"Companies dependent on consumer spending have been under a cloud on Wall Street," cautions Chuck Carlson, the industry's leading expert on dividend reinvestment plans.

"However, Disney (NYSE: DIS) is one of those consumer-dependent stocks where conventional wisdom may not be correct," he adds in his The DRIP Investor.

"With $4-per-gallon gasoline, one would think that the high cost of travel would take some steam out of the firm's theme park attendance. However, recent results on this front were decent, and the firm's other businesses have held up, too.

"To be sure, a prolonged recession would impact business. Still, Disney has done a nice job of positioning its theme parks as an affordable vacation for families, and that should help it continue to weather
economic weakness.

"Disney surprised Wall Street with the resiliency of its theme-park and resort business in the fiscal second quarter. Revenue for the unit jumped 11% in the quarter. Results were aided by a boost in international visitors taking advantage of the weak dollar.

Well, I was wrong about Sony's (NYSE: SNE) Hancock. Sure, I knew it was going to be the number-one movie over the Fourth of July holiday period, but come on, who didn't know that? As of this writing, Boxofficemojo estimates that the Will Smith picture took in $66 million over the three-day timeframe. However, Hancock had opened earlier in the week, and I thought that, by the time all was said and done, the film's cumulative gross by now would have been well over $100 million. Well, the cume now stands at around $107 million. I was thinking more along the lines of $125 million and above for a total tally by this point. Hancock came in a little weaker than expected, considering what seemed to be a very awesome cinematic experience as communicated by the marketing campaign.

Disney's (NYSE: DIS) Wall-E came in second over the weekend with around $33 million. The Pixar cartoon now has about $128 million to its credit. Wanted, distributed by General Electric's (NYSE: GE) Universal, was third with over $20 million. Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) Get Smart and DreamWorks Animation's (NYSE: DWA) Kung Fu Panda were fourth and fifth, respectively. Here's an interesting note on Get Smart. Even after the holiday weekend, and after having been out in the marketplace for a few weekends, it still has yet to reach a total gross of $100 million. As of now, it has a little over $98 million in the bank. That number may change a bit when final figures are in, but in this day and age, when a summer movie with such star power (it stars Steve Carell) doesn't reach $100 million by the second weekend or sooner, it can't be considered super blockbuster material.

Well, it wasn't a terribly exciting box-office weekend. Frankly, I thought there would be more fireworks for the Fourth from these films. And as for all the stocks mentioned here, the bear market will probably keep them weak. The most direct play on the movie business is obviously DreamWorks Animation, and I would wait for that one to come in more before thinking about buying.

Disclosure: I own Disney and GE; positions can change at any time.

Have you checked News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) stock price lately? It's pretty close to the 52-week low. Last Thursday, before the Fourth of July holiday began, News Corp.'s shares closed at $14.76. The 52-week low is $14.58, and the 52-week high is $24.95. As can be seen, it's had quite a fall. And what about competitor Viacom (NYSE: VIA)? The company's stock closed on Thursday with a price of $29.70. That was, in fact, the 52-week low. The 52-week high for Viacom is $44.95. Again, a pretty big dive.

Is it time to enter these two names? From a valuation perspective, considering their growth prospects, the stock prices do make one pause for consideration. They seem cheaper than colleagues Disney (NYSE: DIS) and Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) from certain angles, although the latter two media businesses do have higher dividend yields. But with the big decline in the stock prices, traders certainly have to be looking at them as perhaps candidates for a bounce-back in the second half of the year, especially if the oil situation improves.

I think that's the big problem here. With oil and financials acting in negative ways for the economy, the entire market is one huge growling bear in a bad mood. And that has made me very reticent about initiating a trading position in either News Corp. or Viacom, though I really, really am interested in doing so. I think value trades like this might very well simply be tests of patience at this point. I sense that both these stocks will be higher by the end of the year, but so what? These stocks will probably merely move along with the rest of the major averages, and that movement could be in the downward direction. And News Corp. has been having issues with MySpace.

It's the Fourth of July weekend, and movie studios want to capture as much money for their films as possible, even if they've already been in the theaters for several weeks. No matter what, though, Sony (NYSE: SNE)'s Hancock, starring the always excellent Will Smith, is set to be the financial superhero of the weekend. Already, as of this writing, the film has taken in about $24 million through Wednesday, according to Boxofficemojo. The movie had some showings on Tuesday before its official debut in the middle of the week. It was number one on Wednesday, followed by Disney (NYSE: DIS)'s Wall-E. The robot flick so far has a total tally of around $86 million.

Poor Marvel (NYSE: MVL) and its The Incredible Hulk project. Will anybody be interested in seeing the big green guy now that Hancock is in the marketplace? Indeed, Hulk took in less than a million bucks on Wednesday, and it ranked number seven for that day. Looks like the Hulk fever is winding down at the multiplex, and it looks like Marvel's stock has had its run for the time being. The stock closed on Thursday at $31.20, well away from the 52-week high of $37.41. I still hold Marvel shares, and although there are no big catalysts on the immediate horizon, I have a long-term outlook on the company. Still, the trader in me wishes that I had lightened up on the position back at the $37 level to book some gains.

Hancock should do well north of $100 million once the Fourth of July holiday period has passed. The marketing, in my opinion, is very compelling, and from what I know about the story, it's a smart idea that provides a nice balance to the frivolous plots of Iron Man and Hulk (I'm using the term "frivolous" here with affection). Sony's scored a hit, maybe even a new franchise (I haven't seen the film, so I can't say if a sequel is feasible or not within the confines of the concept), but it won't do much to move the company's stock. Those looking to play the Hollywood game might want to wait for Marvel to pull back further from current levels.

Disclosure: I own Disney and Marvel; positions can change at any time.

For those of you who own blue-chip stocks, this is an eye-opening prediction. An article at CNBC.com talks about the possibility of Dow 10,000. Dow 10,000!

I repeated that in case you didn't get it the first time. It sounds pretty scary to me, and it should sound pretty scary to a lot of you out there. I'd have to presume that most investors don't use the stock market primarily as a substitute casino for the times when Las Vegas is out of reach. Many of you out there must own a Disney (NYSE: DIS) or a Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO), maybe a General Electric (NYSE: GE) or a Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), something generally considered core and safe for the long-term. I happen to own the first three. Anyone who does is in for some huge volatility if Dow 10,000 comes along.

Actually, whether it comes along or not, volatility is here to stay. And here's the thing about the Dow 10,000 prediction: it isn't so farfetched on a mathematical basis. When you first read that number, you say to yourself "No way, that would be like a depression!" But because the numbers are getting higher, the actual point moves aren't as dramatic as they may seem on the surface. If we hit 10,000, that would represent a decline of approximately 29% from the high reached back in October 2007. As I write this, the Dow is about 20% off the high. Is another 9% feasible?

Six months of 2008 are now behind us and the stock market has not been a friendly place to most investors. Stability that was once found in household names that were industry giants is gone, and they have now been brought to their knees.

Many of them were the stocks we might have looked to in the past for stability, so you can be sure I put forward my five candidates with a little trepidation, but forward I go anyway. First a little review is in order.

Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) dropped from around $53 per share last year to around $30 in January and we can buy it today for around $17. Even at that price Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) has downgraded it to a sell and thinks there is more bad news to come. Citigroup was the largest bank in the world. Not any more.

General Motors (NYSE: GM) was the largest car maker in the world. That was before the stock tumbled from $43 to its current $11 range. A crushing blow to long time investors hoping that someone in the company could stop the ship from sinking.

I didn't think Disney's (NYSE: DIS) Wall-E movie would do as well as it did over the weekend. I thought $60 million was too much to hope for (see my previous piece on the subject). I was wrong. According to Boxofficemojo, the Pixar picture pulled in more than $62 million at domestic theaters and came out on top.

Assuming the film continues to do well in upcoming weekends, Wall-E should provide a nice counterbalance to the relative disappointment of Disney's Prince Caspian project that was released in May. While Wall-E won't move Disney's stock all by itself, the movie and its characters should help drive the studio segment in future quarters, as well as provide some opportunities for promotions and initiatives in other parts of the company, such as the theme parks.

Wanted, distributed by General Electric's (NYSE: GE) Universal, debuted in second place with a haul of more than $50 million. The movie, starring Angelina Jolie, had some snazzy, Matrix-like commercials powering its appeal. I can see why the numbers were big on this one. Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) and Get Smart didn't stand a chance against Wanted. It dropped two spots to third place with a tally of $20 million. And, no, I still don't find Steve Carell funny.

Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS) has an interesting weekend coming up. The new Pixar film, Wall-E, opened today. While everyone expects it to be a hit, no one knows yet how big a hit it will ultimately be.

Pixar, of course, is a major brand in computer-generated cartoons. Its major competition is DreamWorks Animation (NYSE: DWA). The latter's most recent hit, Kung Fu Panda, opened earlier this summer box-office season with a $60.2 million first-weekend take, according to Boxofficemojo. Last year, Ratatouille debuted with a first-weekend take of $47 million. In my mind, for Wall-E to please shareholders and show Disney that its Pixar brand is a reliable money machine, the animated feature needs to do at least $60 million. It can't do anywhere near the Ratatouille flick since that was an example of weak opening performance, in my opinion.

I read a great review on Wall-E at the Hollywood Reporter. The author heaps praises on the film and says that Pixar's streak of success is intact. That's pretty pleasing. Yet, the review also worries me to some extent (I'm a Disney shareholder). The author says that there isn't a lot of dialogue in the picture (I guess the robot characters don't speak) and that it might be such a smart project that some moviegoers might not fully appreciate it. In this competitive timeframe, that doesn't make me feel good. I'd rather the film be simple blockbuster material for the popcorn crowd. I don't want the young kids in the audience to feel their attention spans being strained in the least. I'm not looking for art in this case. I just want my company to make as much money as possible.

File this under Only in America; the recently-passed national transportation bill includes $42 million to fund further research on a proposed Anaheim to Las Vegas (Disneyland to Casinoland) magnetic levitation high-speed rail system, designed to whisk the entertainment-starved between the two spots at speeds up to 310 mph. I can just see parents loading the kids on the Maglev and shipping them off to Disneyland (Walt Disney, NYSE:DIS) while Mom and Dad hit the craps tables in Sin City.

This funding, of course, is only a drop in the enormous bucket of this cutting-edge technology. The final cost to construct the system is currently estimated at $12 billion. Imagine the ticket prices- even more than entry to Disneyland, including refreshments!

The technology, which has been under study for more than 20 years, has been proven in a number of demonstration project and is currently in use in several sites, most notably a 19-mile stretch in Shanghai, China. The advent of superconductors has helped the technology leap forward, and many countries have preliminary plans to construct the systems. In the U.S., various groups are promoting maglev lines connecting Baltimore and D.C., San Diego to a new proposed airport, through the Pittsburgh area, and Atlanta to Chattanooga.

Part of the high cost of such system stems from the need to construct new corridors; maglev trains don't operate on rail, but rather float over a different type of rail on a cushion of air maintained by magnetic repulsion. In this respect, finding a corridor across the southern desert should be easier than in densely inhabited areas.

However, I have to wonder if this makes financial sense. Assuming a round-trip price similar to that of an airline ($172 at this moment on Delta), just to gross $12 billion, this train would have to carry 10,000 passengers a day, every day for 20 years. To net $12 billion, the number would probably be, who know? 100,000 a day?

With countries around the world preparing to build their own demonstration projects, wouldn't it be smarter to learn on their dime, and wait until the economies of scale are in our favor before building such a costly system?

And do you suppose our money could be better spent connecting sites of less ephemeral value? In this instance, I wouldn't mind if what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.

There's good news and bad news for shareholders of Disney (NYSE: DIS). The good news, according to data published in this Hollywood Reporter article, is that the latest Disney Channel movie, Camp Rock, achieved better ratings than the first High School Musical movie. Rock attracted 8.9 million eyeballs while the first Musical brought in about 7.7 million viewers. The bad news is that Rock unfortunately couldn't match the success of the second Musical project, which captured the attention of over 17 million viewers.

This movie is extremely important. Disney execs want to find out if they truly know the formula for creating new fads for the kids. This is definitely a strong start, although I thought the movie's ratings might come a little closer to the second Musical film since all we've been hearing about lately is how hot the Jonas Brothers act is right now. It at least should have brought in over 10 million viewers.

I don't know, maybe it's me, but I just don't feel the same kind of buzz for this project as I do for the Musical franchise. Here comes the interesting part: Can Disney grow the movie from here? That will depend on how fickle the Disney Channel audience actually is. Don't fool yourself, the powers that be at Disney are under pressure to form a suitable pipeline of intellectual properties to replace the aging Musical and Hannah Montana brands. Make no mistake, they are aging quickly, as these kinds of things don't have terribly high half-lives.

Shareholders will want to see the Jonas Brothers and Camp Rock really grow into a merchandising phenomenon in the coming months. No matter what, though, the cable channel is a great asset, and it is a strong competitor of Viacom's (NYSE: VIA) Nickelodeon network.

Disclosure: I own Disney; positions can change at any time.

Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks baby is preparing to leave Viacom (NYSE: VIA). That sounds bad, doesn't it? I mean, Viacom should, in theory, be freaked out about losing the star asset.

Yet, an analyst working at JP Morgan has a different take on things. According to Bloomberg, Imran Khan thinks that DreamWorks may be perceived as an expensive business asset. He pointed out that the expenses associated with DreamWorks helped drive a 22% decline in operating income for Viacom's film division in 2007. He further pointed out that films with more modest budgets will aid in generating better returns and will, in fact, reduce the risk of investing in the movie business.

Khan is absolutely correct on his call. I've been talking about the need to reduce film budgets for a long time now, probably to the point where people are sick of me, so I'm always glad when I read an opinion such as this. Only problem is, will the studios listen? Well, they should. Disney (NYSE: DIS), Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), News Corp. (NYSE: NWS), and Sony (NYSE: SNE) would all benefit from increased financial restraint when it comes to the business plans of their respective film units.

I love summer, not only for the weather, but also for all the movies making their way to the multiplexes. According to this article at Marketwatch, for the first six weeks of the U.S. summer box-office season, the total gross for theatrical movies hit $1.46 billion, a statistic that represents about a 5% increase year-over-year in the comparable period. You can thank hits such as Marvel's (NYSE: MVL) Iron Man and Viacom's (NYSE: VIA) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for driving the nice results.

Now, I don't mean to rain on this parade, but I'm afraid I find myself in a similar frame of mind in terms of a piece I wrote back in March about the 2007 movie-business statistics. You see, I always like to look at number of tickets sold as a barometer for the true health of Hollywood. The number of tickets sold increased 1.6% to 206.2 million. The average price of a movie ticket rose 2.9% to $7.08. Now, while I am glad to see an increase this time around in terms of number of tickets sold, I don't find a 1.6% increase terribly exciting. It tells me that the theater industry still needs to convince people that it's fun to get out of the house, away from the giant televisions and the snazzy home-theater systems, and chomp on overpriced popcorn in a dark auditorium. Going to movie theaters is something that, in my opinion, can't truly be replicated in the home. A lot of people don't share that opinion, however.

The challenge for Disney (NYSE: DIS), Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), Sony (NYSE: SNE), and General Electric's (NYSE: GE) Universal is to make people feel that waiting for the DVD shouldn't be the norm. The shared experience of a movie screening is a unique part of culture, and studios need to communicate this fact through their marketing campaigns. I do think there is more work ahead for Hollywood. Focus on the number of tickets sold, that's the big metric.

Disclosure: I own Disney and GE; positions can change at any time.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) wants to see if the attention span of its YouTube users can be stretched a bit. According to this Fortune article, YouTube seems to think that short clips might not necessarily be the backbone of long-term growth. Instead, longer videos might make the site more valuable. Why is this? Well, the article intimates that the founders of the site, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, think there's a market out there that might want something more than simple, user-generated content that focuses on the banal side of life for about three minutes per clip.

I see the point here. Google wants to figure out, once and for all, the best way to monetize its YouTube investment. This isn't the easiest thing to do, since users of YouTube are, in theory, only interested in seeing short content as fast as possible. They don't want to be burdened by ads. But YouTube is betting that maybe, just maybe, by going against theory and putting on longer material of better quality, the eyeballs will become more intrigued and will perhaps be willing to view a greater quantity of videos. It all comes down to the quality of the content.

I recently wrote about World Wrestling Entertainment's (NYSE: WWE) million-dollar giveaway plans. This is the scheme that sees the Mr. McMahon character reward viewers who register at the company's website with portions of his fortune. He calls them up on the phone during WWE's RAW program and doles out various sums; according to this press release, one winner got $200,000, while another player received $125,000. One poor hapless soul won $2! Remember, Mr. McMahon is an evil guy.

I tuned in to see how the contest would be presented and to get some sense of how it was received. It seemed a bit awkward and slow at times. A few in the audience screamed that they were bored. Personally, I thought it was goofy fun to see Vince McMahon calling people to hand out some of his money and enjoyed it for what it was. But WWE will need to optimize the segment and try to make it more exciting, as I don't think it came off exactly as it wanted. McMahon is supposed to keep handing out $1 million a week for an unspecified time period, so the company will have more chances to improve the presentation.

WWE wants to really juice the ratings for the RAW brand, hoping that viewers beyond the hardcore fan base will stop watching networks owned by CBS (NYSE: CBS), Disney (NYSE: DIS), News Corp. (NYSE: NWS), and General Electric (NYSE: GE) long enough to sample the spectacle of the WWE product (of course, GE's NBC Universal owns the USA cable network, which RAW runs on). McMahon is smart to be trying something like this since WWE will be working its way up to perhaps one of its biggest pay-per-view opportunities ever: Wrestlemania 25. With a milestone like that coming, the company has a chance of really expanding its brand equity and setting the stage for long-term growth.

Yesterday, I wrote about my nervousness over Marvel's (NYSE: MVL) The Incredible Hulk. Today, I'd like to talk about how I wouldn't be so nervous if the Iron Man sequel ended up being directed by someone other than Jon Favreau. There are two excellent articles on The Motley Fool discussing this issue, one by Nathan Alderman and one by Marvel expert Tim Beyers. At the time those articles were published earlier in the week, it had seemed that Marvel was reticent about ponying up a higher compensation package for Mr. Favreau on the heels of the awesome success of the first movie starring Robert Downey, Jr. David Maisel, chairman of Marvel Studios, apparently wants to be very conservative about the company's above-the-line costs. Alderman thinks Marvel should give Favreau the requested raise, while Beyers understands the Hollywood dynamics going on and can see why both sides are doing what they are doing.

By the time my own piece is published, it's possible Favreau may be confirmed as the director of the second Iron Man (as I write this, there are rumors that a deal has been offered). Regardless of what happens, I'd like to offer my opinion on whether or not Favreau is an absolutely necessary component for an Iron Man sequel.

He isn't. And if shareholders think he is, then they had better rethink their investment in Marvel. What shareholders must ask themselves is this: Is it the director that is responsible for the ultimate success of a Marvel film, or is it Marvel management and the intangible value of the Marvel intellectual-property portfolio? Which element adds more equity? As far as I'm concerned as a shareholder, I'm investing in Marvel. I'm not investing in Jon Favreau. Any investor who believes that any one director is indispensable is going to be in for a stomach-churning ride, because when the day comes that a Jon Favreau or a Sam Raimi (he directed the Spider-Man flicks) decides that Marvel is no longer paying them what they're worth and jumps ship, the stock could easily see an overreaction sell-off.