In an investor-focused article on the Walt Disney Company’s website, the entertainment giant revealed an achievement that took me by surprise: Kingdom Hearts, the fascinatingly strange Final Fantasy x Disney crossover series, is among the company’s “billion-dollar franchises.”
The article, “How games are helping shape Disney’s next chapter,” appears to be a combination victory lap/game plan meant to be read by the market-minded individual. It’s classy for shareholders, touting the company’s many sales-related achievements in the gaming space, like its increasingly close relationship with Epic Games and creative platform Fortnite, or the success of Marvel Rivals among Gen Z. Also, the Kingdom Hearts thing.
Disney’s executive vice president of games and digital entertainment, Sean Shoptaw, explained that the company has “nine games that have grossed more than $1 billion in retail sales.” Among those nine: the Marvel Strike Force mobile game and Kingdom Hearts.
I don’t really know what to say about this development or its broader implications for Spaceship Earth. The Kingdom Hearts phenomenon passed me by, even though I’m in a high-risk demographic for being a Kingdom Hearts fan (late millennium, PS2 owner). I’ve always assumed it’s the kind of thing you can’t get into after a certain age. It’s like an elf that I simply can’t see because the magic of childhood has left my soul.
However, Kingdom Hearts remains popular and strangely intergenerational. Its release timeline firmly considers it “something millennial,” but it also feels like “something zoom,” judging by the frantic reactions every time Sora reappears in big shoes.
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And it makes sense that it’s racked up $1 billion after 15 mainline games (a large portion of which are repackaged collections of previous games) over a quarter of a century. For the big mouse, that’s a small thing (the new Spider-Man movie alone will gross more than $1 billion before it runs out of theaters). Congratulations to the Walt Disney Company, Square Enix and their respective shareholders.
