The folks at Disney just can’t catch a break, can they? First, it was revealed that Solo: A Star Wars Story opened well below projections and now, because of the pic’s poor box office performance, the studio’s shares have dropped 2.4 percent, according to The Wrap.
On Tuesday, Disney shares closed at $99.72 and adding insult to injury is the fact that in the last five trading sessions, “shares have declined more than 3 percent, and shares are down more than 7 percent so far this year.”
This announcement came after the reveal that Solo: A Star Wars Story opened with a paltry $83 million during its three-day weekend and only climbed to $103 million over the four-day holiday. These numbers are well below the $130 million that it’d been predicted to gross throughout Memorial Day Weekend and seriously underwhelming for a release from one of the biggest franchises in cinema.
The movie’s underperformance has also prompted Disney distribution chief Dave Hollis to reveal his own ideas on why the film did so poorly. One theory is that the studio released it too close to Deadpool 2 and Avengers: Infinity War, with Hollis saying:
“There’s a question of frequency and how many times people will go to the movies. Is this too much and too soon for a third time in a five-week period.”
He’s certainly not wrong there. Going to the movies is pricey and dropping three blockbusters so close to each other eats into people’s wallets rather quickly. These films should feel like events and be given plenty of breathing room in between.
That’s just one theory Hollis offered, though. His other reason is that they released it too soon after The Last Jedi. That’s also probably true, and as he says, they’re now going to spend time figuring out what happened.
“We are all over it, and will spend a lot of time digging into why things happened the way they did. We have a year and a half before Episode IX comes out.”
Thankfully, Episode IX is the next Star Wars picture to hit theaters and we’ve got plenty of room in between it and Solo: A Star Wars Story, with J.J. Abrams’ trilogy closer not due to arrive until December of 2019.