A Long Time Ago in a Box Office Far, Far Away…
Picture the scene at Disney's Burbank headquarters last Tuesday morning. After seven years away from cinemas, Star Wars was supposed to come roaring back over Memorial Day weekend — the unofficial start of Hollywood's summer, when families pile into multiplexes and studios bank a third of their annual ticket sales. Instead, executives woke up to a number nobody at the Magic Kingdom wanted to see: roughly $102 million across four days.
That figure might sound enormous if you're not used to tracking blockbusters. It isn't. It's the worst opening for any Star Wars film since Disney paid $4 billion for Lucasfilm back in 2012 — lower even than 2018's "Solo," a movie so disappointing it briefly froze the franchise altogether. And this one had Baby Yoda in it. The internet's favourite green toddler. The character that made "The Mandalorian" television show a phenomenon and pushed Disney+ subscriptions past 100 million.
So what went wrong? The short answer: Disney spent seven years giving away Star Wars for the price of a streaming subscription, and audiences finally took them at their word — that it wasn't worth leaving the house for. The longer answer is a cautionary tale for anyone running a brand, a business, or anything in between.
