The Force Awakens Not Enough For Disney

stars wars

The latest episode in the Star Wars saga was released last Thursday in the United States. With analyst eyes watching carefully, the film smashed record after record:

Sold $100 million worth of pre-sale tickets, beating out Jurassic World’s $25 million mark.

Brought in $57 million on Thursday night, beating the previous opening Thursday record of $43.5 million, held by the final film in the Harry Potter franchise.

Opened domestically at $238 million, easily surpassing Jurassic World’s opening weekend of $208 million.

Beat the record for biggest global box office debut weekend with ticket sales of $529 million. It beat, you guessed it, Jurassic World, which had the previous record of $525 million.

As you can guess, expectations were high for Disney (DIS). The prequel episodes of the saga were lackluster at best and the new ownership had many Star Wars loyalists worried. Not only did the audience love it, however. The critics gave glowing reviews, with 95% of them giving it a “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Despite the exciting weekend, however, Disney’s stock hasn’t reacted well. In fact, it’s down 6.5% since Thursday’s open. So what’s going on? Two things:

Star Wars’ success was baked in

Even though it’s typical to see huge successes like this influence a stock in a good way, one of the reasons it didn’t could be that the perceived value from the film was already reflected in Disney’s valuation. After all, just the trailer gave the stock a nice bump back in April.

And it’s not like this is a surprise. Whether the film was bad or good, it was still expected to perform well at the box office. So investors had a heads up and reacted accordingly throughout the year.

Other problems

Despite being an analyst darling for years, Disney has lost some votes of confidence recently over its failings with ESPN. A report surfaced in November that the cable sports network has lost 7 million subscribers over the last two years. Considering how a big a piece of Disney’s pie ESPN represents, the news caused a couple analysts to call for caution.