In 2019, Disney was at the top of its game. The company reported over $69 billion in annual revenue and released four of the five highest-grossing films of all time, including Avengers: Endgame, The Lion King, and Frozen 2. But in the years that followed, Disney’s financial success began to collapse. A growing number of industry observers are now pointing out the specific turning point that led to this decline: it was a strategic shift in branding and corporate priorities.
According to one who recently outlined the situation on X, Disney’s stock value dropped from $200 to $86 per share, reflecting a roughly 60% loss. In 2024 alone, the company lost nearly $900 million at the box office. Among its biggest failures was The Marvels, which became the worst-performing MCY ever and the worst-performing film in the studio’s history overall.
Disney also accounted for four of the top five box office losses in 2023. Films like Lightyear, Strange World, and Elemental each lost over $100 million. However, despite these setbacks, company executives did not appear alarmed. Andrej Drats argues that this reaction was due to a larger strategic shift that had taken root years earlier.
Between 2018 and 2019, Disney began rebranding itself. It moved away from its identity as a family-friendly movie studio and repositioned as a corporate media platform with a strong focus on streaming. The major box office successes of 2019, were part of a calculated campaign to drive subscriptions to the new Disney+ service, which launched in November of that year. The theatrical hits were treated less as entertainment events and more as advertisements for the company’s streaming platform.
As Disney shifted toward subscription growth as its main performance metric, box office results became less central to the business model. A new influence began shaping the studio’s content decisions, one that was largely unknown to the general public: the Corporate Equality Index, or CEI.
Here’s exactly how it works:
Major investment firms like BlackRock use CEI scores to determine which companies get funding.
Disney admits in SEC filings that CEI compliance “could cut into profits.”
They prioritize these scores over box office returns anyway. pic.twitter.com/eLmAGkmc47
— Andrej (@AndrejDrats) July 7, 2025
The CEI is a scoring system created by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, whereby companies are rated based on workplace and content policies related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Disney has maintained a perfect 100 percent CEI score since 2007. While this score is not mandatory, it has become a key factor for major investment firms such as BlackRock when deciding where to allocate capital. Disney has acknowledged in its own SEC filings that maintaining CEI compliance may reduce profits. Nevertheless, the company has continued to prioritize its CEI score, even at the expense of box office performance.
This approach has influenced the content Disney releases. Films like Lightyear, which featured a same-sex kiss, and Strange World, which included an openly gay lead character, were highlighted as decisions that aligned with CEI standards rather than audience preferences.
In 2023, CEO Bob Iger admitted that the company had focused too much on volume rather than quality. He acknowledged that Disney had “lost sight of their number one objective.” For Drats, the situation is not a case of simple mismanagement. He calls it a deliberate trade-off. Disney, he says, chose to focus on meeting the standards of institutional investors and industry benchmarks instead of creating content that connects with general audiences.
Disney shareholders recently voted overwhelmingly to reject a proposal from the National Center for Public Policy Research that called on the company to drop the Corporate Equality Index (CEI) from its internal benchmarks, proving just how committed Disney’s leadership and investors remain to diversity, equity, and inclusion standards – the driving force behind Disney’s ideological shift in recent years, pushing the company into controversial social territory that has alienated many of its longtime fans and families. While a perfect CEI score may earn Disney praise from activist groups and institutional investors, the impact on the company’s brand and bottom line has been significant, with declining box office numbers, lost goodwill, and billions in market value erased.
Disney’s decline should serve as a cautionary tale. They have built their brand to impress their institutional investors and industry gatekeepers, not the customers who actually pay for their products and effectively pay their salaries. High marks from elite organizations will never repair the erosion of trust and loyalty among the people who once made Disney a household name. Shareholders who continue to support these policies are ignoring the financial warning signs in favor of maintaining an acceptable political image.
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English (US) · 