Analyst Predicts 'Mufasa: The Lion King" Will Be "Massive Catastrophic Flop" After Film Opens To Abysmal $35 Million Domestic Box Office
The Walt Disney Company and Walt Disney Studios appear to have another commercial failure on their hands as their latest release Mufasa: The Lion King only had a domestic opening of just $35 million.
The-Numbers reports that the film had an opening weekend at the domestic box office of just $35 million. It did do decently internationally with $87.2 million for a global gross of $122.2 million.
The $35 million gross was well below original predictions from Shawn Robbins at Box Office Theory. He originally predicted the film would gross between $57 million and $69 million with a soft target of $61 million back on November 15th. $35 million is 42% lower than $61 million.
As the film got closer to its release, Robbins continued to lower his numbers. On December 5th, the film’s range had declined to between $55 million and $65 million with a soft target of $58 million.
Just ahead of this weekend he lowered it even further to between $34 million and $43 million with a soft target of $39.8 million.
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For comparison, The Lion King, which released just five years ago in 2019 had an opening domestic weekend of $191.7 million. That means Mufasa’s opening weekend was a whopping 81.7% worse than The Lion King. And that’s without factoring in inflation.
2019’s The Lion King eventually went on to gross $543.6 million and another $1.1 billion internationally for a global gross of $1.6 billion.
For another comparison, the original 1994 animated The Lion King had an opening weekend of $40.8 million. Again, that’s without factoring in inflation.
If you do factor in inflation that’s an opening weekend of $87 million.
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Box office analyst OMB Reviews noted that Mufasa’s box office opening is even worse than it looks if you are looking at total tickets sold.
Noting the per theater ratio for Mufasa was only $8,546, he explained, “That’s even worse when you remember that Mufasa and Disney … has almost a complete lock on the IMAX and premium format screens. … So the fact that they had all those premium and still only got half of what Sonic did … says a lot more to Sonic and a lot less to Mufasa. That’s a lot less people going to see Mufasa as far as raw net ticket sales are concerned when you take those numbers into account of how much more expensive IMAX and 3D tickets actually are versus that of Sonic. It’s just a complete demolishment of Mufasa by Sonic in every single way that you actually look at it.”
Later in his analysis, OMB Reviews shared that the international numbers are not as good as what initial expectations were supposed to be either.
Going into the weekend, the film was expected to bring in $180 million internationally, but as noted above it only did $122 million. He said, “The fact this came in $60 million less than what was being anticipated that is not only a sign of just how bad things are domestically, this is also a sign of how bad things are internationally as well. This movie is not being accepted to the same degree.”
“If no one is showing up for this film internationally then it has no audience,” he asserted. “It has no hope whatsoever. If this is their starting point: $87.2 million being currently reported here from The-Numbers.com if that is what we are looking at this movie is going to be a massive catastrophic flop.”
He continued, “A $200 million reported budget. Lord knows how much marketing went into this movie. It’s not good.”
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He then shared that the film is likely going to only make around $366 million by the end of its run.
“When you go from $1.8, $1.9 billion in the first film to now not even half a billion dollars projected right now — again, very early, holiday frame can oftentimes play with those projections — let’s just say it’s not looking good. I think a best case scenario this film barely breaks even, barely breaks profit, but I’m not seeing it at this point,” he shared.
What do you make of Mufasa: The Lion King’s opening box office haul?
Ask yourself this. You and the wife/kids want to see a movie and the choices are Disney's Mufasa or Sonic 3. Which of the 2 movies has the greater risk of being anything from disappointing to including content you wish your kids had never seen or heard?
Disney has destroyed it's brand, it's image. It is no longer trusted by most families. I'm surprised it made what it has.
Disney and especially Bob Iger thoroughly deserve this.
So you are telling me a "Live Action" Prequel to Lion King "Live Action", which both are just CGI Animation of Real Life Animals, somehow bombed?
Who ever could have seen this coming................