on the wall for your career. Not so in Hollywood. It appears to still be the single industry where abject failure is rewarded and people who can only be described as idiots survive and thrive.
Wholesale leadership changes have completely failed to arrive at Lucasfilm despite a litany of such failures, so this news is not expected to have much impact. What news? The news that Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny was a catastrophic money-loser for Disney.
A report in Forbes covers the financial report disclosures by Disney that detail just how bad things were. Production vs. ticket sales leaves a deficit of $134.2 million.
Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny eventually cost an eye-watering $387.2 million, then went on to gross only $384 million worldwide at the box-office. On the law of cinema returns, the studio will have only taken half of that ($192 million).
There is a generous tax break from the UK government to take into account, and ongoing licensing and home entertainment sales will also boost the take, but then that figure also does not include marketing costs.
Another complete clusterf*ck for Lucasfilm, then.
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