Disney Rolls 75 Minutes of Footage at CinemaCon to Tease Robust Slate
After an uncharacteristically uneven year at the box office, Disney came to CinemaCon 2024 with a clear strategy in mind for its presentation: just let the cameras roll.
Extended sneak peeks defined Thursday afternoon’s presentation, with 75 minutes of sneak peek footage from films across the studio’s slate, highlighted by a whopping 35 minutes of this summer’s Pixar sequel “Inside Out 2,” along with sneak peeks of films like “Deadpool & Wolverine,” “Captain America: Brave New World,” “Moana 2,” and “Alien: Romulus,” among others.
It’s a double-down on a strategy that Disney has taken in CinemaCon past, largely eschewing the banter between filmmakers and actors to dedicate more presentation time to showing exhibitors more of what’s going to be in their theaters.
The longest portion of onstage banter came from Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige, who talked to the crowd without a teleprompter about the studio’s upcoming releases, with the help of “Captain America: Brave New World” star Anthony Mackie and “Deadpool & Wolverine” director Shawn Levy. Dwayne Johnson also appeared to show the opening song from “Moana 2.”
Disney blasted to the top of the box office market share charts in the late 2010s with a murderer’s row of tentpoles that brought audiences in all over the world. But in 2023, that excellent track record gave way to a far bumpier year as hits like “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and comeback stories like “Elemental” were interspersed with high-budget flops like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “The Marvels” and “Wish.”
Ironically, despite those flops, Disney still had the second-highest market share in 2023 with $1.44 billion in North America, showing how integral even a diminished Mouse House is for a theatrical market that is still quite a ways away from where it was prior to the pandemic.
But until it can get there, the film industry is turning to Disney — and especially Marvel — to provide the consistent jolt of tentpole support it once provided to the box office every two months or so. Due to strike delays, Disney pulled entirely out of the Q1 2024 slate, and for the first time in more than a decade, it will not have a Marvel film ready for release in the first weekend of May.
But “Deadpool & Wolverine” will be one of the top contenders for the title of summer’s highest grossing film when it hits theaters in late July, and the studio will be hoping for a rebound in family turnout with the release of “Inside Out 2” in June and “Moana 2” at Thanksgiving.
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