What Disney Got Right In August: An Investor Perspective
It was a crazy month for The Walt Disney Company. Buoyed (as always, it seems) by box office success, The Mouse was not an automatic “buy” for brokers this summer. But maybe it should have been?
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The Motley Fool’s Rick Munarriz wrote:
Disney investors looking back on August aren’t going to initially give the media giant a passing grade. The shares surrendered more than 3% of their value for the month. Between a poorly received quarterly report, failing in negotiations to keep the current iteration of Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a former accountant who turned whistleblower taking jabs at the revenue-recognition practices for scoring its theme-parks division, and now a massive windstorm barreling down on Florida as Disney World tries to salvage the historically potent Labor Day holiday weekend, there was no shortage of distractions.
The Disney bears may have won the month when it comes to the stock chart, but don’t sell the House of Mouse short. Disney is still beating the market, even if it wasn’t one of the market’s top stocks this month.
Disney got a few things right in August.
What Went Right For Disney In August
According to Munarriz, among those things were:
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Star Wars vindication in Florida
Thursday’s debut of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida checked off all the boxes of success that were missing from the world’s leading theme-park operator’s debut of an identical 14-acre expansion at Disneyland in California three months earlier…
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A great deal for early Disney+ subscribers
Disney’s D23 fan expo in Anaheim didn’t generate the same kind of buzz that the media behemoth cooked up two years earlier, but it found a clever way to get people to sign up for its Disney+ streaming service nearly three months before its Nov. 12 launch…
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Halloween started in mid-August
Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party is a separately ticketed event at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, taking place on select nights after an early close…
D23 Was Successful, Too
I think it’s important to point out that morale among Disney fans seems very high at the moment. Bolstered and put on display during the company’s fan festival, D23, Disney’s most loyal (and many casual observers) came away impressed – even if the significant splash from a new pavilion, park, or major project didn’t happen.
The D23 Expo that took place in Anaheim, CA, over the weekend unleashed a dizzying wave of new projects from Walt Disney Studios, including upcoming offerings from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pixar, the “Star Wars” universe, and the Disney+ streaming platform that launches on November 12. IndieWire has rounded up the highlights from the convention below.
The Indiewire Staff listed several Disney+ projects in its breakdown of The Walt Disney Company’s most important reveals during last weekend’s con.
Among those was The Mandalorian:
At [last] weekend’s D23 Expo in Anaheim, the team behind the new series “The Mandalorian” answered a few lingering questions, unveiling the first public look at the show set to make its streaming debut this fall.
This first peek not only gives a clue about the greater world of the series but highlights the impressive cast. Pedro Pascal stars as the title character, a gun-toting, rule-breaking bounty hunter in the mold of past “Star Wars” rapscallions like Boba Fett and Sabine Wren.
Set in the time after the events of “Return of the Jedi,” the show also features a bevy of other new characters, from former Empire soldiers to operatives still loyal to what’s left of the Emperor’s reach. Gina Carano, Carl Weathers (playing the perfectly named Greef Karga, the head of a bounty hunter ring), Giancarlo Esposito, and Werner Herzog, Nick Nolte, Emily Swallow, and Omid Abtahi will all feature into the series.
But what do you think? How do you think the company fared this past summer? Would you take a chance on Disney? Let us know in the comments.