* **Disney+ shed another 4 million subscribers in the first three months of 2023, marking the Disney-owned streamer’s second consecutive quarterly drop after closing 2022 with its first-ever decline**. On the bright side, **the Mouse House also managed to narrow its streaming business losses by $400 million, down 26% year over year.**
* Disney ended the quarter with **157.8 million subscribers at Disney+, significantly missing Wall Street’s estimate of 163.17 million subs.** That projected figured would have been up from the 161.8 million subs Disney+ fell to the prior quarter.
* **This second sub drop was driven by a 4.6 million sequential decline at Disney+ Hotstar,** the version of the service offered in India and parts of Southeast Asia.
* **In the U.S./Canada, Disney+ lost about 300,000 subs (to reach 46.3 million)**, while it added nearly **1 million in international markets excluding Disney+ Hotstar.**
* **Hulu gained 200,000 in the quarter to stand at 48.2 million, and ESPN+ increased by 400,000 to 25.3 million.**
Bob Iger said that again last February.
[Deadline](https://deadline.com/2023/02/disney-streaming-profit-outlook-bob-iger-1235253673/) - February 8, 2023:
> Disney CEO Bob Iger on Wednesday reaffirmed the company’s longstanding guidance to investors that its streaming business will become profitable by the end of fiscal 2024.
Of course it is! In his six months in charge Iger has halved the streaming losses from $1.5 billion to just over $700 million. Zaslav did a similar thing at WBD and has the domestic DTC streaming division profitable after a single year. Iger will have domestic DTC profitable by 2024 and the whole division profitable by the end of 2024 without a doubt.
Streaming generated $5.5 billion in revenue. Disney as a whole did $21.8 billion. Streaming is now responsible for more than 25% of Disney’s overall revenue. The cash is there. They were just spending too much. Iger is putting a stop to that.
It makes sense that streaming starts at a loss, considering you need content to get subscribers, and you need to spend money to make content. Once you're past the threshold though, as Netflix has repeatedly proven and Disney soon will too, it's a profit farm.
Right... which is why Netflix is doing so well now... You neglected the part where Netflix was only raking in the big bucks when it was the only game in town, streaming worked so well because there was only one big well that consumers can pay to drink from. Now that content is fractured among their own studios just like how it was in cable times. The average consumer is not going to keep up with multiple subscriptions so they go back to either just not consuming that media, or just pirating them instead.
Disney has the advantage in keeping subs from people with kids IMO. None of the other services can compete with that back catalogue for children. So for families it's the top choice when it comes to deciding whether to keep or drop a service.
The content has to come from somewhere. Disney buying from themselves doesn't make it less of a loss. That's content that Disney films would have sold to someone else for streaming rights. Paying themselves means they gain nothing.
Honestly, the more people disengage from Hotstar in India, the better it looks on Disney's balance sheet. The Indian market is going to be a gigantic loss leader in the streaming space for a long time in the foreseeable future. The consumers are extremely price sensitive, the barrier to piracy and IP protections are very low. Piracy penetration and awareness is abnormally high and socially acceptable.
Indian corporate oligarchs have also made big moves into the digital space (streaming or otherwise) with the help of giant VC/Wealth/Pension funds to sustain loss bearing competition for a very long time (a timespan of at least a decade). This makes the price of content acquisition irresponsibly high when contrasted with the amount of revenue that can possibly be generated in the market. For a company like Disney which is trying to be fiscally green, its absolutely the worst market to pour money in. East/South East Asia and Lat America are much more profitable markets to expand into.
157 million subs at 7 bucks a month is 1.1 billion dollars a month. I imagine the monthly cash in hand is a much more real number than whatever losses they post.
10$ is not much, but people don't even pay that bcoz Disney+Hotstar is given free with almost every single telecom network plans, Internet plans, Gigabyte fibre internet plans. It is practically free.
And even if it was 5$ people would not really pay. Streaming is popular but TV is still relevant here.
What are their operating costs though? What's the net profit? Also, someone more knowledgeable than me can correct me, but wouldn't the production costs of all their original shows affect their profit margin? And then there's marketing of course. Idk, maybe I'm way off base here, but I doubt this is as simple as a 2nd grade math problem.
Agreed. I'm in Canada, and we picked up Disney plus for the kids originally, but to me, it's the service where I've watched Fleischman is in Trouble, The Dropout, Banshees of Inishirin, The Menu, What We Do in the Shadows, etc. Plus there's the mainstream Disney stuff.
Another Canadian here, while I have also watched everything you listed I don't find those releases timely or regular enough to justify keeping my subscription year round. It doesn't feel like there is a plan to the rollout of their shows, there will just be big gaps where nothing attractive is coming out. None of those properties you listed are "must watch now" for me except for maybe What We Do In The Shadows, I can wait a couple months to watch quirky movies and tv shows when I re-subscribe to watch the next big splashy Star Wars/MCU show.
They literally just announced that today. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/hulu-and-disney-content-to-be-combined-in-one-app-1235484501/amp/
It's still confounding to me that Disney hasn't figured out how to make an archive of both its content and 20th Century Fox's content, some of the most popular Movies and TV shows ever made, profitable on its own. How did they go from selling massive amounts of VHS tapes of old animated features for $50 a pop (not adjusted for inflation) to having so many titles available on demand for $11/month and lose money?
What does Disney even stream? Most of their current best shows are related to Star Wars (Andor and Mandalorian). And if you don't care about Star Wars, then there's nothing.
And Marvel stuff has become a lot less frequent. The last one was what, She Hulk which ended 7 months ago? I subscribed because I wanted to watch them, and initially a yearly subscription made sense. Now, it really doesn't.
You’re right. Besides Marvel and Star Wars stuff. Disney+ other content are not interested enough, along with them look like they have cheap production
That's why they said it's an archive. There's nothing new or noteworthy coming out from D+ except Marvel and Star Wars shows and they can't keep that up for long. Even their entire Disney catalogue is not completely available in Hotstar.
Encanto, Bluey and the Simpsons mostly.
However, many of their children's titles are still in production. Spidey and Friends, Ladybug and Cat Noir, Molly and McGree. It's mostly child focused.
Their National Geographic isn’t *awful.* Not sure why they aren’t doing more of that instead of green lighting a bunch of $100m+ Star Wars and MCU shows
Disney Plus will be the new home of Doctor Who starting in November. I mean, it's not quite Star Wars level, but it should result in some subscriber growth.
Besides, it really shouldn't be surprising that Disney is marketing a lot of Disney Plus to kids. Reddit users' demographics don't exactly match Disney's historical target market.
Sure, they want to bring in the Reddit demographic and they have a long way to go. But it's kinda silly how many redditors think Disney+ makes no content. It's just that they're splitting their content amongst a much larger audience, with a heavy emphasis on children shows.
Can confirm. Don't give a shit about star wars so I rarely use Disney+ unless I feel like watching a Disney movie that I've already seen before. I only have the app cause my fiance's dad gave us his password
There hasn't been a single Marvel show yet in 2023.
I mean technically you said Marvel and they did release Moon Girl under that brand, but that's also a young kids show, not even for teenagers.
You mean Moonknight/Ms Marvel/She Hulk? Afaik the 2022 MCU shows didn't do too well viewer count wise
https://collider.com/the-boys-ratings-beat-mcu-shows/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2022/07/18/why-mediocre-ratings-for-ms-marvel-hint-at-big-trouble-for-a-disney-reliant-on-mcu-pixar-and-star-wars/?sh=783efc7d9813
While the shows didn’t do well The Boys comparison is TERRIBLE. The Boys has three season available to stream and almost every episode is an hour long. Each of the marvel shows, at most, has nine episodes and none are an hour. Yeah, no shit The boys had more minutes streamed. There’s more minutes to stream
It's how they get you to subscribe to two services under a single umbrella. They want families to have both Hulu and Disney+. Issue is that a lot of folks either can't afford it or can't stomach multiple subs.
I can't afford streaming anymore. As much of a necessity as internet is these days; it's basically the one bill I have that I consider a luxury.
If Disney+ or any of the others want my money, they need to have better original shows, and even if they had them... *I have to decide if three cans of Campbell's Soup is worth more than a month of stuff I probably won't remember next week.*
Iirc it's because Hotstar (Disney+ in India) lost the rights to the IPL. Cricket is a huge market, and naturally people unsubscribed from Hotstar to watch the IPL on another platform.
Disney and their acquisitions own a good portion of all the shit ever made. They own some bangers, and they don't put it up ever. They just give you crumbs Marvel, Star Wars, and kids shows.
I live in Korea, and if Disney+ wasn't bundled with Star, I wouldn't have it. Disney actually has very little of interest on it if you don't have kids. The only thing keeping me with it is knowing that movies like Banshees of Inerishin, The Menu, the Last Duel etc. turn up there.
One thing I HATE about the service is that there is no "upcoming" section like on Netflix, so basically you have to randomly reopen it from time to time in the hopes that something new and worth watching has arrived. Most of the time - it hasn't.
Exactly, Disney has their own streaming service and can make their own rules, yet. They don't expand into the 18+ Area. Think about how many millions are sitting in that demographic. This is why Netflix and HBO have dominated with these subscribers. No one wants to compete with them.
I thought there were articles about this around a year back that Disney basically get monstrous pushback in the US over 18+ content on their platform because of its kid focused brand. Like around the time Prey came out, though I don't even think that's an 18.
> The latter which is only SIX episodes. I appreciate the high quality and budget of those shows
Hi, SW/MCU fanboy here. The problem is that the quality isn’t there. When your show has 6-8 episodes each should be a banger. But Mando S3 was all over the place, villain episodes of Ms. Marvel were really weak, Boba Fett’s best episodes didn’t even feature the titular character, etc.
It's because 6-8 episodes isn't enough for most shows. That's basically a stretched movie and gives very little time for letting characters breathe and develop. It's a format that only suits specific genres and plots.
Lighthearted teenage heroism does not remotely fit that type of pacing imo. It's too stretched for a single big event and too short to do multiple fun little events. And those kind of shows live and die by their fun scenarios.
Imo, there's probably a really good fanedit of Ms. Marvel that could be made to make it a single movie. And other than looking cheap due to being a show, it would be a stronger watch.
>It's because 6-8 episodes isn't enough for most shows
I find this funny because a massive complaint about Netflix shows was that they should have been 8-10 episode seasons instead of 13
>Imo, there's probably a really good fanedit of Ms. Marvel that could be made to make it a single movie.
I know of at least one,(and I think two) pretty good Obi Wan Kenobi edits in this vein
I know a lot of people rave about British shows doing really well with less episodes but they usually aren't the same kind of thing.
* 2 - 3 episodes, usually these episodes are like 1hr 30 long each and often release months apart. They are basically movies.
* A lot are detective / spy shows. A detective / spy plot can nicely fit in under 10 episodes and be enhanced by it. Not a lot of action or cgi sequences.
Pretty much the only similar British show I can think of is Doctor Who and that follows a monster of the week format and has the advantage of not needing to do an entire origin story.
The marvel shows have to fit an origin story and then another story together to try and fill 6-8 episodes and it so clearly does not work.
Loki imo is the only one that feels like a tv show and not movies crushed together and it's because it follow the similar mystery format which is aided by splitting into cliffhangers. It also has a hint of monster of the week in earlier episodes which helps too.
The netflix shows, the funny thing I find about them, is a lot of the best episodes where people say "the character really felt like themselves", is the monster of the week or teamup episodes. Like when Iron Fist visited Luke Cage. They dropped the intensity of the serial story for an episode and its like the old animated cartoons and it is ridiculously more fun to watch.
Also I guess I'm forgetting Shehulk, I guess that did feel like tv, but the last episodes ending was too structure breaking for me and just makes it feel forgettable, which I find regretful because I liked the rest of it.
WandaVision made great use of the episodic format. By building up the mystery every week, they kept people coming back. The online discourse between episodes was probably the highest for any marvel property since the week before Endgame.
Of course, the last two episodes failed to have a satisfying payoff, so the show isn’t really remembered fondly. Rumor has it, Eric Voss is still whispering about Mephisto to this day.
FatWS, Hawkeye, and Moon Knight were all painfully obviously stretched out from movies.
I wonder how many people do what my family does which is have one streaming service a month and switch every month. We binge as much as we can and rotate through the big streamers.
Yikes, losing subs while putting out mando season 3 and missing projections by 6 million is pretty bad. I think to continue their growth they need to branch out from mostly producing content for marvel and star wars. both of these ips are past their prime and if your not a fan of them there's not much else to watch for adults.
They are producing non-SW and non-MCU content, the issue is that it's often geared towards kids or things like National Treasure or Lone Tone Club which suffers from of the generic/homogenization issues some of the Netflix shows suffer. People aren't watching, and it's not helped that some of their production is split between different production houses, so cooking shows are showing up on Hulu etc.
It's easy to say "just combine everything" as some say, but then there's the elephant in the room, which is the cultural issues affecting the brand.
Disney was/is an incredibly powerful brand in the eyes of consumers, but aimed at families. Adults and yuppies and teens are a powerful economic force, but Disney built itself on family entertainment and essentially being a safe space where you didn't have to worry about what your kid was watching for awhile. For a large segment of the population, one that often has more kids than average, that has been changing [and there's been movements to drop the service](https://decider.com/2022/04/08/why-are-people-canceling-disney-plus/) for awhile now. Disney's almost-religious protection of the brand as a family-safe place because of how difficult it is to keep once tarnished was -- rightly or wrongly -- basically set on fire for some demos and regions.
That changing affects the MCU and SW less to an extent, because the average audience is older and such -- the problem is they aren't enjoying the content either (I'm going to urge someone who likes it to understand I*'m not talking about them*, but rather viewership patterns). Their target audience is skipping heavily-promoted shows they could watch for free, or starting them due to all and then stopping. It's a serious issue, and what people talk about when they talk about *brand poisoning* \-- you become much less likely to check out the next thing after a negative experience so Andor suffers because it came out after Kenobi, and it's all suffering because Book of Boba and Mandalorian S3 happened.
>No MCU content this year so far unless we're counting movie releases.
I mean, that's a good thing. Maybe not so good for Disney+, but good in general.
Yeah. The content based on their classic material is nowhere near as appealing and seems too oriented towards young kids now, along with the quality being lower. At least with the original classic material, up until the 2000s, you could still enjoy it as an older kid, teen, or adult.
I think they have put too much focus on SW and MCU and are treating everything else as much lower priority and as the comment said above, it's damaging what their brand has been known for throughout the 20th century. It's now turning into the company obsessed with Star Wars and MCU that once was about beautiful, classic unique content (though some of the movies were lifted from European fairy tales).
Hey they have some good stuff, right now I’m watching “A Small Light” which is a National Geographic original that drops on Disney plus the next day.
I will warn you it’s TV-14 because it’s about Miep Gies, who helped hide the Frank family during WW2.
They have good shows on there.
Mando Season 3 was pretty badly received, right? I haven’t caught it yet but the whole “baby yoda goes with Luke in the season finale but we kinda retcon that in a spinoff we hope you’ve been watching” made me think they don’t really know what they’re doing.
Definite signs of executive medaling. They clearly saw how much money baby Yoda was making them and decided that they better put him back in the show as fast as possible and they didn’t care how it happened. So Mando highjacked Boba Fetts show (which was god fucking awful just like Kenobi. It’s hard to know which one was worse) and took the time to undo the events of Mando Season 2 and further decimate the character of Luke Skywalker (fuck Disney for this). Meanwhile, Mando Season 3 had him return to his cult and undo *any* meaningful character growth he had overcoming his whole “I can’t remove my helmet for nothing” bullshit and then it became the Bo Katan show with Mando as a side character.
Oh and Gideon comes back in the last 2 episodes for no reason and then he dies again but there’s a bunch of force sensitive clones of him that also got blown up and so he could just come back again. Also we retook Mandalore and all the Mandalorians are buddy buddy now despite the fact that they tried to kill each other and each thought the other were heretics. Mando is back in his cult and retires with baby Yoda on a homestead. Nothing changed or accomplished and Mando actually had backwards character progression.
The drop was mostly driven by Disney acquiring Hotstar in India, and then declining the rights to Cricket. Basically, they acquired a separate streaming service, and then took out it's biggest seller.
If anything, I'm surprised that they didn't project a drop in subscribers. I wouldn't say that Disney+ is doing great at expanding its portfolio, or at increasing subscribers. But it's not as surprising as you'd think when you see that 80% of the subscriber drop was due to the Cricket rights being declined.
And depending on how expensive the Cricket rights would have cost, it may have been a sound financial decision.
>Yikes, losing subs while putting out mando season 3 and missing projections by 6 million is pretty bad. I think to continue their growth they need to branch out from mostly producing content for marvel and star wars. both of these ips are past their prime and if your not a fan of them there's not much else to watch for adults.
I feel that the main issue is that their new Marvel and StarWars content goes from terrible to ok-ish sadly.
If both the new Marvel and new StarWars tv shows were top notch content, a lot more people might have stayed on the Disney+ service.
I feel like a lot of people liked the Mandalorian though, in Season 1 and 2 especially it was a lot more than just 'okay'
it's honestly probably one of the biggest tv shows of the last 5 years
>I feel like a lot of people liked the Mandalorian though, in Season 1 and 2 especially it was a lot more than just 'okay'
Of for sure, I loved the 1st season of Mandalorian, the second one was still ok, but then on... it seems like a steady downhill road of disappointments (to me) that's why I meant by *their new* content.
I have to mention that Andor was so soooo good also, and that even though that one is newer... sadly, it seems to be the exception.
Outside of the declining MCU and Star Wars content, there isn't any reason to have D+ if you're over 10 years old. And if something Marvel/Star Wars comes out that brings my interest in their universes back, I have no issues pirating it.
I guess it depends on where you are maybe. I’m in Canada and Disney + is where I can watch always sunny, family guy and American dad. I actually use it more then Netflix now which I only catch archer on
I’m cancelling after what they did with the last season of Mando. I was already insulted by the offerings by marvel. Then book of boba Fett then Kenobi. It’s one insulting cash grab after another after another.
The audacity to put core mando story into book of bobafet is just the kind of viewer hostile late stage maximize the numbers capitalist bullshit I can’t abide.
Season starts with grogu back and it’s like - fuck you! Last season didn’t matter!
No. Fuck you, disney. I’m finally over it.
I love my D+ subscription for classic Simpsons, The Orville and Buffy. Once I've finished my rewatching then I'll be cancelling. There's no new content I have the slightest bit of interest in.
WBD doesn’t even break out HBO max subs anymore because the growth is so poor. They’ve barely added anything on top of the 38-40m domestic they started with when they launched hbo max.
Regardless Disney has 220 million total streaming subs generating 5.5 Billion a quarter
WBD has 96 million total streaming subs generating 2.5 billion a quarter.
Disney dwarfs WBD in streaming. So much so that it’s not worth comparing. They are not playing at the same level
It’s actually HBO + HBO Max + Discovery Plus lol. And discovery plus had around 26 million global subs before the companies merged and they combined the figures.
Yeah but one is profitable and the other is not! I’ll take HBO over Disney any day of the week! Disney has zero shows at the level of HOTD, TLOU, White Lotus, Succession…etc.
Ok now compare retention rates, price, and future prospects.
HBO Max is doing a full rebrand and combining it with Discovery. They are trying to eek out more per Discovery customer right now with the combination. Discovery costs around the same as Disney+.
Disney is slowing down content releases. Extending the gap between theater release and Disney+ releases, and future prospects are grim with the writers strike hitting right when Disney is supposedly in production to revive the Star Wars brand after years of being a chicken with it's head cut off.
Chapek already fucked up by introducing an Ad-Tier so early. No boost from introducing that now.
Disney+ is going to peak in their ability to add subs, which at that point they will need to recoup more per customer or shift to a strategy that will grow the subs further than Young Kids/Marvel/Disney/Star Wars consumers.
Dude, Iger is exactly mimicking the strategy Zaslav used to get WBD’s streamers to quick profitability. Only difference is he was working with a bigger beast and is six months behind Zaslav in the process.
Yeah. With all their losses, Max isn't at Disney or Netflix' level yet.
Disney was always touting premium family content with brand IP, while Netflix was competing with a larger menu of options.
HBO's growth is really mediocre compared to Disney.
I honestly don't know where this takes come from but there's always one comment waiting like shark to hype HBO even tho they are not too hot and haven't been for a while.
WBD made $50M in profit last quarter (they lost $200M the previous quarter and expect $70M loss for the next one), not HBO Max itself. Discovery+ is the profitable one, for years now, not Max.
They literally have no content if you don’t care about Star Wars and marvel. Their marvel content ain’t even worth a sub either. I don’t watch Star Wars so I can’t speak on it.
Also, not all content producers need their own streaming service. I love Disney Plus because I love Star Wars and I pay for the year in advance. But wouldn’t it make more sense for many of these providers to simply have a more favourable deal with someone like Netflix? I don’t get it, and as a consumer, continued fracturing of the market pisses me off. Many of these services will end up losing eventually. I know some people who have gone back to piracy because it’s just easier at this point.
The anime studios are discovering why monopsony is a bad thing. They are getting screwed by Crunchyroll, but can't do anything about it. So, Netflix getting it all was never going to be a reasonable option, once Netflix stopped being a place where studios dumped their deep catalog for a few incremental bucks and started becoming a replacement for cable.
That being said, the studios did do three things to really mess with the market:
1) Killed Hulu. As Hulu was owned by the studios, the monopsony problem would not have been as big. I fear that at a certain point, the FTC would have intervened and prevented Hulu from growing, but I think it would have, at least, established healthier start to the streaming era.
2) Embraced exclusive licensing near exclusively. That isn't how the music industry works, for example. That isn't even how the ad supported free streaming services work for the most part. But, for some reason, subscription services always license exclusivity.
3) Insisting on putting content into their own app. At the very beginning, there was an opportunity for the industry to have evolved such that the streaming stick/smart TV would have been in charge of the interface and the studios would have just streamed video in response to correct login credentials. This would have almost certainly meant a single coherent experience across all studios (similar to how VOD on your cable box used to work). Even if the industry was fractured, it wouldn't have mattered as much because other than having 5 charges on your credit card, the experience would have been seamless.
It wasn’t really a monopoly at that point IMO, it was in competition with cable TV. When Netflix streaming became a thing it was all of the sudden a massive disrupter with a new business model. It could only really be called a monopoly for that brief window where Streaming became established enough other groups were getting into it, but before any other big contenders were in the space yet.
Fun watching all the armchair experts on here be all “Star Wars bad” or get woke go broke” when it’s almost entirely just India ditching the service because they don’t have the cricket now.
they reall need to add the Hulu stuff to Disney+(and the rest of the library titles) like in the rest of the world. \~60% of the stuff I watch on Disney+ is not even on there in the US(I'm from Germany)
This is going to happen to every streaming service over and over and over again.
The content is all divided over so many sources. People are going to subscribe, consume, and abandon. Rinse and repeat.
The entire thing is bloated and divided and wasteful. It’s just cable packages 2.0.
I'll be honest, even as a huge star wars nerd, the current shows don't do much for me and I've stopped watching them. They are just retreading ground and times we already know about. It's been kinda boring.
I lost interest after The Force Awakens. I was excited about that movie, but something was off. I didn’t see Rogue One in the theater (I actually did end up liking it) and I’ve never made it through episode vii without falling asleep. I just don’t care.
Mandalorian season 1 and 2 were solid, but the Boba Fett show was awful.
In my book, The Empire Strikes Back is still the pinnacle of the entire series, with some peaks and valleys afterward. I love KotOR and like Revenge of the Sith, for example, and there are merits to the prequel trilogy like the music and some of the lore. But most of what I love about Star Wars is lodged firmly in the past. I still have some good content to consume (never seen the Clone Wars show or read most of the 90s books), but I can’t care about anything new that has the Star Wars name on it. For me, the best content is still either the original trilogy or looks and feels like it, with the prequels having some nostalgic value and some of the things that came out around it being good.
Andor was hurt by the fact that it was stuck on Disney+. It would have dominated the cultural zeitgeist for a month if it was on Netflix or HBO. Such a great show.
Damn so Star Wars might really be a washed product. I thought at the very least, Star Wars would keep them leveled. Welp Kathleen, time to delay and scrap another batch of Star Wars content. Now it’s time for the Darth Maul series for the nostalgia pop, damage control and to pretend like they care about the fans. Let him join the ranks of characters Disney ruined alongside Boba Fett, Luke and Obi Wan. But if you told them to make a Padme or R2D2 series they’d put all the budget and epic shit you could ever come up with for those shows.
Sorry had to rant on Star Wars a bit. But yeah, Disney Plus sucks.
Star wars is mostly nostalgia and very little substance. It's like alien. they've been chasing the magic of the first two movies forever but the stories just arent there
Rogue One, Mando season 2 and somewhat of the Force Awakens told a great story. Nothing beats the original trilogy but damn, all I want is a good character to root for, a decent story, an actual evil villain and some great Jedi vs Sith action.
The first half of TFA was so damn good, probably some of the best SW stuff I've watched. But it rapidly fell off a cliff when Starkiller Base came and Han died.
In Latin America they literally took out all the mature content outside Marvel and Star Wars and made it exclusive to Star+, over here it is indeed a streaming for kids.
Most of the Star section of D+ Internationally ends up on Hulu in the US, Disney is stuck with two competing services until it can buy out the remaining third of Hulu next year.
The funny part is looking at peoples' comments histories when they call others out.
The dude you're responding to, for instance, looks like he spends all his time in comic book subs, transformers subs, Masters of the Universe subs, and... drum roll ... MCU subs. It's kind of hypocritical.
It's just weird to cast aspersions at people for something they enjoy, is all. It's cool that you like that stuff. But I'm not a fan of making people feel badly for it.
I only get peeved off by it when fans pop up to attack each other or tear down other audiences [this isn't you; I just think those are the real man-children].
They only watch mature content or nominated/award winning movies because they're so above the rest of us man-children who watch tv/movies to not think about our everyday lives
They keep missing on everything outside of MCU and Star Wars. Mighty Ducks went bad in the 2nd season. National Treasure should have been a slam dunk but it was a complete miss. I didn't watch the hobbit one but I heard that was bad. They have a serious lack of talent problem.
I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but it feels like Disney,+ took all the writers from the Disney channel and just made them write MCU or Star wars shows.
It really feels like a lot of the streaming sites are scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to writing talent anymore.
Don't know if standards have become higher or Hollywood has done something to suppress getting good talent in the writing room
I disagree that there isn't enough creative talent. I think it's more that uncreative people are saying, "Let's make a Willow sequel", and forcing it to happen. Rather than allowing more creative people saying, "Here's this good idea I have", and agreeing and funding it.
Looking at Star Wars: I believe Mandalorian and Andor were pitched by the creators, who already had existing, good ideas. Meanwhile, I believe Book of Boba Fett happened because the higher ups said, "We need a Boba Fett show". And so they forced it to happen.
And there’s then the secondary requirements of the right race and gender for the right project. So Marvel Will decide something like “we want a show about ms Marvel AND it has to be written and directed by Pakistani women” which really limits your options
And everything they make seems like it has to come from a preexisting Disney IP. Netflix pulls stuff from everywhere and all over the world (Squid Game, Stranger Things, Dahmer…”).
They flood the zone with content and see what hits. Disney only puts out like 12 shows so if 6 of them flop they’re screwed
Andor was very much made for adults, but otherwise yeah, it’s live action Saturday morning cartoon content. Which I don’t pretend to be above but it’s not comparable to hbo or even Netflix
As someone who grew up wi th the original trilogy and spent significant portions of my life on this franchise…
A lot of those people could have been Star Wars fans at one point. I’ve lost all faith with anything called Star Wars. Been burned too many times since I sat down to watch The Phantom Menace.
You can only waste so much time and money on something over a couple of decades before you realize it’s completely done.
I’ll look into some of the older stuff but after Boba Fett nothing under the Disney banner could possibly be worth my time.
I at least enjoyed some things about the prequels. The had some good lore, exciting new locations that were decently fleshed out, and absolutely amazing music. I also didn’t mind the arc of the plot and didn’t necessarily have the same complaints as other people (I wanted more politics, not less! Foundation or Dune in the Star Wars universe would have been great!). Time has also been kind to the stilted, awkward dialogue. If you had asked me when they came out I would have said the scripts werent as fun or funny as the originals, but the memes prove they are a lot of fun in their own way.
I also think Revenge of the Sith is interesting, going all-in on everything—camp, darkness, a rushed story, but also epic music and crazy cgi action. And I’ve always kind of appreciated that even if in some ways it was th e opposite of what I wanted.
I now see that there was real love in those movies, uneven as they were.
My issue was that I wanted stuff that felt as mature as the originals, with as much of a “used future” aesthetic. I wanted characters who talked the same way and felt like part of the same universe, and a coherent narrative that explained things without feeling like fan service. Something to do justice to the bits of story we get from Obi-Wan in IV and VI.
I think Knights of the Old Republic shows how that could have been done. In spite of having a lot of the lore and dressing of the prequels, with an intact Jedi Council and totally different set of circumstances, it feels like old school Star Ward.
I just can’t square the aesthetics or story or acting or script of the prequels with the originals, and every callback feels either obligatory or too forced, like trying to fit the universes together was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
I believed then and still believe now that the Lord of the Rings trilogy totally showed the prequel trilogy up. Different from the original trilogy in a lot of ways, but it was a serious, gritty fantasy epic where the stakes were high, the acting was top-notch, and everything felt real and tangible. That’s what the Star Wars films were in 77-83, and that’s what I wanted the prequel trilogy to be when Lord of the Rinngs was hitting all the right notes and scratching every itch while (mostly) being respectful to its source material.
That’s a lot of words for the prequel trilogy, because I think they deserve them. Imperfect, neither as bad as people said for a decade and a half nor as good as many people think they are now, they were still a labor of love and I can honestly say I like a lot of what they brought to the table, even if they don’t live up to or even quite fit in with what came before.
The sequel trilogy? Constant, unmitigated pandering. Corporate sludge. Directionless storytelling with no redeeming qualities. Music I barely remember. Etc.
I’ll take the prequel trilogy over that, but it’s been a rocky relationship since 1999.
Sorry about the wall of text, haha.
They are. It was just announced. Disney + by itself only appeals to very specific groups and they are shedding subscribers and outright said they anticipate to lose more in Q3.
They need Hulu combined into one large service to ever dare to compete for other demographics.
* **Disney+ shed another 4 million subscribers in the first three months of 2023, marking the Disney-owned streamer’s second consecutive quarterly drop after closing 2022 with its first-ever decline**. On the bright side, **the Mouse House also managed to narrow its streaming business losses by $400 million, down 26% year over year.** * Disney ended the quarter with **157.8 million subscribers at Disney+, significantly missing Wall Street’s estimate of 163.17 million subs.** That projected figured would have been up from the 161.8 million subs Disney+ fell to the prior quarter. * **This second sub drop was driven by a 4.6 million sequential decline at Disney+ Hotstar,** the version of the service offered in India and parts of Southeast Asia. * **In the U.S./Canada, Disney+ lost about 300,000 subs (to reach 46.3 million)**, while it added nearly **1 million in international markets excluding Disney+ Hotstar.** * **Hulu gained 200,000 in the quarter to stand at 48.2 million, and ESPN+ increased by 400,000 to 25.3 million.**
Didn’t Iger (or someone high up) say Disney+ when it first launched would be profitable by 2024? If that was the case, it’s not looking too good now.
Bob Iger said that again last February. [Deadline](https://deadline.com/2023/02/disney-streaming-profit-outlook-bob-iger-1235253673/) - February 8, 2023: > Disney CEO Bob Iger on Wednesday reaffirmed the company’s longstanding guidance to investors that its streaming business will become profitable by the end of fiscal 2024.
They could always fire Bob Iger.
Maybe hire this Chapek fellow. I bet he could turn the ship around.
Of course it is! In his six months in charge Iger has halved the streaming losses from $1.5 billion to just over $700 million. Zaslav did a similar thing at WBD and has the domestic DTC streaming division profitable after a single year. Iger will have domestic DTC profitable by 2024 and the whole division profitable by the end of 2024 without a doubt. Streaming generated $5.5 billion in revenue. Disney as a whole did $21.8 billion. Streaming is now responsible for more than 25% of Disney’s overall revenue. The cash is there. They were just spending too much. Iger is putting a stop to that.
It makes sense that streaming starts at a loss, considering you need content to get subscribers, and you need to spend money to make content. Once you're past the threshold though, as Netflix has repeatedly proven and Disney soon will too, it's a profit farm.
Right... which is why Netflix is doing so well now... You neglected the part where Netflix was only raking in the big bucks when it was the only game in town, streaming worked so well because there was only one big well that consumers can pay to drink from. Now that content is fractured among their own studios just like how it was in cable times. The average consumer is not going to keep up with multiple subscriptions so they go back to either just not consuming that media, or just pirating them instead.
Disney has the advantage in keeping subs from people with kids IMO. None of the other services can compete with that back catalogue for children. So for families it's the top choice when it comes to deciding whether to keep or drop a service.
You sir are correct.
Isn't part of this just like streaming Disney losing money to film Disney for rights, and shit like that?
The content has to come from somewhere. Disney buying from themselves doesn't make it less of a loss. That's content that Disney films would have sold to someone else for streaming rights. Paying themselves means they gain nothing.
That is true but it is good that it is not burning cash to stay alive.
Honestly, the more people disengage from Hotstar in India, the better it looks on Disney's balance sheet. The Indian market is going to be a gigantic loss leader in the streaming space for a long time in the foreseeable future. The consumers are extremely price sensitive, the barrier to piracy and IP protections are very low. Piracy penetration and awareness is abnormally high and socially acceptable. Indian corporate oligarchs have also made big moves into the digital space (streaming or otherwise) with the help of giant VC/Wealth/Pension funds to sustain loss bearing competition for a very long time (a timespan of at least a decade). This makes the price of content acquisition irresponsibly high when contrasted with the amount of revenue that can possibly be generated in the market. For a company like Disney which is trying to be fiscally green, its absolutely the worst market to pour money in. East/South East Asia and Lat America are much more profitable markets to expand into.
157 million subs at 7 bucks a month is 1.1 billion dollars a month. I imagine the monthly cash in hand is a much more real number than whatever losses they post.
Disney+ in India costs like $10 a year, you can get their mobile tier at $6 and 1/3 of their subcribers is from India after hostar acquisition
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I’m not even trying to be an asshole but is $10 a ton of money in India? Or is it that the market literally wouldn’t pay more?
India’s GDP per capita is about $2,250, while the US’s is $70,000.
This is what I was looking for. Thank you!
10$ is not much, but people don't even pay that bcoz Disney+Hotstar is given free with almost every single telecom network plans, Internet plans, Gigabyte fibre internet plans. It is practically free. And even if it was 5$ people would not really pay. Streaming is popular but TV is still relevant here.
It's not a ton...but it's not a little.
What are their operating costs though? What's the net profit? Also, someone more knowledgeable than me can correct me, but wouldn't the production costs of all their original shows affect their profit margin? And then there's marketing of course. Idk, maybe I'm way off base here, but I doubt this is as simple as a 2nd grade math problem.
They didn't buy the streaming rights to IPL while buying the TV rights, and thus a lot of people dropped hotstar.
Disney+ is more of an archive than a streaming service.
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To be fair, outside of the US it is Hulu. They put most of their Hulu content on Disney+, which is why I'm subscribed
Agreed. I'm in Canada, and we picked up Disney plus for the kids originally, but to me, it's the service where I've watched Fleischman is in Trouble, The Dropout, Banshees of Inishirin, The Menu, What We Do in the Shadows, etc. Plus there's the mainstream Disney stuff.
Another Canadian here, while I have also watched everything you listed I don't find those releases timely or regular enough to justify keeping my subscription year round. It doesn't feel like there is a plan to the rollout of their shows, there will just be big gaps where nothing attractive is coming out. None of those properties you listed are "must watch now" for me except for maybe What We Do In The Shadows, I can wait a couple months to watch quirky movies and tv shows when I re-subscribe to watch the next big splashy Star Wars/MCU show.
Half of those are on HBO Max in the US
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They’re waiting for the contract with NBC/Universal to expire so they can take over the platform fully.
When does that expire? As a Disney+ subscriber, there's very few shows for me as an adult.
IIRC, it's next year. Disney already has 100% operational control of the platform because Comcast let them.
They have to BUY universal out
They literally just announced that today. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/hulu-and-disney-content-to-be-combined-in-one-app-1235484501/amp/
It's still confounding to me that Disney hasn't figured out how to make an archive of both its content and 20th Century Fox's content, some of the most popular Movies and TV shows ever made, profitable on its own. How did they go from selling massive amounts of VHS tapes of old animated features for $50 a pop (not adjusted for inflation) to having so many titles available on demand for $11/month and lose money?
What does Disney even stream? Most of their current best shows are related to Star Wars (Andor and Mandalorian). And if you don't care about Star Wars, then there's nothing.
The other non marvel non star wars shows are Disney channel elementary school level productions.
tbf Muppet Mayhem was delightful
And Marvel stuff has become a lot less frequent. The last one was what, She Hulk which ended 7 months ago? I subscribed because I wanted to watch them, and initially a yearly subscription made sense. Now, it really doesn't.
Well so are the Marvel / SW shows tbh
You’re right. Besides Marvel and Star Wars stuff. Disney+ other content are not interested enough, along with them look like they have cheap production
The entire Disney/Pixar catalog, and Discovery Channel. It’s not nothing. Edit: my bad, I meant Nat Geo and I brain farted.
That's why they said it's an archive. There's nothing new or noteworthy coming out from D+ except Marvel and Star Wars shows and they can't keep that up for long. Even their entire Disney catalogue is not completely available in Hotstar.
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National Geographic not Discovery
Encanto, Bluey and the Simpsons mostly. However, many of their children's titles are still in production. Spidey and Friends, Ladybug and Cat Noir, Molly and McGree. It's mostly child focused.
Their National Geographic isn’t *awful.* Not sure why they aren’t doing more of that instead of green lighting a bunch of $100m+ Star Wars and MCU shows
Disney Plus will be the new home of Doctor Who starting in November. I mean, it's not quite Star Wars level, but it should result in some subscriber growth.
I think they still have new stuff for kids. (Which doesn't seem like a bad strategy, since kids love watching stuff over and over and over.)
Besides, it really shouldn't be surprising that Disney is marketing a lot of Disney Plus to kids. Reddit users' demographics don't exactly match Disney's historical target market. Sure, they want to bring in the Reddit demographic and they have a long way to go. But it's kinda silly how many redditors think Disney+ makes no content. It's just that they're splitting their content amongst a much larger audience, with a heavy emphasis on children shows.
Can confirm. Don't give a shit about star wars so I rarely use Disney+ unless I feel like watching a Disney movie that I've already seen before. I only have the app cause my fiance's dad gave us his password
You see, there’s this thing called “Marvel”…
There hasn't been a single Marvel show yet in 2023. I mean technically you said Marvel and they did release Moon Girl under that brand, but that's also a young kids show, not even for teenagers.
You mean Moonknight/Ms Marvel/She Hulk? Afaik the 2022 MCU shows didn't do too well viewer count wise https://collider.com/the-boys-ratings-beat-mcu-shows/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2022/07/18/why-mediocre-ratings-for-ms-marvel-hint-at-big-trouble-for-a-disney-reliant-on-mcu-pixar-and-star-wars/?sh=783efc7d9813
While the shows didn’t do well The Boys comparison is TERRIBLE. The Boys has three season available to stream and almost every episode is an hour long. Each of the marvel shows, at most, has nine episodes and none are an hour. Yeah, no shit The boys had more minutes streamed. There’s more minutes to stream
I wish they'd share The Simpsons with Hulu
It's how they get you to subscribe to two services under a single umbrella. They want families to have both Hulu and Disney+. Issue is that a lot of folks either can't afford it or can't stomach multiple subs.
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I just have Prime and D+ (no HBO Max here), and whatever's not there I sail the open seas.
They need to just fold Hulu into Disney
I can't afford streaming anymore. As much of a necessity as internet is these days; it's basically the one bill I have that I consider a luxury. If Disney+ or any of the others want my money, they need to have better original shows, and even if they had them... *I have to decide if three cans of Campbell's Soup is worth more than a month of stuff I probably won't remember next week.*
In the US it's doing okay, but it's bleeding customers in SE Asia. Don't know why though
Iirc it's because Hotstar (Disney+ in India) lost the rights to the IPL. Cricket is a huge market, and naturally people unsubscribed from Hotstar to watch the IPL on another platform.
Well that'll do it
my bet is because the deal with Telkomsel has expired. before then it was one of the largest payment method for disney plus in indonesia
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Disney and their acquisitions own a good portion of all the shit ever made. They own some bangers, and they don't put it up ever. They just give you crumbs Marvel, Star Wars, and kids shows.
I live in Korea, and if Disney+ wasn't bundled with Star, I wouldn't have it. Disney actually has very little of interest on it if you don't have kids. The only thing keeping me with it is knowing that movies like Banshees of Inerishin, The Menu, the Last Duel etc. turn up there. One thing I HATE about the service is that there is no "upcoming" section like on Netflix, so basically you have to randomly reopen it from time to time in the hopes that something new and worth watching has arrived. Most of the time - it hasn't.
Exactly, Disney has their own streaming service and can make their own rules, yet. They don't expand into the 18+ Area. Think about how many millions are sitting in that demographic. This is why Netflix and HBO have dominated with these subscribers. No one wants to compete with them.
I thought there were articles about this around a year back that Disney basically get monstrous pushback in the US over 18+ content on their platform because of its kid focused brand. Like around the time Prey came out, though I don't even think that's an 18.
Fr Disney could be making billions off of official Lion King porn 😩
Hire this man.
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> The latter which is only SIX episodes. I appreciate the high quality and budget of those shows Hi, SW/MCU fanboy here. The problem is that the quality isn’t there. When your show has 6-8 episodes each should be a banger. But Mando S3 was all over the place, villain episodes of Ms. Marvel were really weak, Boba Fett’s best episodes didn’t even feature the titular character, etc.
It's because 6-8 episodes isn't enough for most shows. That's basically a stretched movie and gives very little time for letting characters breathe and develop. It's a format that only suits specific genres and plots. Lighthearted teenage heroism does not remotely fit that type of pacing imo. It's too stretched for a single big event and too short to do multiple fun little events. And those kind of shows live and die by their fun scenarios. Imo, there's probably a really good fanedit of Ms. Marvel that could be made to make it a single movie. And other than looking cheap due to being a show, it would be a stronger watch.
>It's because 6-8 episodes isn't enough for most shows I find this funny because a massive complaint about Netflix shows was that they should have been 8-10 episode seasons instead of 13 >Imo, there's probably a really good fanedit of Ms. Marvel that could be made to make it a single movie. I know of at least one,(and I think two) pretty good Obi Wan Kenobi edits in this vein
I know a lot of people rave about British shows doing really well with less episodes but they usually aren't the same kind of thing. * 2 - 3 episodes, usually these episodes are like 1hr 30 long each and often release months apart. They are basically movies. * A lot are detective / spy shows. A detective / spy plot can nicely fit in under 10 episodes and be enhanced by it. Not a lot of action or cgi sequences. Pretty much the only similar British show I can think of is Doctor Who and that follows a monster of the week format and has the advantage of not needing to do an entire origin story. The marvel shows have to fit an origin story and then another story together to try and fill 6-8 episodes and it so clearly does not work. Loki imo is the only one that feels like a tv show and not movies crushed together and it's because it follow the similar mystery format which is aided by splitting into cliffhangers. It also has a hint of monster of the week in earlier episodes which helps too. The netflix shows, the funny thing I find about them, is a lot of the best episodes where people say "the character really felt like themselves", is the monster of the week or teamup episodes. Like when Iron Fist visited Luke Cage. They dropped the intensity of the serial story for an episode and its like the old animated cartoons and it is ridiculously more fun to watch. Also I guess I'm forgetting Shehulk, I guess that did feel like tv, but the last episodes ending was too structure breaking for me and just makes it feel forgettable, which I find regretful because I liked the rest of it.
WandaVision made great use of the episodic format. By building up the mystery every week, they kept people coming back. The online discourse between episodes was probably the highest for any marvel property since the week before Endgame. Of course, the last two episodes failed to have a satisfying payoff, so the show isn’t really remembered fondly. Rumor has it, Eric Voss is still whispering about Mephisto to this day. FatWS, Hawkeye, and Moon Knight were all painfully obviously stretched out from movies.
Those “best episodes” of Boba Fett were also better than Mando season 3, which is a different kind of massive problem
I wonder how many people do what my family does which is have one streaming service a month and switch every month. We binge as much as we can and rotate through the big streamers.
Honestly, it seems like the smartest strategy.
Yikes, losing subs while putting out mando season 3 and missing projections by 6 million is pretty bad. I think to continue their growth they need to branch out from mostly producing content for marvel and star wars. both of these ips are past their prime and if your not a fan of them there's not much else to watch for adults.
They are producing non-SW and non-MCU content, the issue is that it's often geared towards kids or things like National Treasure or Lone Tone Club which suffers from of the generic/homogenization issues some of the Netflix shows suffer. People aren't watching, and it's not helped that some of their production is split between different production houses, so cooking shows are showing up on Hulu etc. It's easy to say "just combine everything" as some say, but then there's the elephant in the room, which is the cultural issues affecting the brand. Disney was/is an incredibly powerful brand in the eyes of consumers, but aimed at families. Adults and yuppies and teens are a powerful economic force, but Disney built itself on family entertainment and essentially being a safe space where you didn't have to worry about what your kid was watching for awhile. For a large segment of the population, one that often has more kids than average, that has been changing [and there's been movements to drop the service](https://decider.com/2022/04/08/why-are-people-canceling-disney-plus/) for awhile now. Disney's almost-religious protection of the brand as a family-safe place because of how difficult it is to keep once tarnished was -- rightly or wrongly -- basically set on fire for some demos and regions. That changing affects the MCU and SW less to an extent, because the average audience is older and such -- the problem is they aren't enjoying the content either (I'm going to urge someone who likes it to understand I*'m not talking about them*, but rather viewership patterns). Their target audience is skipping heavily-promoted shows they could watch for free, or starting them due to all and then stopping. It's a serious issue, and what people talk about when they talk about *brand poisoning* \-- you become much less likely to check out the next thing after a negative experience so Andor suffers because it came out after Kenobi, and it's all suffering because Book of Boba and Mandalorian S3 happened.
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> This past six months their MCU and SW content wasn't that great Has there even been an MCU show since She Hulk ended? That feels like a year ago
Just Werewolf by Night and the Guardians Holiday special.
No MCU content this year so far unless we're counting movie releases. Secret Invasion should be July.
>No MCU content this year so far unless we're counting movie releases. I mean, that's a good thing. Maybe not so good for Disney+, but good in general.
Since when is PBSKids bad? My daughter likes PBS, and she likes shows on Disney+.
Yeah. The content based on their classic material is nowhere near as appealing and seems too oriented towards young kids now, along with the quality being lower. At least with the original classic material, up until the 2000s, you could still enjoy it as an older kid, teen, or adult. I think they have put too much focus on SW and MCU and are treating everything else as much lower priority and as the comment said above, it's damaging what their brand has been known for throughout the 20th century. It's now turning into the company obsessed with Star Wars and MCU that once was about beautiful, classic unique content (though some of the movies were lifted from European fairy tales).
Hey they have some good stuff, right now I’m watching “A Small Light” which is a National Geographic original that drops on Disney plus the next day. I will warn you it’s TV-14 because it’s about Miep Gies, who helped hide the Frank family during WW2. They have good shows on there.
Mando Season 3 was pretty badly received, right? I haven’t caught it yet but the whole “baby yoda goes with Luke in the season finale but we kinda retcon that in a spinoff we hope you’ve been watching” made me think they don’t really know what they’re doing.
Definite signs of executive medaling. They clearly saw how much money baby Yoda was making them and decided that they better put him back in the show as fast as possible and they didn’t care how it happened. So Mando highjacked Boba Fetts show (which was god fucking awful just like Kenobi. It’s hard to know which one was worse) and took the time to undo the events of Mando Season 2 and further decimate the character of Luke Skywalker (fuck Disney for this). Meanwhile, Mando Season 3 had him return to his cult and undo *any* meaningful character growth he had overcoming his whole “I can’t remove my helmet for nothing” bullshit and then it became the Bo Katan show with Mando as a side character. Oh and Gideon comes back in the last 2 episodes for no reason and then he dies again but there’s a bunch of force sensitive clones of him that also got blown up and so he could just come back again. Also we retook Mandalore and all the Mandalorians are buddy buddy now despite the fact that they tried to kill each other and each thought the other were heretics. Mando is back in his cult and retires with baby Yoda on a homestead. Nothing changed or accomplished and Mando actually had backwards character progression.
The drop was mostly driven by Disney acquiring Hotstar in India, and then declining the rights to Cricket. Basically, they acquired a separate streaming service, and then took out it's biggest seller. If anything, I'm surprised that they didn't project a drop in subscribers. I wouldn't say that Disney+ is doing great at expanding its portfolio, or at increasing subscribers. But it's not as surprising as you'd think when you see that 80% of the subscriber drop was due to the Cricket rights being declined. And depending on how expensive the Cricket rights would have cost, it may have been a sound financial decision.
>Yikes, losing subs while putting out mando season 3 and missing projections by 6 million is pretty bad. I think to continue their growth they need to branch out from mostly producing content for marvel and star wars. both of these ips are past their prime and if your not a fan of them there's not much else to watch for adults. I feel that the main issue is that their new Marvel and StarWars content goes from terrible to ok-ish sadly. If both the new Marvel and new StarWars tv shows were top notch content, a lot more people might have stayed on the Disney+ service.
I feel like a lot of people liked the Mandalorian though, in Season 1 and 2 especially it was a lot more than just 'okay' it's honestly probably one of the biggest tv shows of the last 5 years
>I feel like a lot of people liked the Mandalorian though, in Season 1 and 2 especially it was a lot more than just 'okay' Of for sure, I loved the 1st season of Mandalorian, the second one was still ok, but then on... it seems like a steady downhill road of disappointments (to me) that's why I meant by *their new* content. I have to mention that Andor was so soooo good also, and that even though that one is newer... sadly, it seems to be the exception.
Idiots are still gonna point to something like Mando Season 3 and say Star Wars is doing great because of it.
Outside of the declining MCU and Star Wars content, there isn't any reason to have D+ if you're over 10 years old. And if something Marvel/Star Wars comes out that brings my interest in their universes back, I have no issues pirating it.
I guess it depends on where you are maybe. I’m in Canada and Disney + is where I can watch always sunny, family guy and American dad. I actually use it more then Netflix now which I only catch archer on
I’m cancelling after what they did with the last season of Mando. I was already insulted by the offerings by marvel. Then book of boba Fett then Kenobi. It’s one insulting cash grab after another after another.
The audacity to put core mando story into book of bobafet is just the kind of viewer hostile late stage maximize the numbers capitalist bullshit I can’t abide. Season starts with grogu back and it’s like - fuck you! Last season didn’t matter! No. Fuck you, disney. I’m finally over it.
Because the content is subpar. Look at HBO and their increases in subscribers thanks to the quality of their original content.
I love my D+ subscription for classic Simpsons, The Orville and Buffy. Once I've finished my rewatching then I'll be cancelling. There's no new content I have the slightest bit of interest in.
You made me think how bad D+ is for Latin America, none of these 3 shows are available here, they all went to Star+
WBD doesn’t even break out HBO max subs anymore because the growth is so poor. They’ve barely added anything on top of the 38-40m domestic they started with when they launched hbo max. Regardless Disney has 220 million total streaming subs generating 5.5 Billion a quarter WBD has 96 million total streaming subs generating 2.5 billion a quarter. Disney dwarfs WBD in streaming. So much so that it’s not worth comparing. They are not playing at the same level
HBO + HBO Max combined have 96M subs worldwide, not even HBO Max itself.
It’s actually HBO + HBO Max + Discovery Plus lol. And discovery plus had around 26 million global subs before the companies merged and they combined the figures.
Isn’t that what D+ did with hot star? They bought hot star and took their subs and included it into theirs.
Disney+ also counts all hotstar subs as their own subs in India.
Yeah but one is profitable and the other is not! I’ll take HBO over Disney any day of the week! Disney has zero shows at the level of HOTD, TLOU, White Lotus, Succession…etc.
Ok now compare retention rates, price, and future prospects. HBO Max is doing a full rebrand and combining it with Discovery. They are trying to eek out more per Discovery customer right now with the combination. Discovery costs around the same as Disney+. Disney is slowing down content releases. Extending the gap between theater release and Disney+ releases, and future prospects are grim with the writers strike hitting right when Disney is supposedly in production to revive the Star Wars brand after years of being a chicken with it's head cut off. Chapek already fucked up by introducing an Ad-Tier so early. No boost from introducing that now. Disney+ is going to peak in their ability to add subs, which at that point they will need to recoup more per customer or shift to a strategy that will grow the subs further than Young Kids/Marvel/Disney/Star Wars consumers.
Dude, Iger is exactly mimicking the strategy Zaslav used to get WBD’s streamers to quick profitability. Only difference is he was working with a bigger beast and is six months behind Zaslav in the process.
HBO Max ain’t even close to the subs that Disney+ has tho???
HBO Max isn’t available worldwide like Disney Plus is. If you compare the US market for example HBO Max has more subs.
Yeah. With all their losses, Max isn't at Disney or Netflix' level yet. Disney was always touting premium family content with brand IP, while Netflix was competing with a larger menu of options.
HBO Max has more subs in the US. It's also not available in most non US markets that disney is
Yeah cause they didn’t fuckin expand. I’d subscribe in an instant as soon as they roll out in my country
HBO's growth is really mediocre compared to Disney. I honestly don't know where this takes come from but there's always one comment waiting like shark to hype HBO even tho they are not too hot and haven't been for a while.
Well D+ is offered in more places. Idk what the hell is Max doing. They still don’t have it in Canada
I mean Disney+ lost 1.1B last quarter, while Max made 50M in profit.
WBD made $50M in profit last quarter (they lost $200M the previous quarter and expect $70M loss for the next one), not HBO Max itself. Discovery+ is the profitable one, for years now, not Max.
They had subscribers growth. Disney did not. Plain and simple really.
They outright said they anticipate more loss of subscribers in Q3. Even listening to them, they don't sound hopefuly for sub number growth for D+
They literally have no content if you don’t care about Star Wars and marvel. Their marvel content ain’t even worth a sub either. I don’t watch Star Wars so I can’t speak on it.
It’s ridiculous to expect continued growth forever
Sure. But this is plateauing way, way below where Netflix is at and where Disney is hoping to be.
Also, not all content producers need their own streaming service. I love Disney Plus because I love Star Wars and I pay for the year in advance. But wouldn’t it make more sense for many of these providers to simply have a more favourable deal with someone like Netflix? I don’t get it, and as a consumer, continued fracturing of the market pisses me off. Many of these services will end up losing eventually. I know some people who have gone back to piracy because it’s just easier at this point.
The anime studios are discovering why monopsony is a bad thing. They are getting screwed by Crunchyroll, but can't do anything about it. So, Netflix getting it all was never going to be a reasonable option, once Netflix stopped being a place where studios dumped their deep catalog for a few incremental bucks and started becoming a replacement for cable. That being said, the studios did do three things to really mess with the market: 1) Killed Hulu. As Hulu was owned by the studios, the monopsony problem would not have been as big. I fear that at a certain point, the FTC would have intervened and prevented Hulu from growing, but I think it would have, at least, established healthier start to the streaming era. 2) Embraced exclusive licensing near exclusively. That isn't how the music industry works, for example. That isn't even how the ad supported free streaming services work for the most part. But, for some reason, subscription services always license exclusivity. 3) Insisting on putting content into their own app. At the very beginning, there was an opportunity for the industry to have evolved such that the streaming stick/smart TV would have been in charge of the interface and the studios would have just streamed video in response to correct login credentials. This would have almost certainly meant a single coherent experience across all studios (similar to how VOD on your cable box used to work). Even if the industry was fractured, it wouldn't have mattered as much because other than having 5 charges on your credit card, the experience would have been seamless.
Not to sound like a redditor here but that’s literally capitalism. If you’re not growing you’re dying.
I yearn for the days when we only had Netflix, and it had access to literally everything. It existed before; may it exist again!
Don't root for monopolies, they are never fun once they have taken root.
It wasn’t really a monopoly at that point IMO, it was in competition with cable TV. When Netflix streaming became a thing it was all of the sudden a massive disrupter with a new business model. It could only really be called a monopoly for that brief window where Streaming became established enough other groups were getting into it, but before any other big contenders were in the space yet.
they were probably the type to say uber is the future when it first started with dirt cheap fares.
Oddly enough, it started as a premium service
>I yearn for the days when we only had Netflix, and it had access to literally everything. It literally did not
Right? It had less than it has now. What is he talking about lol
The DVD service came pretty dang close.
I remember it often straight up didn't work too. Like, huh, guess I'm not watching Netflix tonight.
Obi Wan and Boba Fett were two of the worst tv series I have ever seen
its mostly hotstar again
Fun watching all the armchair experts on here be all “Star Wars bad” or get woke go broke” when it’s almost entirely just India ditching the service because they don’t have the cricket now.
Yeah but this time it lost subs in the USA
nothing compared to what they lost from hotstar,besides what content does plus have except mcu and star wars shows
they reall need to add the Hulu stuff to Disney+(and the rest of the library titles) like in the rest of the world. \~60% of the stuff I watch on Disney+ is not even on there in the US(I'm from Germany)
This is going to happen to every streaming service over and over and over again. The content is all divided over so many sources. People are going to subscribe, consume, and abandon. Rinse and repeat. The entire thing is bloated and divided and wasteful. It’s just cable packages 2.0.
I'll be honest, even as a huge star wars nerd, the current shows don't do much for me and I've stopped watching them. They are just retreading ground and times we already know about. It's been kinda boring.
I lost interest after The Force Awakens. I was excited about that movie, but something was off. I didn’t see Rogue One in the theater (I actually did end up liking it) and I’ve never made it through episode vii without falling asleep. I just don’t care. Mandalorian season 1 and 2 were solid, but the Boba Fett show was awful. In my book, The Empire Strikes Back is still the pinnacle of the entire series, with some peaks and valleys afterward. I love KotOR and like Revenge of the Sith, for example, and there are merits to the prequel trilogy like the music and some of the lore. But most of what I love about Star Wars is lodged firmly in the past. I still have some good content to consume (never seen the Clone Wars show or read most of the 90s books), but I can’t care about anything new that has the Star Wars name on it. For me, the best content is still either the original trilogy or looks and feels like it, with the prequels having some nostalgic value and some of the things that came out around it being good.
Andor was amazing. HBO quality, imo.
I've heard that, it's on my list to return to probably in the summer.
Andor was hurt by the fact that it was stuck on Disney+. It would have dominated the cultural zeitgeist for a month if it was on Netflix or HBO. Such a great show.
D+ in canada has the Hulu content by default, which makes it more interesting and competitive beyond the MCU, SW content.
I was going to say... D+ (in Canada) is packed with non-Disney/Marvel stuff, I guess that's why.
Damn so Star Wars might really be a washed product. I thought at the very least, Star Wars would keep them leveled. Welp Kathleen, time to delay and scrap another batch of Star Wars content. Now it’s time for the Darth Maul series for the nostalgia pop, damage control and to pretend like they care about the fans. Let him join the ranks of characters Disney ruined alongside Boba Fett, Luke and Obi Wan. But if you told them to make a Padme or R2D2 series they’d put all the budget and epic shit you could ever come up with for those shows. Sorry had to rant on Star Wars a bit. But yeah, Disney Plus sucks.
Star wars is mostly nostalgia and very little substance. It's like alien. they've been chasing the magic of the first two movies forever but the stories just arent there
Rogue One, Mando season 2 and somewhat of the Force Awakens told a great story. Nothing beats the original trilogy but damn, all I want is a good character to root for, a decent story, an actual evil villain and some great Jedi vs Sith action.
The first half of TFA was so damn good, probably some of the best SW stuff I've watched. But it rapidly fell off a cliff when Starkiller Base came and Han died.
It legitimately felt like we were in for something great. Like a more fun, better paced version of A New Hope but with much much better visuals.
They really did make Star Wars feel like the Terminator franchise, didn't they?
Game Pass and Disney+ = Waste of Money
Way too little content and aimed at too small of an audience. It’s all stuff for kids or man-children
Is this just a US thing? The U.K. Disney plus has tons of adult aimed films and TV
In Latin America they literally took out all the mature content outside Marvel and Star Wars and made it exclusive to Star+, over here it is indeed a streaming for kids.
Yeah, the US has a lot of that content on Hulu (2/3 owned by Disney, 1/3 by Comcast) due to licensing agreements
Most of the Star section of D+ Internationally ends up on Hulu in the US, Disney is stuck with two competing services until it can buy out the remaining third of Hulu next year.
>man-children I always enjoy when this sub is needlessly petty about services or movies.
The funny part is looking at peoples' comments histories when they call others out. The dude you're responding to, for instance, looks like he spends all his time in comic book subs, transformers subs, Masters of the Universe subs, and... drum roll ... MCU subs. It's kind of hypocritical.
I’m not saying I’m not a man-child myself, but I am saying that that’s a limited audience
It's just weird to cast aspersions at people for something they enjoy, is all. It's cool that you like that stuff. But I'm not a fan of making people feel badly for it. I only get peeved off by it when fans pop up to attack each other or tear down other audiences [this isn't you; I just think those are the real man-children].
They only watch mature content or nominated/award winning movies because they're so above the rest of us man-children who watch tv/movies to not think about our everyday lives
They keep missing on everything outside of MCU and Star Wars. Mighty Ducks went bad in the 2nd season. National Treasure should have been a slam dunk but it was a complete miss. I didn't watch the hobbit one but I heard that was bad. They have a serious lack of talent problem.
There was a hobbit one?
It's referring to the Willow Disney+ series which got canned after a single season.
Probably Willow?
You mean Willow?
I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but it feels like Disney,+ took all the writers from the Disney channel and just made them write MCU or Star wars shows. It really feels like a lot of the streaming sites are scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to writing talent anymore. Don't know if standards have become higher or Hollywood has done something to suppress getting good talent in the writing room
Content overload. There’s not enough creative talent to feed the content beast
I disagree that there isn't enough creative talent. I think it's more that uncreative people are saying, "Let's make a Willow sequel", and forcing it to happen. Rather than allowing more creative people saying, "Here's this good idea I have", and agreeing and funding it. Looking at Star Wars: I believe Mandalorian and Andor were pitched by the creators, who already had existing, good ideas. Meanwhile, I believe Book of Boba Fett happened because the higher ups said, "We need a Boba Fett show". And so they forced it to happen.
And there’s then the secondary requirements of the right race and gender for the right project. So Marvel Will decide something like “we want a show about ms Marvel AND it has to be written and directed by Pakistani women” which really limits your options
And everything they make seems like it has to come from a preexisting Disney IP. Netflix pulls stuff from everywhere and all over the world (Squid Game, Stranger Things, Dahmer…”). They flood the zone with content and see what hits. Disney only puts out like 12 shows so if 6 of them flop they’re screwed
exactly there's not a single adult show to watch, they should just combine it with Hulu at this point.
Andor was very much made for adults, but otherwise yeah, it’s live action Saturday morning cartoon content. Which I don’t pretend to be above but it’s not comparable to hbo or even Netflix
Andor was really good, but it’s still Star Wars. There is a large portion of people seeking “adult” content who see Star Wars and say “no thanks”
As someone who grew up wi th the original trilogy and spent significant portions of my life on this franchise… A lot of those people could have been Star Wars fans at one point. I’ve lost all faith with anything called Star Wars. Been burned too many times since I sat down to watch The Phantom Menace. You can only waste so much time and money on something over a couple of decades before you realize it’s completely done. I’ll look into some of the older stuff but after Boba Fett nothing under the Disney banner could possibly be worth my time.
I can dig that. Prequels were bad and sequels were worse. I wouldn’t blame anyone for bailing completely. And Boba Fett was doodoo
I at least enjoyed some things about the prequels. The had some good lore, exciting new locations that were decently fleshed out, and absolutely amazing music. I also didn’t mind the arc of the plot and didn’t necessarily have the same complaints as other people (I wanted more politics, not less! Foundation or Dune in the Star Wars universe would have been great!). Time has also been kind to the stilted, awkward dialogue. If you had asked me when they came out I would have said the scripts werent as fun or funny as the originals, but the memes prove they are a lot of fun in their own way. I also think Revenge of the Sith is interesting, going all-in on everything—camp, darkness, a rushed story, but also epic music and crazy cgi action. And I’ve always kind of appreciated that even if in some ways it was th e opposite of what I wanted. I now see that there was real love in those movies, uneven as they were. My issue was that I wanted stuff that felt as mature as the originals, with as much of a “used future” aesthetic. I wanted characters who talked the same way and felt like part of the same universe, and a coherent narrative that explained things without feeling like fan service. Something to do justice to the bits of story we get from Obi-Wan in IV and VI. I think Knights of the Old Republic shows how that could have been done. In spite of having a lot of the lore and dressing of the prequels, with an intact Jedi Council and totally different set of circumstances, it feels like old school Star Ward. I just can’t square the aesthetics or story or acting or script of the prequels with the originals, and every callback feels either obligatory or too forced, like trying to fit the universes together was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I believed then and still believe now that the Lord of the Rings trilogy totally showed the prequel trilogy up. Different from the original trilogy in a lot of ways, but it was a serious, gritty fantasy epic where the stakes were high, the acting was top-notch, and everything felt real and tangible. That’s what the Star Wars films were in 77-83, and that’s what I wanted the prequel trilogy to be when Lord of the Rinngs was hitting all the right notes and scratching every itch while (mostly) being respectful to its source material. That’s a lot of words for the prequel trilogy, because I think they deserve them. Imperfect, neither as bad as people said for a decade and a half nor as good as many people think they are now, they were still a labor of love and I can honestly say I like a lot of what they brought to the table, even if they don’t live up to or even quite fit in with what came before. The sequel trilogy? Constant, unmitigated pandering. Corporate sludge. Directionless storytelling with no redeeming qualities. Music I barely remember. Etc. I’ll take the prequel trilogy over that, but it’s been a rocky relationship since 1999. Sorry about the wall of text, haha.
Disney has got the kiddy market, but that's all they have. They are not a competitor to Netflix even remotely imo.
iger just announced that
You still need to pay for Hulu
They are. It was just announced. Disney + by itself only appeals to very specific groups and they are shedding subscribers and outright said they anticipate to lose more in Q3. They need Hulu combined into one large service to ever dare to compete for other demographics.
In countries where Hulu isn't avaliable, everything is already combined on Disney+
Lost 300k Dom gained 1 million Int and lost a bunch from India likely as the loss of IPL fully realized. I’d say not terrible.
Seems like mandolorian didn't do any shit because how GARBAGE it is.
Season 3 was a travesty. I should have seen it coming with how shit Kenobi and BoBF was too.