LucasFilm under Disney: the first eight years, by the numbers
People can be very bad with numbers, and especially so when they want to be. This is often the case when discussions about numbers are tangled together with some other topic: where the cold, factual conclusions are perceived to have a bearing on more subjective matters. This is invariably the case in politics, but it's also the case in less highly-charged fields. Right now, I'm thinking about the Walt Disney Company. More specifically: about its purchase of LucasFilm in 2010. And most specifically: about the financial results that this purchase has yielded them thus far, over the past eight fiscal years. This has been prompted by a discussion about that topic, in which it became startlingly clear to me that there are people who don't have any idea what the difference between gross revenue and net profit is. Their lack of understanding leads them to proclaim, quite incorrectly, that the Star Wars franchise has made Disney billions of dollars in profits. They can hardly be