Disney's movie business suffers another setback with 'Surrogates'

At first glance, I didn't think the second-place finish was all that bad. Surrogates came in ahead of MGM's Fame, Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) The Informant!, and Lions Gate's (NYSE: LGF) Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself. Since I had heard a lot of apprehension about the opening prospects for Surrogates, I was preparing for a much lower number and rank.

However, according to the Los Angeles Times, the film cost $80 million to make. Add in the expense of selling the picture, and you get a figure reportedly north of $100 million. A $15 million take on the first weekend for a very expensive reel of celluloid won't do much to stimulate shareholder value. The timing of the film's debut in the market may have contributed to its weak performance. Surrogates probably should have been released in the summer, or maybe sometime in the spring. This is all hindsight, I realize. The event is now in the cinematic history books, so there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Now that Cook is gone, I am praying that Disney will be able to improve its studio operations once and for all; it's difficult to tell investors to consider buying the company's stock when this part of the business is having issues. Of course, with the Marvel (NYSE: MVL) acquisition, one might expect that a lot of the heavy lifting will be done by that operation over time. The media concern did lay out billions of dollars for that investment, after all. Hopefully Disney won't need to buy anything else.

Disclosure: I own Disney; positions can change without notice.