By Ryan Nakashima, Business Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) --Disney said Tuesday it is shutting down its Disney Infinity line of video games, saying the changing market is too risky.
The company booked a $147 million charge, mostly for unsold inventory. It also laid off about 300 employees, most of them based in Salt Lake City at Avalanche Software, a game studio Disney bought in 2005.
CEO Bob Iger told analysts the risks "caught up with us." Although the unit did well – bringing its interactive division into profitability in recent years – Disney determined it was better to manage the risks by licensing characters rather than developing video games from scratch, he said.
"That business is a changing business, and we did not have enough confidence in the business in terms of it being stable enough to stay in it," Iger said.
Disney Infinity, a platform that brought characters from its "Pirates of the Caribbean" into the same digital sandbox as those from "Cars" and "Frozen," was launched in 2013 as a way to jump on the "toys to life" bandwagon made popular by the game "Skylanders." Real-world action figures were placed on pads and meant to activate in the video game world.
When Infinity launched in August 2013, it helped Disney pull its Interactive business to profitability after years of losses, and it was a precursor to the Playmation line of smart, connected toys Disney launched last year. But diminishing sales of Infinity hurt the consumer products unit that was merged with the interactive division last summer.
The high cost of making Infinity came in stark contrast to "Star Wars Battlefront," a hugely successful game in which Disney licensed its characters and stories to Electronic Arts. That deal gave its consumer products segment a big jolt in the previous quarter through December.
Infinity's lackluster results, conversely, contributed to Disney missing Wall Street forecasts in the latest quarter through March. It posted adjusted earnings of $1.36 per share, falling below the $1.40 expected by analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research.
The entertainment company posted revenue of $12.97 billion in the period, also falling short of Street forecasts. Six analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $13.26 billion.
Shares in Walt Disney Co., which is based in Burbank, California, tumbled 5.6 percent to $100.60 in after-hours trading after the results were released, taking them into negative territory for the year.
Barbra Streisand approves multi-part documentary that will draw upon her archives
A year after telling her story in a 1,000-page memoir, Barbra Streisand has approved a multi-part documentary about her life — to be directed by fellow Oscar winner Frank Marshall.
The documentary, announced Thursday by Sony Music Vision, is currently untitled and does not have a release date. It will feature rarely seen video, photographs and audio recordings from Streisand's personal archives. Oscar-winning documentary maker Alex Gibney, whose many credits include films about Paul Simon and Steve Jobs, will serve as producer.
"For years I've been thinking about the best way to share the vast amount of content I've been safely storing in my vault," the 82-year-old Streisand said in a statement. "These films, photos and music masters — many never seen or heard by the public — hold some of my most cherished memories. I'm so pleased that producer Alex Gibney and director Frank Marshall have agreed to take this journey with me."
Marshall, who has directed documentaries about the Beach Boys and the Bee Gees and produced such classics as "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "The Sixth Sense," said in a statement that the Streisand movie would "illustrate why she has become an enduring icon to a global audience of all generations."
Sony Music Vision is presenting and distributing the project in partnership with her longtime record label, Columbia Records.
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