Shares of Walt Disney fell 2.4 percent Thursday after CFO Jay Rasulo suggested that some of Wall Street’s estimates competence be too high, in vast partial since a film studio won’t perform as good in a third entertain this year compared with final year.

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“I wish to get something out of a approach that is specific about Q-3,” Rasulo pronounced during a Nomura Media Telecom Summit. The CFO afterwards launched into “compatability items” that he mentioned during Disney’s latest gain call yet that “were a small bit complicated.”

Tops on a list was a film studio, where Iron Man 3 will substantially beget $1.2 billion during a box bureau worldwide. Impressive, yet $300 million bashful of what The Avengers did a year ago.

Box Office Milestone: ‘Iron Man 3’ Hits $1 Billion Worldwide

“Obviously, we are anxious with a outcome of Iron Man,” Rasulo said. “Normally, everybody would say, ‘that’s terrific,’ but, remember, a year ago in Q-3 … we expelled Avengers.”

Next, Rasulo pronounced that a “big portion” of a selling responsibility for Lone Ranger will start in a third entertain yet that a Jul 4 recover is a fourth-quarter film in terms of generating income for Disney.

Iron Man 3 not measuring adult to Avengers and a selling losses of Ranger have lead to $150 million reduction in handling income for a film studio in a third entertain this year compared with final year, Rasulo said. 

Also impacting Disney’s formula in a third entertain is $73 million reduction in net deferred income during ESPN due to “the covenance and timing of a opposite deals,” Rasulo explained. 

Theme parks also have $65 million value of timing issues, he said, in partial since a Easter holiday fell wholly in a third entertain final year yet that wasn’t a box this year.

Shares of Disney fell $1.61 Thursday to $64.65.

By KATHERINE ROSMAN

From Grumpy Cat to Keyboard Cat, when online fur balls are prepared for primary time they spin to Internet talent-manager Ben Lashes to measure commercials and chartering deals. WSJ’s Linda Freund reports.

Some celebrities simply can't be pleased. Just ask Ben Lashes, a talent manager in Los Angeles. This week, he landed a vital motion-picture understanding for a customer who 9 months ago was an different vital in Morristown, Ariz., race 227.

When he told his customer that she was streamer to Hollywood, she looked bored. “She hates movies,” says Mr. Lashes of his client, Grumpy Cat, a cat with a mouth puckered into a scowl whose viral photos have ricocheted around a Internet.

Helping Cats Turn Internet Fame Into Dollars

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Grumpycats.com

Tardar Sauce, a churned multiply cat from Arizona who has gained luminary as ‘Grumpy Cat.’

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Mr. Lashes, 34 years old, is an deputy for Internet cats. When an mocking sketch of a sly becomes Internet famous, Mr. Lashes contacts a pet owners and offers to assistance strategize ways to prolong, strengthen and monetize. He says he operates with this doubt in mind: “What would Walt Disney

do if he combined Mickey Mouse and it went viral on YouTube?”

Grumpy Cat, a Arizona sourpuss, is Mr. Lashes’s star client. The cat is carrying a mini-Mickey moment.

Last September, Bryan Bundesen, 34, a wire technician from Galion, Ohio, was visiting his sister Tabatha in Arizona. He snapped a print of her cat, a churned multiply whose genuine name is Tardar Sauce. (Ms. Bundesen, who works as a waitress during a Red Lobster, says her daughter suspicion a cat’s fur was a tone of tartar sauce, though misspelled it.) Mr. Bundesen posted a design on a website Reddit. People suspicion it was funny. Many began to conceal a print with sentences expressing what they illusory to be a cat’s exasperation with humans: “I suspicion we could not be some-more disappointed…you valid me wrong,” reads one of thousands. “There are dual kinds of people in this world…and we don’t like them,” says another.

Within weeks, photos and videos of a cat had been common and posted to social-media sites millions of times.

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Grumpy Cat

Mr. Lashes became a cat’s deputy in October. He says he is perplexing to assistance a Bundesens gain on a cat’s luminary though overexposing it. This week, Mr. Lashes helped negotiate a sale of a film choice formed on Grumpy Cat’s persona to Broken Road Productions, a prolongation association obliged for Adam Sandler’s 2011 automobile “Jack and Jill.” Terms of a one-picture understanding weren’t disclosed.

This week, Grumpy Cat is entrance to New York to foster a stirring Chronicle Books release, “Grumpy Cat: A Grumpy Book: Disgruntled Tips and Activities Designed to Put a Frown on Your Face” during BookExpo America, a book attention convention.

Mr. Lashes also has fake a understanding with Grenade Beverage LLC to emanate and discharge a line of Grumpy Cat coffee-in-cans and bottled beverages. Excluding a film deal, a Bundesens have warranted a low-six-figure sum off a cat so far, Mr. Bundesen says. Mr. Lashes’s take is about 20%, clients say. (Mr. Lashes declined to criticism on financial arrangements.)

“He is unequivocally good during assisting us not get taken advantage of,” Mr. Bundesen says of Mr. Lashes.

Mr. Lashes grew adult in Spokane, Wash. After a year of college, he forsaken out in 2000 to pursue his dream of apropos a veteran musician. He fronted a rope and worked in talent scouting for an eccentric label.

In 2010, he listened from Charlie Schmidt, an aged crony of his father’s and a multimedia artist in Spokane. Back in 1985, Mr. Schmidt told Mr. Lashes, he had dressed his now defunct cat, Fatso, in a blue T-shirt, sat him during a keyboard and manipulated a cat such that it played a strain Mr. Schmidt wrote. Mr. Schmidt had recently posted a aged video on YouTube. Keyboard Cat was floating up.

Mr. Lashes started assisting his family friend, formulating a social-media plan to fan a cat’s grass-roots popularity. He told Mr. Schmidt to adopt a new cat and make some-more videos. Then came a chartering deals with T-shirt, fondle and newness present companies. Soon, Mr. Lashes was creation deals for a cat to seem in selling and ad campaigns. In all, Mr. Schmidt says he has done scarcely $300,000 from Keyboard Cat deals Mr. Lashes has arranged.

Mr. Lashes now lives in West Hollywood, Calif., where he works out of his one-bedroom condo. His newest customer is Princess Monster Truck, a cat with an underbite. “When it comes to cats, Ben knows who is going to be big,” says Christopher Torres, a customer of Mr. Lashes and a creator of Nyan Cat, a digital, square-shaped feline. Mr. Lashes also represents other photographs, images, sayings or ideas that widespread online and turn informative inside jokes.

Mr. Lashes says he tries to assistance his clients strengthen their brands as well.

Last month, Messrs. Torres and Schmidt filed a lawsuit with a U.S. District Court in a executive district of California. They lay that 5th Cell and Warner Bros.—respectively a developer and publisher of a Scribblenauts authorization of videogames—have infringed on a copyright and heading right of Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat, by including a characters in Scribblenauts games.

“If you’re a large house and we routinely compensate for a use of these things, we will come after you,” says Kia Kamran, an profession who works with Mr. Lashes on his clients’ transaction matters and who also represents a egghead skill rights of a tattoo on former fighter Mike Tyson’s face.

A mouthpiece for Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment declined to comment. 5th Cell didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Lashes says he is driven by a enterprise to “protect a small guy” though also to have fun. At a South by Southwest tech gathering in Austin, Texas, in March, he organised a paid-appearance understanding for Grumpy Cat from a website Mashable. For two-hour stretches over 3 days, a cat lay on a cushioned pedestal in Mashable’s tent and conventioneers waited in line for hours to have their print taken with a nonplused puss.

The logistics weren’t that difficult to work through—Grumpy Cat was already scheduled to be in Austin to fasten a luminary book of an online diversion show, “Will Kitty Play With It?”

As partial of a transport losses lonesome by Friskies, a cat-food code that sponsors a diversion show, Mr. Bundesen says he chauffeured Grumpy Cat around Austin in a black BMW

X5, with coloured windows. When they left a final day of a Mashable appearance, he says a automobile was swamped by 40 to 50 people holding photos of a cat by a automobile windows. “It was like a paparazzi,” he says.

A chronicle of this essay seemed May 29, 2013, on page A1 in a U.S. book of The Wall Street Journal, with a headline: A Hollywood Agent Helps Web’s Cats Claw Their Way to a Top.

Beginning Jun 11 and using by Aug. 1, Valley 11 Cinemas is charity a package of 8 morning film matinees for usually $5 as good as special deals on benefaction packages.

Billed as 2013 Summer Kid Shows, a array facilities such films as Madagascar 3, Disney’s Earth, Hotel Transylvania, Disney’s Oceans, Planet 51, Disney’s African Cats, Ice Age 4 and Disney’s Chimpanzee, pronounced Devon Bolen, ubiquitous manager of a 11-screen cine-plex handling in a Shasta Outlets selling center.

Movies are theme to change though notice and all films will be shown in a customary 2-dimension format, Bolen said. Each underline film is approximately 90 mins long. With age-appropriate previews and time for cleaning a museum between showings, any matinee will final scarcely 2 hours.

Each film in a array will play for usually one week with a 10 a.m. uncover any Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, he explained further.

“It’s an overwhelming deal. We usually wish to give families with kids something to do in a summer months,” pronounced Bolen, who started handling Valley 11 Cinemas in January.

Reel Theatre, a association that manages a film complex, “offered a identical array package final year, though we didn’t publicize it enough,” he added.

While a array is essentially dictated for children ages 4-12, Bolen is anticipating “a lot of relatives will lay in with their kids” to keep function problems to a minimum.

“We will have additional staffing to keep a kids underneath control, though we are not a babysitting service,” Bolen said.

Misbehavior will not be tolerated and could outcome in a child being asked to leave a screening room, he said.

For relatives who can't dedicate to 8 weeks of shows, singular uncover tickets are $1.

They will be sole usually if adequate seating is available.

Since no outward food or drinks are authorised in any of a 11 auditoriums, array sheet holders will find coupons in their sheet pamphlet for additional assets on benefaction items.

For example, a vast popcorn and vast soothing splash sole as Combo No. 1 is usually $6 with a array sheet coupon, though $8.50 though a coupon, states a flyer accessible from a theater.

From time to time we adore to demeanour out for a good understanding on cruises, though now we suspicion we would offer sum on 4 new 2013 Disney Cruise Line deals, that are for those of we who live in a US. Cruise lines adore to offer their business some good rates, as this becomes a prefect approach for some people to knowledge a holiday of a lifetime, but carrying to compensate a full price.

Disney Cruises contend that we need to keep checking behind with them often, as their deals change all a time, and now they have 4 good deals.

The initial is for some extraordinary rates for those who wish to transport from Miami. Selected new Disney Cruise Line cruises from Miami starts during usually $499 per person, that is for a four-night Bahamian cruise, or $625 per chairman for a five-night journey to a Caribbean.

Disney wants to contend farewell to a pier in Galveston, Texas, and so have special offers as a approach to celebrate. You can suffer a seven-night Disney Wonder Bahamian and Caribbean journey during some overwhelming rates.

The third Disney Cruise understanding is for residents in Florida, here we have a possibility to go on a Bahamas or a Caribbean journey are some extraordinary rates, nonetheless there are usually a few dates available.

Finally, if we are a portion in a U.S. Military, or late afterwards there are some well-developed rates to be had.

Check out all 4 special Disney Cruise line offers for 2013 on their official website.

Follow Cruise Ship News on Facebook, Google+, Pinterest+ and Twitter. You can also download the app on Android and iPad.

ESPN repelled a media universe final week when it announced estimable layoffs. That a pierce came on a heels of a integrate of eye-popping deals usually underscored a cutthroat conflict between networks scrabbling for live-sports rights.

But even as Fox Sports 1 and NBC Sports Network enter a ring, one fact remains: There aren’t many some-more deals to be had. With a difference of a NBA, many sports-rights contracts for a vital properties are sealed down until after a start of a subsequent decade.

Which might explain because ESPN spent so large recently. The Walt Disney Co. network only inked a $825 million, 11-year understanding to put a U.S. Open tennis tourney wholly on cable, finale CBS’s 46-year attribute with a Open. Two years ago, ESPN snatched Wimbledon from NBC after 43 years with a 12-year understanding value $500 million.

ESPN also non-stop a wallet to launch a SEC Network, a 24-7 channel clinging to a premier discussion in increasingly-hot college football (it didn’t divulge terms). Only dual years ago, it announced a $300 million, 20-year understanding to emanate a Longhorn Network with a University of Texas. Then there’s a $470 million-a-year understanding struck in late 2012 for a long-demanded college-football playoffs.

There’s a flipside to such spending. ESPN’s preference to lay off 300 to 400 staffers, a network’s initial mass cutbacks given 2009, was driven by an obligatory need to condense costs. Compared with other sports-media companies, that run most leaner, ESPN has copiousness of employees—over 6,000 worldwide, pronounced James Andrew Miller, co-author of a book “Those Guys Have All a Fun: Inside a World of ESPN.”

The large esteem on a setting is a NBA. The league’s inhabitant TV deals with ESPN and Turner Sports’ TNT end after a 2015-2016 season.

Fox Sports owner David Hill has done no skeleton about wanting a NBA. “Will we be in a position to bid on a NBA TV rights commencement with a 2016 season? Absolutely,” Mr. Hill told Broadcasting Cable in April. “As TV rights come adult for bid from opposite college and veteran leagues, we will be opportunistic and we will bid on them.” 

But save a NBA, there are only not that many inhabitant sports packages left to buy—which eventually drives adult prices for internal sports.

When Skylanders rival Disney Infinity is expelled after this year, it will come with pre-made play sets like this one for Pixar’s arriving Monsters University.

The film deals with a college days of Monsters, Inc characters like Mike, Sulley and Randy, and a play set binds quick to that, featuring antic wars with opposition propagandize Fear Tech. At a finish of a trailer, we see how a monsters competence correlate with a Toy Box.

The Monsters University play set will be enclosed with a Disney Infinity starter pack.

Disney Infinity hits many vital platforms this August.

Watch a trailer.

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Photos: “Mickey and a Magic Map” uncover during Disneyland

The new uncover casts a mischievous Mickey Mouse, in his classical purpose of sorcerer’s neophyte from “Fantasia,” in a 22-minute low-pitched featuring songs from half a dozen Disney charcterised films.

During a premiere of a new uncover we saw Thursday evening, about dual dozen dancers and singers achieved with a subsidy soundtrack in a prolongation coming Broadway peculiarity in a refurbished Fantasyland Theatre.

A onetime home to productions starring Snow White, Pocahontas and even Dick Tracy, a museum had been used in new years as a meet-and-greet plcae for a Disney princesses, withdrawal a theatre and a 1,800 seats radically unused.

I came mostly to see how Disney blended technological advances like an huge LED shade backdrop and a “talking” King Louis impression with live actors and normal melodramatic props and sets.

The “Magical Map” in a pretension of a uncover was achieved with 6 companion LED screens divided plumb into thirds by a span of mostly invisible catwalk stages for a performers.

At initial we found a 240-square-foot unsentimental map to be distractingly differing with a brew of hand-drawn cartography, computer-rendered characters and even a occasional live-action Mickey all projected on a hulk LED screen. Overwhelmed by a constantly in suit digital backdrop, we was incompetent to heed a performers in a steampunk-inspired costumes from a painterly map with all onstage sketch from a same earthtone palette.

Midway by a show, a horde and star Mickey left from a theatre and became a digital impression on a shade — causing me to remove hold with a categorical impression and feel like we was examination a film rather than a live performance. It wasn’t until nearby a finale, when a digital Mickey remade before a eyes behind into a costumed impression (with a assistance of a trap door), that we was means to strike a change visually between a live and prerecorded performances.

Similar camouflaged LCD screens were used to good outcome on a Disney Dream journey boat in a form of unsentimental portholes, fascinated design and digital dance floors. Unfortunately, a enchanting map in a Disneyland uncover left me wondering “Why are they doing this?” rather than “How are they doing this?”

Disney has been regulating a articulated “talking” characters in smaller shows via a parks — many recently in “Minnie’s Fly Girls” and “Disney Dance Crew.”

For me, a “talking” King Louie from a “Jungle Book” was a prominence of a show, dancing extravagantly with his swift feet and sharp-witted prolonged arms. His platypus-like mouth changed in sync with a lyrics to “I Wanna Be Like You” while his blinking eyes enlivened his face.

Another prominence was a princess miscellany that seamlessly blended together songs by Pocahontas and Mulan — dual characters frequency seen in a park — with a third balance by Rapunzel.

One of my favorite moments was when a beautifully rendered 18-foot-tall riverboat delivered Tiana onstage between a separate in a hulk LED shade for “Dig a Little Deeper.”

Conversely, we found a “Under a Sea” series by Sebastian a crab from “The Little Mermaid” to be a slightest successful series of a show. we couldn’t get over a fact that a puppeteer singing a lead outspoken had his hands shoved low inside a backside of a crab’s shell. He looked approach too most like an obstetrician delivering a baby crustacean — a visible we couldn’t get out of my head.

The jukebox low-pitched featuring a review of Disney stars has turn common use over a final few years for Disneyland parades, night eyeglasses and theatre shows. And while we cite a single-story productions once featured during a Fantasyland Theatre, we know a unsentimental profitableness of a multi-character revues. It only creates some-more clarity in terms of flexibility, shelf life and interchangeability. But it doesn’t meant we can’t prolonged for another staged prolongation of “Aladdin” or “Beauty and a Beast.” It never hurts to ask.

For now though, “Mickey and a Magical Map” will offer as a stout workhorse for Disneyland — and substantially will for years to come. You can design new numbers to get substituted in whenever a latest Disney charcterised underline hits a theaters and maybe even a holiday chronicle of a uncover here or there.

Related thesis park stories and print galleries:

Disneyland: Fantasy Faire | Mickey a Magical Map

Universal Studios Hollywood: Wizarding World of Harry Potter

Six Flags Magic Mountain: Full Throttle

Knott’s Berry Farm: Timber Mountain | Coast Rider

SeaWorld San Diego: Aquatica

U.S. parks: Top 13 for 2013 | Disney World | Cedar Point | Top 10 H2O coasters

International parks: Top 13 for 2013 | Shanghai Disneyland | Disneyland Paris | Top 20 H2O parks

Follow a Los Angeles Times Funland thesis park blog on Twitter, Facebook and Google+

Disney Channel star Bella Thorne (Shake it Up) has sole Autumn Falls, a YA book series, to Random House Children’s Books, a publisher announced. 

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Star Wars fans can get romantic about their favorite scholarship novella saga. So it was no warn final month when some of them were dissapoint about Walt Disney’s (DIS) astonishing preference to cease growth at Lucasfilm’s video diversion multiplication and concentration on chartering deals instead.

Disney didn’t wait prolonged to act. On May 6, it announced an exclusive, multiyear agreement to permit Star Wars to Electronic Arts (EA), a second largest video diversion company. In other words, people spooky with a authorization can demeanour brazen to some-more digital diversions as they wait for Disney to recover a hotly expected seventh Star Wars film in 2015.

The agreement is a depart from Disney’s bigger video diversion strategy. The association is perplexing to pierce divided from building one-off titles tied to particular cinema and radio shows. Instead, in September, Disney will recover Disney Infinity, a diversion height in that business will be means to play with their favorite characters from a Magic Kingdom in a “sandbox” environment.

But Disney clearly thinks differently about a Star Wars franchise, that it acquired final year in a $4 billion squeeze of Lucasfilm. That explains a some-more normal chartering understanding with a EA deal. The financial terms were kept underneath wraps.

For EA, a Star Wars understanding is a possibility for vindication. Two years ago, EA expelled Star Wars: The Old Republic, a large multiplayer diversion that cost an estimated $300 million. At a time, researcher P.J. NcNeaily pronounced it was a “single largest bet” in a career of John Riccitiello, who was afterwards EA’s CEO.

The Old Republic didn’t attract adequate compensate subscribers. In November, EA attempted to deliver a investment by releasing a giveaway version. It’s misleading if EA’s rescue try will work. Riccitiello won’t be around to applaud if it does—he quiescent in Mar when EA warned that it was expected to skip a quarterly numbers.

Disney doesn’t wish to take such risks. That’s because it pulled a block on diversion growth during Lucasfilm. And if a EA understanding doesn’t compensate off, Disney can always let Star Wars-obsessed gamers play with them in Infinity’s open world.