Disney’s overall worth plummets to its lowest figures in nearly 50 years

Disney keeps going down hill. Its stock market shares fell 45% this year, making for the worst results since 1974. The company was unable to make up for its lacking finances with the release of Avatar and the Way of Water, the long-awaited sequel to the film that James Cameron released 13 years ago, which only managed to gross $134 million domestically in its first weekend.

Despite being the second-biggest global release of 2022, the figures aren’t enough to help the company make a come back after its shares dropped nearly 5% on Monday, reaching their lowest level since March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began.

Crisis in the Chinese market

Its main problem, however, was not its box office figures in the United States, but its results in China, where it only grossed $57.1 million, according to data published by The Wall Street Journal.

Tony Chambers, Disney's Global Head of Theatrical Distribution, explained the reason for the low numbers in the Chinese market: "The problem is nobody wants to go to the cinema, because they’ve been told that Covid is extremely dangerous. Although cinemas are open, the appetite for going to them isn’t really there."

However, Chambers' reasoning did not help the company to increase its stock price. As revealed by MarketWatch, shares went down 4.8% on Monday. Each share reached a stock market value of $85.78, two cents less than the price back in 2014.

The Avatar sequel’s poor results are the straw that broke the camel's back for the company, which, this year, saw its shares decline by 44.6%, according to

FactSet. Disney’s overall worth, which at its peak reached $350 billion, is now valued around $156 billion.