Disney’s Approach To Theaters Was Already Changing
While not every year of the last several has been a box office record year, it’s difficult to argue that the theatrical movie business has been doing quite well, at least from the studio side of things. However, the interesting trend that we’ve seen over the years, and more from Disney than any other studio, is that these huge box office numbers have been put up by fewer and fewer movies. Even in the mid-1980s, Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s strategy of “base hits,” not “home runs,” meant seeing more movies released in theaters, and as long as each one, or most of them, were modest hits, the studio blossomed.