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Movies & TV

08th Dec 2019

Disney becomes first studio in history to pass $10 billion at worldwide box office

Dave Hanratty

Disney box office

It is Disney’s world and we’re just spending money in it.

If you needed a marker of Disney’s power – outside of the overwhelming amount of entertainment that the media conglomerate is putting out lately – how does $10 billion sound?

Or, rather, a little bit north of that figure.

That’s the state of play as far as worldwide box office earnings are concerned for the House of Mouse, with Variety reporting that Disney is imminently set to become the first studio to move beyond the $10 billion mark.

As of Sunday, the current total is at around $9.997 billion, made up $3.28 billion in North America and $6.7 billion in the rest of the world.

This year’s Avengers: Endgame ($2.798 billion in global takings) and The Lion King live action remake ($1.656 billion) contributed a huge chunk to the milestone, which will be made official before Stars Wars: The Rise of Skywalker opens in the next fortnight.

Variety notes that recent Fox films – with that empire acquired by Disney in March – such as Dark Phoenix and Le Mans ’66 don’t count towards the overall total, otherwise they’d be up at around $11.9 billion.

2019 really has been a colossal year for the studio, with five films crossing the billion-dollar mark at the box office; Avengers: Endgame, The Lion King, Aladdin, Toy Story 4 and Captain Marvel.

As of this weekend, Frozen 2 has clocked in at $920 billion and will almost certainly make it a sixth. As noted, Star Wars is nearly here, too.

Don’t look for the Disney dominance to wane any time soon, essentially.

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