Amid Layoffs, Disney Announces Exciting Upcoming Film Slate at CinemaCon

This week, Disney announced a lot of job losses. But on Wednesday, the team in charge of making movies got together in Las Vegas to show off their successes and the movies they have coming up. They showed these off to a crowd made up of movie theater owners and people who work in the industry.

The Walt Disney Company is part of the CinemaCon convention and they are showing exclusive new footage from films like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Elemental,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and “The Little Mermaid.” This week-long trade conference is for all the people in charge who show movies in places such as huge movie chains (like AMC) to small independent movie theaters so that these people have something to get moviegoers excited about.

Alan Bergman, who is the person in charge of Disney Entertainment, came on stage at the Colosseum theater located in Caesars Palace.

He expressed his gratitude towards everyone for their help even though it had been a really difficult time lately. He was pleased to notice that the business is starting to become better now.

Disney has been the most successful movie studio in the world since 2016. Last year, four of Disney’s movies made up the top 10 highest-grossing films in America. Those four movies – “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”, “Avatar: The Way of Water”, and “Thor: Love and Thunder” – were responsible for 27% of all box-office earnings from U.S. theaters. Out of these four films, “Avatar: The Way Of Water”, gained more than $2.3 billion worldwide, making it the third biggest movie ever released!

Disney announced that this week through Thursday, they are letting go of some people from their company as part of a plan to save money. This is the second round of layoffs for Disney this year and it will impact about 3% of their employees worldwide. The goal is to create cost savings amounting to $5.5 billion.

Tony Chambers from Las Vegas said that Disney has always provided amazing movies for theaters, and this year is no exception. For the first time since 2019, Disney will have movies coming out from all seven of its studios: 20th Century, Lucasfilm, Marvel Studios, Disney Pictures, Pixar Animation Studios, Disney Animation Studios and Searchlight Pictures.

Coming in 2023 is a really exciting year for movies! A theme park ride starring Danny DeVito and Owen Wilson called “Haunted Mansion” (July 28), a live-action version of “The Little Mermaid” (May 26), an Indiana Jones movie, some releases from Marvel with “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” (May 5) and “The Marvels”. Plus, Disney Animation has a new musical “Wish” with Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine coming up, as well as Pixar’s original “Elemental” (June 16). Sounds like it’s going to be an awesome year in the cinema!

Recently, Pixar released some of their movies like “Soul”, “Luca”, and “Turning Red” directly on Disney+. On Wednesday, the first 20 minutes of “Elemental” was revealed. This movie is special because it’s premiering at Cannes film festival and it tells a story about a place where all the four elements (earth, wind, fire and water) live peacefully but separately.

Disney’s CinemaCon presentations usually don’t include actors, but this year was an exception. Harrison Ford and Melissa McCarthy both made special appearances!

Harrison Ford delivered a video message to introduce a thrilling scene from the upcoming movie “Indiana Jones 5”. He said it meant a lot to him, and encouraged everyone to go see it when it is released on June 30th.

“Indiana Jones” is also coming to Cannes next month for the first time.

McCarthy, who plays Ursula in “The Little Mermaid”, was there to introduce a snippet of her singing “Poor Unfortunate Souls.”

She described Ursula as evil and sneaky, then said: “Maybe that’s why I like her so much.”

Some of the new movies coming up are “A Haunting in Venice” (from Kenneth Branagh on Sept. 15), “The Boogeyman” (on June 2) and a sci-fi adventure movie titled “The Creator” (on Sept. 29). It stars John David Washington from 20th Century Studios.

Searchlight is releasing two movies. The first is “Theater Camp” which will be out in July and the second one, called “Next Goal Wins”, will arrive in November. It’s a funny movie about soccer and Michael Fassbender plays a coach who has to help an American Samoa football team that’s having trouble. People who saw the trailer for this movie were laughing and clapping about it.

Chambers didn’t talk about “Magazine Dreams” which was supposed to be released in December after doing very well at the Sundance Film Festival. Jonathan Majors, who is also now playing a villain called Kang in Marvel movies, got arrested in March of this year for an assault charge. However, his lawyer said that he hasn’t done anything wrong.