Disney Revenue Breakdown ’91-’19 How Disney makes money – Python Code, Plots and Source Data Included [2min read]

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Disney Revenues grew incredibly in the last 25 years, but more interestingly revenue streams changed significantly through time.

4 key points impressed me:

  • They increased revenues by 20 billions every 10 years in the last 25 (roughly)
  • How much Movies Revenue Stream decreased in % on the total revenues, from 40% in 1991 to less than 20% in 2019
  • Revenues from “Disney Park and Resorts” contributed more than 30% in the last 5 years
  • Revenues from “Disney Media” contributed more than 40% from 2005 to 2015

What can I say?

Nowdays The Walt Disney Corporation is:

  • 40% a Television-Radio-OnLine Media company
  • 30% an Entertainment and Hospitality company
  • <20% a Movies company

DataSource

I took the original dataset from data.world you can find here, but data are recorded until 2016, for more recent years I took the data from the “The Walt Disney Company Reports Fourth Quarter And Full Year Earnings For Fiscal”

For the years:

Data where scraped by the authors with import.io so I don’t know about the reliability.

Instead I took the data manually from the reports.

But on this point, I can say that more recent data that I took manually were coherent with the past year’s trend so I will consider it reliable.

I had only a problem with the year 1996 because for that year I have only Total information and the other two revenue streams. I miss at least the other 2 revenue streams.

Data were cleaned and merged with Python, I created a function to plot all the different plots. You will find it at the end of the article.

There are other two revenue strams that I did not analyzed because I was not interested on them:

Disney Company Revenues

The Walt Disney Company Revenues from 1991 to 2019

Don’t be fooled, here I talk only about revenues, not about margins. I should make another research to understand Disney’s profitability for each segment. Probably in the future is something that I will do.

As you can see revenues increased by 20 $ billions from 1997 to 2010 and from 2011 to 2019.

Disney Media Revenue Contribution

Disney Media Revenue Contribution On Total Disney Revenue From 1991 to 2019

When I was a child I preferred Cartoon Network to Disney Channel.

By the way, in the above plot, what really impressed me is how much weight Disney Media had from 2003 until 2019. In fact, Disney Media contributed more than 40% of the total revenues.

Disney Movies Revenue Contribution

Disney Movies Revenue Contribution On Total Disney Revenue From 1991 to 2019

When I and my sister were child my father always pushed to see Robin Hood Carton. Why? Because we already know it and that way we could fall asleep immediately. Obviously Dinsey produced other movies. I talked about them in my previous post, this one.

One thing that for me was not so obvious, especially after acquisitions like Lucasfilms in 2012 or Pixar in 2006 was how Movies’ weight on total revenues decreased through time, and nowdays It is less than 20%.

Disney Parks and Resorts Revenue Contribution

Disney Parks and Resorts Revenue Contribution On Total Disney Revenue From 1991 to 2019

What really impressed me was the parks and resorts’ contribution. Basically, I was aware only of the existence of Disneyland Paris and World Disney Orlando. Instead, I counted roughly 33 resorts on their website! (and the website could be also improved, I did not expect a so ugly website https://www.disneyworld.co.uk/resorts/)

The Walt Disney Company Analysis with Python Code

What I liked in this analysis was to:

  • plot differently the bars of total revenues filtering by revenues range (over 20$ billion, over 40$ billion, over 60$ billion)
  • code a python function to plot automatically the plots, customizing also the bar color

Thank you for reading the article!

If you liked the pink color plots or you think is useful feel free to share. 

With just a tweet or a like on LinkedIn new opportunities might arise.

Or you can follow me and improve this repository on github!

All the code is here.

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