Over all, box office sales are declining, so it’s easy to chalk up this to that trend over all and argue that people will watch the movie some other way, and Disney will still make their money back on streaming and parks.

But those parks and streaming make their money based on over all cultural relavence.

Arguably declining box office sales are largely driven by a declining relevance of the major producers who have consolidated so much of the industry. If 90% of the major films in a year are made by 2~3 companies who are all doing fairly similar things, and people aren’t interested in what they do, then it drives people away from theaters as a whole.

So even if this poor box office performance isn’t an outright failure due to other revenue stream, it is part of a larger trend of the entire industry being destroyed by corporate consolidation and an uncompetitive environment.