Morning Market Roundup: Disney’s Disaster, Microsoft Windows 8 Launch Date

Here’s what’s important in the financial world this morning:

Entertainment: Disney’s recent movie “John Carter” was a disaster at the box office and now the company will take a $200 million write-down; this comes in higher than analyst forecasts of $120 million to $160 million. According to The New York Times, Disney’s studio division will see an operating loss of $80 million to $120 million from the flop in the March quarter as compared to the December quarter’s $77 million operating profit.

The company now hopes that The “Avengers” and Pixar’s “Brave” will help studio operations later in the year.

Tech: Microsoft will wrap up work on its new Windows 8 during the summer and launch it in October. Personal computers and tablets will carry the new operating systems including ones that run Intel Corp. and ARM Holdings chips.

By utilizing ARM technology, Microsoft will now use identical processors found in Apple Inc.’s iPad but there will be less than five ARM devices debuting as compared to the more than 40 Intel products.

Oracle: will report its fiscal quarter three results after the market’s close on Tuesday. Analysts estimate that earnings per share increased to $0.56, up from $0.54 in the previous year while revenue rose only 2.5 percent to $9.02 billion. Over the last two months, the company’s stock has been downgraded. Analysts have expressed concern about the competition that Oracle has faced by the cloud providers Salesforce.com and Workday along with the burden of its Sun Microsystems transaction.

CVR Energy: The company has again said no to Carl Icahn’s $30 per share tender offer. Shareholders were also asked by senior leadership to not tender their shares, according to Reuters. In a statement by CVR Energy chief executive officer Jack Lipinski, he said, “After committing to drop his tender offer and proxy solicitation if he didn’t receive sufficient tenders by March 23, Mr Icahn has again gone back on his word by extending his distracting and detrimental campaign.”

[Editor’s note: the above is a cross post that originally appeared on Wall St. Cheat Sheet.]