Disney Stock Gets Hit Again, Cementing Years Of Self-Inflicted Financial Problems

After decades of dominance, the Walt Disney Company has been on a years-long losing streak. And it's all its own fault. 

On Thursday, Disney announced quarterly earnings, and once again, they were disappointing relative to Wall Street expectations. That sent the stock price tumbling, down $9 per share as of early afternoon. That's a 7.65 percent single-day decline, and it's once again dropped Disney shares roughly 46 percent from their 2021 highs. 

Even worse for the entertainment giant, it means its stock price is lower than it was a decade ago.

It's a stunning decline for a company that used to dominate the entertainment industry. 

While the explanations for this are varied, and there are issues across their various businesses that have hurt the company's bottom line, the vast majority of Disney's issues are self-inflicted wounds. And instead of dealing with the ramifications and underlying problems with their strategy, the company brought CEO Bob Iger back to fix things. Iger, though, has done little to nothing to stop the onslaught of negative news. 

RELATED: Another Big Budget Disney Movie Flops At The Box Office After Politicized Promo

Which isn't surprising, since he was responsible for setting the company on its problematic course in the first place.

Attendees are reflected in Disney+ logo during the Walt Disney D23 Expo in Anaheim, California on September 9, 2022. (Photo by Patrick T. FALLON / AFP) (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)

Disney Has Created Its Own Unnecessary Problems

While the modern Disney company is heavily diversified, with ESPN, Parks, travel, streaming, and technology, at its core remains the film studio. Quality family entertainment drives much of the company's ancillary businesses. 

"Frozen," for example, has spawned theme park lands, themed experiences, limitless merchandise sales, short projects for Disney+, and stage shows. 

And that's precisely the problem. Over the last decade, Disney has failed to turn out quality original entertainment, as its focus shifted to politically-charged content and activism. Here's a list of some of their most recent animated film projects.

• 2021 — Raya and the Last Dragon
• 2021 — Encanto
• 2022 — Strange World
• 2023 — Wish
• 2024 — Moana 2

Not exactly the most impressive filmography, is it?

Similarly, the Disney-owned animation studio Pixar has shifted its focus away from the classic storytelling that made it successful. "Toy Story," "Up," "Monster's Inc.," "Finding Nemo." All movies that had humor, heart, inoffensive plots, and quality that was reminiscent of classic Disney. Here's a list of Pixar's recent releases:

• 2020 — Onward
• 2020 — Soul
• 2021 — Luca
• 2022 — Turning Red
• 2022 — Lightyear
• 2023 — Elemental
• 2024 — Inside Out 2
• 2025 — Elio

Outside "Inside Out 2," all of those films were box office disappointments. "Lightyear" injected politics into a kids movie, and failed. "Elemental" had a "non-binary" character in a kids' movie, and failed. It's become a consistent problem for Disney and Disney-owned properties, including Marvel. Injecting politics where it doesn't belong, only to see disappointing financial results. 

Politics isn't the only problem; audiences have realized they can wait for movies to hit streaming services and save money and time. But that's a result of the content becoming more and more disposable. Watching films at home isn't the same experience as going to the theater, as distractions and smartphones make it harder to focus. Yet consumers have realized that there's little point in paying more for a mediocre product. That's what Disney's been churning out, mediocrity. And once you lose the benefit of the doubt with your customers, it's extremely hard to get it back.

Disney also picked an unnecessary fight with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, inserting itself into a political discussion around teaching young children inappropriate materials. Its reputation has never recovered.

Then there are issues with ESPN, which overpaid for the NBA, is currently locked in a fight with YouTube TV, and has not been able to successfully break into the lucrative world of sports betting. The streaming model, which Disney jumped into with Disney+, is extremely hard to make money on, as customers get used to low monthly fees and bundled deals with other companies while expecting mountains of expensive new content. 

Still, the broader issue remains: this was avoidable. Disney simply did not have to allow far-left progressives to take over its studios, its executive ranks, and its workforce. It did not have to allow those progressives to inject their personal political views into content meant to appeal to the widest possible audience. It did not have to forcefully advocate for teaching inappropriate content to children in Florida, losing its unilateral control over the Walt Disney World property in the process.

Disney became the dominant family entertainment company in Hollywood for a reason, and instead of building on it, Iger has created, tolerated and exacerbated its decline. The obsessive focus on IP in the parks, at the cost of user experience, theming and quality. The politicization of kids movies. The desire to be part of celebrity culture. The company-wide degradation has, again, cost the company prestige, money, and as Thursday's results show, stock value. As the meme goes, not great, Bob.