Why Didn't 'Dumbo' Clean Up at the Box Office?
Fine, Disney's live-action Dumbo opened with an estimated $45.0 million. That's a pretty big number -- not elephant big, sure, but maybe baby-elephant-with-oversized-ears big.
Nonetheless, that's not a tremendous sum for a movie that cost a reported $170 million to make and another $130 million or so to market. At those costs, and given that Disney has to share about half the global grosses with theater owners, Dumbo will have to sell about $600 million worth of tickets worldwide to break even. At $116 million globally so far, the levitating baby elephant is soaring at only about one-sixth of that level and will have to soar miles higher just to clear the bar of profitability.
Indeed, Dumbo's domestic debut comes at the low end of expecations, which were all over the circus tent, from $43 to $65 million. In retrospect, however, it's easy to see why Dumbo was such a gargantuan gamble whose ultimate landing was hard to predict. Among the wild cards were these five factors:
Tim Burton. The visually inventive director helped Disney kick off the current wave of live-action remakes of its classic cartoons a decade ago with his smash hit reimagining of Alice in Wonderland. Since then, however, his own career has been commercially hit-or-miss. His old-school Gothic creepiness may or may not have been the right mode for a remake of Disney's unusually dark and traumatic 1941 cartoon, but his auteurist spendthrift extravagance was probably more than the fragile yarn could bear. If Disney had limited Dumbo to a stricter budget -- about $100 million less, as with its Pete's Dragon and Christopher Robin -- expectations would have been lower, and profitability would have been much easier. Sure, it's tough to do a live-action film about a flying elephant on the cheap -- but maybe that should have been reason to reconsider the whole project.
The adults. As it turned out, the grown-ups did come out for Dumbo, as Disney's tracking showed that 54 percent of the viewers were over 25. But that wasn't a given. The adult audience was essential; kids don't have the nostalgia for Dumbo that they do for the Disney animated features of the last 30 years, and the inevitably grim tone of the film was going to keep a lot of kids away -- or at least scare their parents into not bringing them. Plus, grown-ups probably appreciate Tim Burton more than kids do, even though the filmmaker frequently works for Disney and often tries to make movies that have something to offer viewers of all ages.
Nonetheless, Dumbo got just a 50 percent fresh rating from the critics at Rotten Tomatoes. Considering that viewers old enough to remember being traumatized by childhood viewings of the original Dumbo are also the ones who still rely (sometimes) on critics, those reviews had to hurt. Fortunately, consumer word-of-mouth was strong (as measured by an A- grade at CinemaScore), so peer recommendations, Burton fandom, and curiosity about how Burton and Disney would handle this unique property from their childhood all apparently overcame the lack of critical enthusiasm.
The competition. There wasn't much from new movies this week, although all three of them targeted adults as well. There was Unplanned, which did better than expected (an estimated $6.1 million, good for fifth place), considering that it's an evangelical Christian polemic about abortion, and that its R rating for gore (the first R rating in faith-based distributor Pure Flix's history) kept it from being advertised on a lot of the right-leaning outlets that target the film's natural constituency. There was also terrorism docudrama Hotel Mumbai, which expanded from four screens to 924 and reaped an estimated $3.1 million, finishing in eighth place. And there was Matthew McConaughey's stoner comedy The Beach Bum, which, according to estimates, aptly scrounged up a lackadaisical $1.8 million, still good enough for tenth place.
Even in the aggregate, though, these newcomers didn't pose much of a threat to Dumbo. Bigger challenges came from the second week of Us -- with Jordan Peele's thought-provoking horror film grabbing another estimated $33.6 million, for a 10-day total of $128.2 million -- and from the fourth week of Disney's own Captain Marvel, which earned another estimated $20.5 million, for a huge 24-day total of $353.8 million. The little elephant could have done better at a time when two such hits weren't sucking up most of the peanuts at the multiplex, but then, it's never a good time anymore. In another four weeks, Disney's own Avengers: Endgame is going to rule the box office universe, and maybe people are already saving their ticket money for that center-ring event instead of Burton and Disney's new sideshow attraction.
The slump. For the first quarter of 2019, domestic box office overall is down 20 percent from the same period last year. Yes, there was no Star Wars movie held over from Christmastime this winter, and Black Panther was an incredible fluke even for a sure-thing Marvel movie, a fluke no one expected to be repeated this year. Nonetheless, there's been a dearth of hits motivating people to keep coming back to the theaters this winter, even with such blockbusters as Captain Marvel, Us, and How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World all currently filling seats at the multiplex. Yes, Avengers: Endgame could single-handedly make up for the entire 2019 deficit (though counting on it to do so is probably wishful thinking). Nonetheless, moviegoers have spent the winter falling out of the habit of going to the movies, and Burton's elephant alone wasn't going to be enough to cure homebound viewers of their fondness for cocooning on their couches.
The genre. The modest earnings of Dumbo, along with those of Mary Poppins Returns, Christopher Robin, and Pete's Dragon (not to mention such stumbles as A Wrinkle in Time and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms) ought to make Disney question its live-action family film strategy. Not every Disney remake of its beloved animated features is going to pay off as well as Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, or Beauty and the Beast did. Nonetheless, Disney is more than doubling down; Dumbo is just the first of four live-action remakes of old Disney cartoons due this year, with Aladdin coming in two months, The Lion King two months after that, and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (a sequel to Maleficent, the successful recent reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, starring Angelina Jolie as the vengeful sorceress) coming in October. So Disney is offering twice as many live-action cartoon remakes this year as Marvel movies.
That seems like oversaturation, of the sort that offers a serious risk of live-action cartoon remake fatigue among the nostalgic adults that Disney relies on to bring both grown-ups and their kids to the theater. Disney's animated intellectual-property well is deep but not bottomless, and the decision to make sequels to the remakes smacks of desperation and creative bankruptcy. (Remember the sequel to Burton's live-action Alice? Of course you don't. No one does.) Really, the only sign that Disney hasn't scraped the bottom of this well yet is the fact that it hasn't tried to adapt Song of the South... at least, not yet.
Not that anyone's going to listen to me on this issue. Disney could drop this whole subgenre tomorrow, and then all it would have left is Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, and Disney's own cartoon studio (coming soon: Frozen 2!), all of them ridiculously profitable. Even if Dumbo didn't fly as high as it should have, Disney is still coming to take all your monies.