Dis­ney claims 2019’s box-office crown with an unprece­dent­ed gross

Though much of this weekend’s movie chat­ter con­cerned the State­side release of Quentin Taran­ti­no​‘s lat­est pic­ture, the biggest vic­to­ry belonged to the ever-expand­ing Walt Dis­ney Com­pa­ny. With five full months still left on the cal­en­dar, the House of Mouse has secured a posi­tion of total box-office dom­i­nance for the rest of the year.

Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood may have edged out the com­put­er-ani­mat­ed The Lion King remake at the tick­et counter, but Dis­ney still hit a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone in terms of their col­lec­tive year-to-date gross­es. The Hol­ly­wood Reporter notes that the wind­fall now stands at a mind-bog­gling $7.67 bil­lion for glob­al tick­et sales, break­ing the pre­vi­ous record of $7.61 bil­lion that Dis­ney had set in 2016. (And we’ve still got the undoubt­ed­ly lucra­tive sequels to Malef­i­cent and Frozen left on the board.)

With Avengers: Endgame, Cap­tain Mar­vel, Aladdin, Toy Sto­ry 4, and The Lion King, they’ve claimed the top five box-office spots in Amer­i­ca. Aladdin, Cap­tain Mar­vel and Endgame have all sur­passed the bil­lion-dol­lar mark (The Lion King is expect­ed to join them soon), with the lat­ter sur­pass­ing Titan­ic to become the high­est-gross­ing movie of all time. It’s Disney’s world, we’re just pay­ing them to live in it.

For those invest­ed in The Fate of the Cin­e­ma (which sounds like a stu­dio tent­pole that would not earn a bil­lion dol­lars), the out­look has been large­ly gloomy. Over at the Guardian, Guy Lodge penned an op-ed posit­ing the dis­so­lu­tion of the Dis­ney colos­sus as the only mea­sure for staving off the film industry’s impend­ing exis­ten­tial cri­sis. In the event that Disney’s cre­ative teams con­tin­ue to devote more resources to their imag­i­na­tive­ly bank­rupt remakes than their charm­ing ani­mat­ed fea­tures (the next Moana, the next Coco) in the long term, the prog­no­sis looks grim.

But those in search of opti­mism needn’t look so hard to find it. In August, Walt Dis­ney Stu­dios Motion Pic­tures will release Ready Or Not, a thor­ough­ly grown-up hor­ror film chock­ablock with blood and curs­ing. The fate of their recent acqui­si­tion 20^th Cen­tu­ry Fox and their specialty/​indie releas­ing arm Fox Search­light seemed unclear, but Dis­ney has more capa­bil­i­ty than ever to get films like Ready Or Not made and out there.

Even for those read­ers unin­ter­est­ed in the com­mon rabble’s Dis­ney films, the rip­ples of their pow­er can still be felt, for bet­ter and for worse.