Disney Has Made A Lot More From 'Star Wars' Than What It Bought The Franchise For
Image Source: Royal Bank
The $4.05 billion that Disney paid for Lucasfilm in 2012 wasn't the company's most expensive acquisition (it paid $7.4 billion for Pixar in 2006 and an incredible $71.3 billion for 21st Century Fox in 2018), but still, it's a lot of money. 11.5 years after bringing Star Wars under the umbrella of the Mouse-House, the company has now revealed how much money it has made from the franchise since the day in October 2012 when George Lucas and Bob Iger signed the deed of contract in a filing for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
One of the slides shows the Return on Investment ratio of four of Disney's key franchises, and while Frozen leads this chart with an impressive factor of 9.9, Star Wars still has a ratio of 2.9, which means that Disney has made nearly $12 billion from Star Wars since 2012.
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You won't get that amount by adding up the global box office numbers of the Star Wars films released since 2015. Since the early days of the space opera, the franchise has been much more than just a bunch of movies. One of George Lucas's most genius stokes was to retain the rights for practically all kinds of merchandise, spotting the Star Wars logo and for decades, the revenues from toys, apparel, coffee cups, LEGO sets, bedsheets, books, comics, and countless other physical products far exceeded that of the movies.
This hasn't changed since the Disney acquisition. While Star Wars toys may play a much less prominent role today than they did in the late 70s and early 80s, Star Wars has branched out into new areas under the leadership of Disney: With Galaxy's Edge part of Disney Parks, there are also Disney cruises solely dedicated to the galaxy far, far away. Since 2019 several new Star Wars TV shows have premiered on Disney+ every year, with the first season of The Mandalorian being among the flagship shows when the streaming service started. While the costs of each of these shows are accounted for, it is much harder to estimate the number of new subscribers associated with these shows.
Disney's board members are most likely happy with this 2.9x ROI for Star Wars. Still, there have also been some financial disappointments over the years: Solo bombed at the box office, and the Galactic Starcruiser - a ridiculously expensive immersive hotel experience at the Disney parks - had to close down after just a few months. Following the divisive Sequel Trilogy, Disney struggled for years to find a new strategy for cinematic Star Wars before announcing several new feature films slated to hit cinemas starting in 2026.
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Source: Screenrant
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