Time for me to re-read "Poor Charlie's Almanack"!
"Disney (DIS) is an amazing example of autocatalysis… They had all those movies in the can. They owned the copyright. And just as Coke (KO) could prosper when refrigeration came, when the videocassette was invented, Disney didn't have to invent anything or do anything except take the thing out of the can and stick it on the cassette. And every parent and grandparent wanted his descendents to sit around and watch that stuff at home on videocassette. So Disney got this enormous tail wind from life. And it was billions and billions of dollars worth of tail wind.
Obviously, that's a marvelous model if you can find it. You don't have to invent anything. All you have to do is to sit there while the world carries you forward… A lot of what happened to Disney was like what a friend of mine said about an ignorant fraternity brother of his who succeeded in life: 'He was a duck sitting on a pond. And they raised the level of the pond.' To be fair, Disney has been brilliant about creating new stuff-to catch the same tailwind. But by the time it's done, The Lion King alone is going to do plural billions. And, by the way, when I say, 'when it's done,' I mean fifty years from now or something. Plural billions- from one movie?"
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