As June begins to wrap up we find ourselves midway through 2019. On the whole, it hasn't been a great year at the box office. Overall, business is down compared to 2018 and a lot of movies have been underperforming compared to expectations. However, a look at the numbers does confirm one thing, Disney rules all. The studio has brought in over $1.7 billion at the domestic box office so far this year, and that's more than double the number two studio.
Disney's official domestic box office take, through June 16 is $1,732,885,863. The number two studio is Warner Bros. which sits at $803,413,229 through the same period. Those numbers don't even includethe last week's worth of business, but considering the big winner was Disney's Toy Story 4, and Warner Bros. highest performing film right now is Godzilla: King of the Monsters which has been out for a month, that ratio is only going to increase.
What's also impressive is that Disney has reached this position with only five films having been released, and one of them was the Disneynature documentary Penguins which was hardly a box office power house. Universal and Warner Bros. have released eight films in the same time period and done a fraction of the total business.
The massive difference isn't simply because Disney is now a larger company, Box Office Mojo is still listing 20th Century Fox as a separate studio, so the $222 million that those films have brought in to North America aren't being added to the Disney numbers.
Of course, the numbers say a lot more than "Disney is unstoppable" when you look at them a little closer. While Disney's lead is impressive, the total also down slightly compared to last year, mostly because domestically, Black Panther did better in 2018 than Captain Marvel did this year, though globally those positions are reversed.
Also, while Warner Bros. may be looking like a distant second place, that studio actually has their numbers seeing a serious spike compared to last year. The $800 million WB has brought in domestically is a 26% increase compared to 2018.
Of course, the year is far from over and while a lot of things could change, Disney's dominance isn't likely to be one of them. In addition to the just released Toy Story 4, which is off to an impressive start at the box office, the studio has four more films on the schedule and three of them are The Lion King, Frozen II, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, all three are virtually guaranteed to be massive hits. Only Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is a question mark and that film will probably still do well, and only look like an underperformer in comparison to everything else.
Where Disney comes out in the end is anybody's guess. While the studio might actually be behind its 2018 pace, with so many big movies on the way, it could very easily set yet more box office records when the year comes to an end.
