All hail the Magic Kingdom. Disney has hit a big box office goal, selling more than $6 billion in tickets worldwide.
This is the fifth time Disney has reached $6 billion — and the first time since the pandemic.
They hit this mark before in 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016. No other movie studio has come close to $6 billion since 2015. It's important to note that the overall box office hasn't fully bounced back since the pandemic. Ticket sales are still about 20% lower than they were before the pandemic started.
Thanks to two huge hits — May's "Lilo & Stitch" ($1.03 billion) and November's "Zootopia 2" ($1.3 billion so far) — along with James Cameron's "Avatar: Fire and Ash" ($450 million in its first week) and three Marvel sequels, Disney made $2.3 billion at home and $3.65 billion internationally from all these movies.
This is Disney's best year since 2019, when they had seven movies that crossed the $1 billion mark.
These included Marvel films like "Captain Marvel" and "Avengers: Endgame," live-action remakes like "Aladdin" and "The Lion King," animated sequels like "Toy Story 4" and "Frozen II," and the Star Wars sequel "The Rise of Skywalker."
Not every movie Disney released in 2025 made a profit.
Pixar's "Elio" made only $154 million, the live-action "Snow White" made $205 million, and "Tron: Ares" made $142 million — all far below their production budgets, which ranged from $150 million to $250 million. Studios split ticket sales about 50-50 with theaters, so a movie needs to make at least 2.5 times its budget to be worth the cost. Even so, Marvel didn't do well with three straight underperformers: "Captain America: Brave New World" ($415 million), "Thunderbolts" ($382 million), and "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" ($521 million). These numbers are nothing like the days when any Marvel movie could easily hit $1 billion. Still, Disney's missed movies still beat most of their rivals' biggest hits in terms of ticket sales. And the characters from these movies can bring in hundreds of millions, even billions in merchandise, like "Lilo & Stitch."
Disney's box office success is likely to continue in 2026 with a strong lineup, including "Avengers: Doomsday," "Toy Story 5," the live-action "Moana," and "The Devil Wears Prada 2."
It's good to be Disney.
