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New Star Wars Trailer Just Generated Another $2 Billion Profit For Disney Holders

Sometimes you just see things that seem silly in the world of finance. It seems to be without a doubt that Star Wars is going to prove to be the best acquisitions that The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) has ever made. What is even more amazing is that a new movie trailer being released, even without the next Star Wars movie officially even being released, just added $2 billion in market cap to Disney’s shares.

Sometimes the real news is harder to make up than news hoaxes. But that is the case for Thursday. Disney ended the day with a market cap of $183.7 billion, after its shares closed up 1.05% at $108.10. Just call it a 1% gain, and it is close to $1.8 billion — or nearly $2 billion.

The new ninety second trailer of Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens was released at the Star Wars Celebration 2015 event in Anaheim, California on Thursday. This trailer follows an earlier trailer from last December, which received millions upon millions of pageviews on YouTube and other websites.

When we visited that Star Wars trailer release in December, Disney shares were at $92.51 with a 52-week range of $68.80 to $92.96. Its market cap was already over $150 billion at the time, and its consensus analyst price target was $95.44 — while the absolute highest analyst price target was up at $106. Now zoom forward four short months — Disney’s share price was $108.10 as of Thursday’s close, with a market cap of $183.7 billion. Its 52-week range is now $76.88 to $108.94. The consensus price target is now about $107.50 and the highest price target is now $124.00. Translation in four months —

  • Disney’s gain in just four months is over $15 in the raw stock price;
  • the consensus analyst price target in that four months has risen by more than $12;
  • and the highest analyst price target is a full $18 higher than it was just four months ago.

Sometimes the real news seems more made up than hoax news. Still, this is real. Back in 2012, 24/7 Wall St. projected that the $4 billion purchase price was not just a steal — we projected that Disney would milk out far more than $30 billion from the $4 billion purchase alone.

Disney just seems to be in the perfect place at the perfect time. Disney hadn’t even bought the Star Wars franchise when 24/7 Wall St. named Disney as one of ten stocks to own for the next decade. That being said, Disney has gone above and beyond all expectations — and it has lots of other things working in its favor as well.

It seems as though Disney keeps winning every time it does anything new around Star Wars. It hasn’t even yet sold a single new Star Wars movie ticket, and its official release is not set for another 8 months. Some critics of this notion that Star Wars just added another $2 billion in market value for Disney might argue that the stock was higher with the broad market. The problem is that the earlier broad market gains did not hold up on Thursday.

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