Today is the day. The Walt Disney Company released their Q3 earnings report and they did lose a lot, $4.72 billion to be exact, for the third quarter that runs from April-June.

I think this was worse than what many of us were expecting, since they had to close down parks, experiences and the film industry was also shut down.

But Parks seemed to take the largest hit with sales in theme parks falling to $983 million from the $6.5 Billion they were at a year ago.

Currently only Walt Disney World is open domestically, and that didn’t happen until mid-July. Disneyland Paris and Tokyo Disneyland also didn’t open until July. The Disney Parks, Experiences and Products Segment had a lost of $1.96 billion.

Disney+ was a bright spot and it has reached 60.5 million paid subscribers globally and exceeded projections. Disney+ will be released to more countries soon with the Nordics, Belgium, Luxembourg and Portugal in September and Latin America in November. It will also be launching on Disney+ Hot Star on September 5.

During the call, they continued to try to razzle dazzle the investors with all the name dropping of shows they put on Disney+, including ‘Hamilton’ and ‘The Mandalorian’ and their 145 Primetime Emmy award nominations.

Mulan has been delayed again, for the 4th time and now they are releasing Mulan as a Video-on-demand add on for Disney+ markets in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand on September 4th for $29.99.

It will be theatrically released simultaneously in other countries. Interestingly Bob Chapek said that they were thinking it was a “one off’ and not a business model, but basically they are going to never say never and see how it goes.

Disney is also going to have an investor day in the future to go over their “acceleration into streaming” with their Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star Brand.  They kept going on about this new “Star Brand,” that is basically like Hulu internationally and is big in India.  Bob Chapek discussed that they would do more with the Star Brand in 2021.

Frankly it was a lot of talking but basically Hulu, ESPN, Disney, cost referrals and cost reductions kept their losses from being worse and offset the damage.

They kept talking about streamlining expenditures, which could tie into the rumors about layoffs coming.

Another interesting bit of information is that reopening money was less than they expected.

A representative from JP Morgan asked if the parks not reopening to expectations was due to people not visiting in the numbers they were hoping for.

Bob Chapek said it seems to be that 50% of guests traveling from a distance and 50% of guests coming from local areas. However they got a much higher number of cancellations after reservations rate as cases of COVID-19 increased in Florida.

They are trying to replace the cancellations with locals and AP holders (likely why we have the 30% AP discounts and Florida resident deals going on.) They hope that when consumer confidence returns the guests will return.

The revenue generated at Walt Disney World is exceeding costs, but at a much lesser amount than expected when they planned the reopening 6 weeks earlier due to the increase in COVID-19 case in Florida.

Disney has furloughed over 100,000 people, but they claim they have brought most of them back. Disney admits that the experiences in Q4 are going to be significantly higher because most staff were furloughed during this quarter.

Could those rumored layoffs be just around the corner?

The entire call seemed to be full of non-answers, but really, what can the company say? The pandemic has decimated the Disney empire, and there’s not enough sugar to make that medicine easier to swallow.

That being said, Disney stock actually rose. Go figure.