Further Reading Cats and dogs are living together because the new Ghostbusters is actually good

In a Monday statement to investors, the company attributed the “downward revision… to a lowering of previous expectations regarding the home entertainment business, mainly driven by an acceleration of market decline.”



The statement continued: "A majority of the goodwill that was impaired was originally recorded at the time of the acquisition of Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Inc. in 1989.”

As such, the Japanese corporate giant is taking a $977 million (112.1 billion yen, £780 million) writedown in its movie business. That's driven in large part by the fact that most of us are watching a lot of movies and TV shows via streaming services these days.

“The decline in the DVD and Blu-ray market was faster than we anticipated,” Takashi Iida, a Sony spokesman, told Bloomberg News.

In addition to the home entertainment business losses, two of Sony Pictures' biggest 2016 productions, Ghostbusters and Angry Birds, did not do particularly well in theaters. Ars liked the former, but we skipped a formal review of the latter.



Earlier this month, Sony’s entertainment chief, Michael Lynton, announced that he would be leaving the company after 13 years in order to focus on being the chairman of Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat. He is set to leave Sony in six months.