Monday, June 23, 2014

The Mouse Never Stops

Now with synergistic Add On.

The Disney animated feature that could.

Frozen took in another $3.6M in Japan over the weekend to take its box office tally in the nation to $233.3M.
The Disney film has now been the box office leader in Japan for 15 weeks in a row as its warm response continues to shock analysts.
Frozen's $1.259B worldwide gross places it 5th all-time with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 within striking distance at #4.

All I can say is, my face has fallen atop the floor.

Add On: But it shouldn't, since Disney has long been built of inter-locking pieces that reinforce each other:

... [The Disney] ecosystem is amazing. Second, the opportunities for strong growth going decades into the future exists. The Shanghai theme park and Star Wars franchises are simply two of the more high profile examples of the sort of thing to expect over and over from Disney in the future. ...

Even since I was a little kid watching Anette and the other Mouseketeers dance their hearts on the teevee, I was kind of aware that walt Disney Productions had a lot of moving parts.

The Disneyland shows about Davey Crockett sold a lot of 45 rpm records and coonskin caps. The Mickey Mouse Club (also the nighttime show) tirelessly plugged Disney theatrical releases and cartoons. And sold a lot of Mouseketeer caps.

The big amusement park in Anaheim built a lot of its rides and exhibits around the animated features. Which (in those ancient days) were recycled into theaters every seven years.

Smart. And certaintly forward-looking. At a time when most movie companies didn't look beyond the next quarter of profits and losses.

Understand that Diz Co. was cross-promoting and plunging into new media (then known as "television") before any other movie studios were doing it. The corporation got into amusement parks decades before other entertainment conglomerate ventured into that pool. In the seventies and eighties, when its movie operations withered on the vine, Disneyland and Disneyworld did a lot to keep Diz Co. afloat.

That fact that, today, it has morphed into the Berkshire-Hathaway of entertainment conglomerates shouldn't take away from the fact that in building a healthy corporate "ecosystem", Disney was there first.

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