After waffling between positive and negative territory throughout the session, major market benchmarks ended higher on Monday as investors geared up for the busiest week of the quarterly earnings season. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI 0.68%) and the S&P 500 (^GSPC 1.11%) posted small gains.
Today's stock market
| Index | Percentage Change | Point Change |
|---|---|---|
| Dow | 0.07% | 17.70 |
| S&P 500 | 0.28% | 8.42 |
Data source: Yahoo! Finance.
As for individual stocks, Walt Disney (DIS 1.80%) climbed on a trio of exciting box-office developments, and Halliburton (HAL -0.22%) rose after posting strong second-quarter 2019 earnings.
Image source: Getty Images.
Disney's film studios are on a roll
Shares of Disney gained 0.7%, hovering near all-time highs after the entertainment conglomerate's live-action remake of The Lion King broke multiple box-office records over the weekend.
After launching last week in China, where it has already collected nearly $98 million in gross ticket sales, The Lion King brought its global gross to $531 million through Sunday as it began its worldwide rollout in earnest. That includes $185 million from North American audiences alone, which represented the biggest-ever domestic opening weekend in the month of July (without adjusting for inflation) and marked the best opening of all time for any live-action Disney remake to date.
If that weren't enough, at Comic-Con 2019 this weekend, Disney announced Marvel's Avengers: Endgame had finally beat Avatar to become the highest-grossing film of all time, boasting a global haul of $2.79 billion.
Finally, Disney's superhero-centric subsidiary also took the opportunity at Comic-Con to formally unveil its "Phase 4" slate of films for the next two years. Marvel detailed 2020-2021 launch dates for movies including Black Widow, The Falcon and Winter Soldier, The Eternals, Hawkeye, Thor 4: Love & Thunder, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Halliburton pumps out a quarterly beat
Shares of Halliburton soared 9.2% -- making it the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 -- after the oil-field services company announced impressive second-quarter 2019 results. Halliburton's revenue climbed 3.4% year over year to $5.93 billion, translating into adjusted net income of $303 million, or $0.35 per share. Analysts, on average, were only modeling earnings of $0.30 per share on slightly higher revenue of $5.97 billion.
Chairman and CEO Jeff Miller insisted Halliburton's execution was "outstanding" during the quarter, particularly given sustained growth momentum from international markets as the company navigates more difficult market dynamics in North America. For perspective, North American revenue rose a modest 2% sequentially to $3.3 billion, while international revenue jumped 6% to $2.6 billion.
"We are successfully executing our strategy of controlling what we can control and managing our business to perform well in any market conditions," Miller added.
