Disney, the once undisputed king of animated movies, has lost the box office race to archrival Universal Pictures for the last three years running — and there’s no sign of magical turnaround on the horizon.
From Pixar’s “Onward,” which opened to a disappointing $39 million in March 2020 to Walt Disney Animation’s “Strange World,” which barely cracked $25.5 million in its first 12 days of domestic release, Disney’s theatrically released animated films have grossed just over $1 billion worldwide.
Meanwhile, in that same period, with the same burdens of COVID and on much lower production budgets, Universal’s combined theatrical output from Illumination and DreamWorks Animation have earned $2.06