21 December 1937: Snow White premieres and saves Disney
Walt Disney premiered Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length cel-animated feature film. Hollywood insiders had nicknamed it Disney's Folly, and the studio had mortgaged itself to finish it, with costs swelling to about $1.5 million. It became, for a time, the highest-grossing sound film ever, funded a new studio and proved that animation could carry a feature-length story.
The lesson: The bets that look most foolish to insiders are sometimes the ones that build empires.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Disney at the start of 1990 → $15,714 today, vs $19,429 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 1990, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 15.7 times the money, but $3,714 less than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Disney teaches: Expensive strategic pivots can take years to pay off; a company remaking itself for a new era can leave shareholders waiting a long time.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $7.00 | $15,714 | $19,429 |
| 1995 | $15.00 | $7,333 | $14,783 |
| 2000 | $30.00 | $3,667 | $4,626 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Disney? Every starting year and the full story →
More Disney history
- 17 July 1955: Disneyland opens, chaotically
- 16 October 1923: Walt and Roy Disney start a cartoon studio
- 30 October 2012: Disney buys Lucasfilm and Star Wars
- 14 December 2017: Disney agrees to buy much of 21st Century Fox
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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