The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2015–2018
A Wrinkle in Time: Disney's $130.6M loss on a $103M film
Ava DuVernay's $103M adaptation grossed $133M worldwide — and Disney's loss reached $130.6M per Deadline, one of 2018's biggest bombs.
Walt Disney Pictures · 2018-03-09
What happened
A Wrinkle in Time — Ava DuVernay's adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's beloved 1962 novel, produced by Walt Disney Pictures — cost an estimated $103 million, making DuVernay the first woman of color to direct a $100 million live-action film. The milestone made the failure harder to separate from the film itself.
Released March 9, 2018, it grossed $100 million domestically and $133 million worldwide — barely above its budget. Deadline's annual cost analysis calculated the net loss at $130.6 million, one of the biggest bombs of 2018, and Yahoo Finance estimated Disney's loss at $86–186 million after the Q2 earnings report.
The failure was a rare case of a big-budget film with a beloved source and a celebrated director that simply did not connect: mixed reviews, confused marketing and an awkward adaptation of a structurally strange novel combined to produce Disney's most expensive miss of the year.
Why it happened
- The novel's structure fought the film: L'Engle's book is a philosophical journey, not a plot machine, and the adaptation's attempts to make it a blockbuster pleased neither fans of the book.
- The marketing sold wonder it could not deliver: the trailers promised epic visuals, and the film's mixed reception turned the gap between promise and product into the story.
- The milestone made the failure political: as the first $100M film by a woman of color, its miss was read as a verdict on representation budgets, and Disney's cautious release plan amplified the loss.
The lesson
A beloved book is not a film script: A Wrinkle in Time's philosophical structure fought every blockbuster instinct, and $103M plus a historic milestone could not make the adaptation work.
Sources
- Deadline — The Biggest Box Office Bombs Of 2018: Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament
- Wikipedia — A Wrinkle in Time (2018 film)
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