Warner Bros Movies Take Over American Box Office

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 12, 9:15AM EDT

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Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. (NASDAQ: WBD) stock has taken a beating this year.
A couple of movies did well, but the most recent quarterly results were ugly.

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Warner Bros Movies Take Over American Box Office — © icholakov / Getty Images

Very little positive can be said about Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. (NASDAQ: WBD | WBD Price Prediction), which was created by a merger of Discovery and AT&T’s media operations. The stock has taken a beating. It is down 14% this year. Investors are questioning the wisdom of the original transaction. There is one silver lining this year. Warner Bros., its studio business, has become a box office champion.

According to Box Office Mojo, the top film in the United States based on box office sales is “A Minecraft Movie,” with total ticket sales of $408 million. The is miles ahead of second place “Sinners” at $214 million. Walt Disney’s “Captain American: Brave New World” is the only other movie with a gross of over $200 million in the United States this year.

“A Minecraft Movie” has done well despite poor reviews. Its Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score is only 47%. Its popularity is based on the Minecraft video game, which was released in 2011 and is among the best-selling games in video game history.

“Sinners” has received extraordinary reviews. Its Rotten Tomato Tomatometer rating is 97%. Widely regarded director Ryan Coogler helmed the vampire movie. One of America’s most famous movie stars, Michael Bakari Jordan, plays the lead.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s most recent quarter was ugly. Revenue dropped 10% to $9 billion. The company lost $453 million compared to a loss of $966 million in the same quarter a year ago. Revenue from all of its opening segments fell.

If streaming is the future of TV and movies, Warner Bros. Discovery continues to lag. Paid subscriptions rose only 5.2 million from the fourth quarter of last year to 122.3 million. The larger companies Netflix, Disney, and Amazon Prime Video, have badly beaten the company.

Except for its movie business, Warner Bros. Discovery continues to be a failure.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.