Star Wars, Marvel Help Push Disney Past This Historical Mark

Unless you’ve been in a coma in a secluded part of the world without any sort of media access, you’re probably well aware that Star Wars: The Force Awakens finally hit theaters and awoke a massive slew of Star Wars mania in the process. The movie smashed the previous box office record for an opening weekend by tens of millions of dollars, and this windfall helped push Disney past a huge financial milestone as the company has now taken in more than $5 billion in 2015, topping that number for the first time. That is so much money.

The House of Mouse has a number of big time subsidiaries, many of which had massive years individually. However, when taken together, Variety reports that all of their earnings combined to take Disney over the $5 billion dollar threshold for the first time in company history, besting their previous high of $4.73 billion, which they achieved in 2013.

But it’s not just Lucasfilm that propelled Disney to such astronomical numbers, as they also have little companies like Marvel and Pixar under their corporate umbrella. In just over a weekend, Star Wars: The Force Awakens has already surpassed $500 million worldwide, but Marvel had a pretty solid year as well. Avengers: Age of Ultron alone topped $1.4 billion worldwide, and Ant-Man, though not quite that scale of blockbuster, added a tidy sum of $500 million plus to sweeten the pot.

Animation studio Pixar also did its fair share of heavy lifting when it came to earning at the box office. Inside Out, the critically acclaimed exploration of emotions inside the head of an adolescent girl, raked in $851 million globally. However, their other offering of 2015, The Good Dinosaur, was not as much of a success, only bringing in $189 million against a reported $200 million budget. (It must be nice to be able to think of $189 million as a failure.)

Not to be outdone, Disney got a big boost from one of their of their classic titles. Kenneth Branagh’s live action adaptation of Cinderella brought in $542 million from the global marketplace, virtually assuring that we’ll eventually see such interpretations of damn near all of Disney’s animated favorites (Beauty and the Beast and The Jungle Book, among others, are already on the way).

Though $5 billion is a ridiculous number, it’s not entirely unheard of. This is Disney’s first time, but both Warner Bros. and Fox have topped that margin in years past, and Disney isn’t even the only one to do it this year. Thus far, Universal currently stands and the big fish in the sea, with $6.8 billion earned this year, thanks in large part to Jurassic World and Furious 7, both of which topped a billion dollars at the box office.

Brent McKnight