Disney is having a Marvel-ous year

Xinhua | Updated: 2019-12-23 11:06

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Blowing past all previous box office records, the Mouse House smashed its own record of 7.61 billion US dollars back in July and has been on afterburner thrusters ever since.

Seemingly an unstoppable entertainment juggernaut, Disney has already powered past a world cume milestone of 10 billion US dollars for 2019 for its home-grown films and toward 11.94 billion dollars with the Fox titles added, which are now under Disney's banner. This gives Disney a lock on nearly 40 percent of the US domestic market.

Disney's staggering box office numbers are a world first and a record that could take eons to break, giving them bragging rights for years to come.

"Disney is the one to beat," Hollywood entertainment attorney, Randy Mendelsohn, explained to Xinhua. "And that won't happen anytime soon."

Disney's dominance is in large part due to the vision and business acumen of soon-to-be-retiring Chairman and CEO Bob Iger, who has been quietly implementing his own well-thought out, strategic 10-year plan of savvy acquisitions of innovative, content-heavy companies like Pixar, LucasFilm and 20th Century Fox.

Ten years ago, Disney was an "also ran" who, until as recently as five years ago, consistently finished in the middle of the pack amongst the Hollywood Big 6 studios.

Now, stampeding toward 2020, Disney is powering across the New Year finish line and into business history with a record breaking six films being inducted into coveted Billion Dollar Club in a single year: superhero film Avengers: Endgame ($2.8 billion and the highest-grossing film in history), photo-realistic animation movie The Lion King ($1.7 billion), the female-driven superhero film Captain Marvel ($1.1 billion), animated comedy film Toy Story 4 ($1.07 billion), musical fantasy film Aladdin ($1.05 billion), plus animated musical fantasy film Frozen II, which was released less than four weeks ago, yet has already passed the 1-billion-dollar mark and is still going strong. Frozen II is also already the seventh largest animated film of all time.