Straight Answers to Silly Questions: What are the most obvious signs from their movies that Disney is out to make money?

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© 2019 TWDC


What are the most obvious signs from their movies that Disney is out to make money?
Why are you asking such a silly question about The Walt Disney Company in general and specifically its Walt Disney Motion Pictures Studio division? Is there a valid reason for this, or are you jumping on the “let’s bash Disney because it’s a huge corporation” bandwagon?
First of all, The Walt Disney Company was not created just to create “art” or provide entertainment just for the sake of making audiences happy. It was founded. in part, because Walt Disney was an artist who wanted to share his talents as an animator with the world, but it was also set up as a business enterprise. It wasn’t created to make art for art’s sake.
Second, “Disney” exists to give its shareholders a return for their investments. When you buy stock in any business, you’re not merely getting a pretty piece of paper with the company logo; you’re purchasing a stake in that company’s future. Thus, if you own stock in Disney, or Viacom, or any of the major entertainment-related companies, such as Comcast or MGM Holdings, you are giving them your money to help them finance their film projects in the hope that those projects either make a profit or, at the very least, break even.
If that sounds a bit like gambling, that’s because it is. Making a movie is, in essence, a big-stakes crapshoot. 20th Century Fox, when it was an independent corporation, had its boom-and-bust cycles, just like most business entities. Its heyday was when Darryl F. Zanuck was its head, roughly between 1935 to the late 1950s. After 1954 or so, when Zanuck was losing his “magic touch” and Fox started to decline, the studio nearly went out of business due to the rise of television in the Fifties and bad decisions made by the board of directors, including the long and expensive process of making Cleopatra.
Indeed, if it had not been for the success of a handful of films (The Longest Day, The Sound of Music, Star Wars, Alien, and Die Hard), I doubt that Fox would have survived as a studio long enough to co-produce (with Paramount Pictures) 1997’s Titanic. The first three movies on the aforementioned list helped 20th Century Fox survive into the 1980s, while the others kept the company healthy enough for Rupert Murdoch and his family, owners of 21st Century Fox, to sell the studio and its intellectual properties to The Walt Disney Company.
So, yes, every film and or television series “Disney” makes, either under its own brand or through its various subsidiaries (Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm Ltd., or 20th Century Fox) is intended to make money.
That’s why “show business” is called show business.

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