- Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS) slipped 3% today, to a three-week low, with a number of intersecting stories and data around the stock today - but dominated by an analyst raising new worries about a potential slowdown from a strong streaming start.
- The shares sipped directly out of the market open today after Barclays' Kannan Venkateshwar downgraded the stock to Equal Weight, concerned that Disney's direct-to-consumer momentum could be at risk in the longer term.
- The firm had been bullish in 2018, when "everything about its streaming business was conjecture," followed by Disney pulling off a wildly successful streaming launch.
- Now it faces structural factors in keeping the growth going. Venkateshwar says to hit its long-term goal, Disney will need to more than double its current growth pace, to at least match Netflix.
- After a remarkable string of success at the 2021 box office, including the year's top film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Disney's taking a breather of late: Its Twentieth Century film The Last Duel stumbled out of the gate over the weekend, finishing its opening as the fifth-best movie despite reuniting Good Will Hunting star/creators Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
- And more significant on the film front, Disney delayed a large batch of Marvel movies, pulling some from its schedule, and postponed the fifth movie in the popular Indiana Jones series by a year, into 2023.
- Disney stock is now down 5.5% for 2021:
