Square backs away from movies: Shareholders rejoice
Badly beaten, Square consolidates position and focuses on core offerings
To look this good is not cheap
Following exhaustive marketing and promotional work on a global scale, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within has to be declared as one of the biggest flops the movie industry has ever seen.
Costing around $115 million, the movie took around $30 million in the States, one of its core territories, and spent only one week at number one in Japan. A bad loss by anyone’s standards.
As a result of these financials, and the fact that SquareSoft has amongst the most easily irritable shareholders in the history of the world, Square has conceded that it may have to pull away from the filmmaking business with immediate effect.
"We definitely cannot say things are going better in Japan,” said film director Yoichi Wada. “We will go back to basics and concentrate our resources on game development.”
The substantial losses will be rolled into Square’s next financial quarter reports which is likely to put a dent in Square’s promise to shareholders that the report would show a profit of 700 million yen. This should (hopefully) result in another greatly entertaining shareholder meeting. As we reported at the time, the last one was somewhat fiery, and saw Square lynchpin Hironobu Sakaguchi busted down to Assistant Producer. A completely useless and pointless exercise that saw Square fans confused and achieved nothing. This reactionary move must, in hindsight, be quite embarrassing to Square’s board and shareholders.
We will bring you the news from the next SquareSoft shareholder meeting, due to take place at the end of this month.
Costing around $115 million, the movie took around $30 million in the States, one of its core territories, and spent only one week at number one in Japan. A bad loss by anyone’s standards.
As a result of these financials, and the fact that SquareSoft has amongst the most easily irritable shareholders in the history of the world, Square has conceded that it may have to pull away from the filmmaking business with immediate effect.
"We definitely cannot say things are going better in Japan,” said film director Yoichi Wada. “We will go back to basics and concentrate our resources on game development.”
The substantial losses will be rolled into Square’s next financial quarter reports which is likely to put a dent in Square’s promise to shareholders that the report would show a profit of 700 million yen. This should (hopefully) result in another greatly entertaining shareholder meeting. As we reported at the time, the last one was somewhat fiery, and saw Square lynchpin Hironobu Sakaguchi busted down to Assistant Producer. A completely useless and pointless exercise that saw Square fans confused and achieved nothing. This reactionary move must, in hindsight, be quite embarrassing to Square’s board and shareholders.
We will bring you the news from the next SquareSoft shareholder meeting, due to take place at the end of this month.
Companies:
Square
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