Did Disney really secure a defense contract award? Everything to know about the controversy

The internet has been inundated with recent reports that the multibillionaire conglomerate Disney has secured a lucrative Department of Defense contract with the US government. It goes without saying that the Babylon Bee website published this online report as satire.

Parody articles on theology, politics, current affairs, and public figures are published on The Babylon Bee, a conservative Christian news satire website. It has been described as The Onion but for Christians or conservatives.

In one of their more recent pieces which is titled “Disney Awarded Defense Contract After Producing More Bombs Than Lockheed Martin”, the website comically presents fake news about the industry giant partnering with the US military to produce bombs. Here's everything to know about it.

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Bee’s believable fake news about Disney explained

Disney Awarded Defense Contract After Producing More Bombs Than Lockheed Martin byu/ItsGotThatBang inboxofficecirclejerk

After being posted on the Babylon Bee website on November 28, 2023, the article quickly gained popularity online. Though intended to be satire, the piece ended up appearing on several social media sites and online forums, which caused a lot of netizens to talk about it. It thus lost its ability to be distinguished as real or fake, like the majority of online media.

The piece is a reaction to Disney's recent box office "bombings." Here, "bombing" does not mean literally; rather, it means a disastrous box office revenue. The studio's films didn't do well in theaters this year. The industry understands this. The multibillion-dollar company's films did make a lot of money, but the issue lies in how much Disney is paying to make them.

Although The Little Mermaid (2023)has a production cost of $300 million, it managed to generate an impressive $569 million in revenue. However, the expenses have further escalated due to ongoing advertising campaigns. On the other hand, despite having a $200 million budget, the most recent failure, Wish, also lagged behind The Emoji Movie.

Another recent picture from the company, The Marvels, was similarly not received well by audiences. And Marvel Studios is not at all responding well to its first true movie office flop in fifteen years. With four of the top ten highest-grossing movies of all time, The Marvels, the studio's most recent release, was viewed negatively after years of unheard-of success.

The movie has been out for almost a month now, and it's already tapering down its box office run. It will be the lowest-grossing picture in the whole franchise, barely making it to $200 million globally and failing to break $100 million domestically. That's another "Bomb" for Disney because of this.

The fact that Disney World is the second-largest buyer of explosives, directly after the US Government, is another noteworthy fact that should be mentioned in relevance to the piece. But the purpose of these explosives is quite different, and it has nothing to do with war or anything of the sort. Instead, it's employed to add flare and excitement to Disney World, “the happiest place on earth”.

Furthermore, the satirical article includes fictitious quotes from CEO Bob Iger. The quotation reads as follows:

"This is a momentous day for our company. We now have a useful channel to funnel our bomb-making efforts. Though the fact that we have been producing bombs of immense scale for the last decade has previously only resulted in losing hundreds of millions of dollars, we can now actually make money with our bombs."

It then goes on to state the following:

“Whereas Disney had been desperately looking for ways to stop making bombs, this government contract will serve as a new beginning for the House of Mouse. "We were all feeling the heat," Iger said. "Now, we can stop worrying about how to fix things and go back to focusing on cranking out bomb after bomb after bomb."

Again, while the article was written just for laughs, it divided the community. Some people praised Babylon Bee for its wit and humor, while others said they didn't think it was all that funny. This also isn't the first time an article by The Bee about Disney has gone viral on social media.

A user snapped the headline "Child Grooming content on X reduced by 83 percent after Disney pulls ads" by the bee and shared it on X in the wake of the studio removing ads from X. This caused the Babylon Bee piece to go viral. Fake news created such a stir that it had to be verified. speaks a lot about the internet and society at large.

One needs to be careful what they share online these days, as rumors circulate like wildfire. It is now the user's responsibility to laugh but to exercise caution when disseminating false information on the internet.