Wall Street expects Disney+ to continuously add new subscribers, even as most of the folks who might sign up for Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar have already done so.
Disney took a pretty sharp dive on Wall Street two weeks ago (for a 10% decline in 2021) on the news that Disney+ has earned “just” 2.1 million new subscribers in the previous quarter. Disney+ already has 118.1 million paying subscribers,179 million if you include Hulu and ESPN+. That dwarfs the 40-57 million theoretical monthly subscribers under the most optimistic scenarios for (respectively) Apple TV, HBO Max, Peacock and Viacom (including Paramount+ and Showtime). Sure, Amazon claims 175 million households streamed Prime Video content in the last year, but last I checked subscribing to Disney+ doesn’t come with free shipping on your Amazon Christmas list. The issue isn’t that Disney+ isn’t being paid for and consumed by a large number of subscribers. The issue is that it’s expected to continuing growing despite the obvious potential for a plateau. Disney is partially a victim of its own initial out-of-the-gate success. The pre-launch expectations were 60-90 million subscribers by 2024. Disney+ notched an incredible 86 million subscribers from November 2019 to October 2020. Now, to be fair, families worldwide spent much of 2020 mostly in lockdown due to a global pandemic, and (for those territories participating) the $7-a-month streaming platform filled with Marvel movies, Disney toons, and Disney Channel television shows looked like exactly the kind of “how to entertain your kids all day when they aren’t in school” option for frustrated families. Disney immediately took advantage (in a non-evil way) of the mid-March 2020 chaos, releasing Frozen II onto the platform much earlier than intended and selling it as a gift to socially-distanced families. That also distracted from the global theatrical failure of Pixar’s Onward just weeks earlier. Crossing the 100 million milestone in the first 16 months also meant increased expectations for long-range forecasts, with the new “target” being not 60-90 million but 230-260 million by 2024. With the obvious caveat that Disney+ isn’t yet available in every nation on Earth and may not be for a while, the new normal has set in. As frankly feared, the vast majority of “got to see” Disney+ content is exactly what you’d expect it to be, namely the theatrical Disney toons (including the was-supposed-to-be-in-theaters Pixar flick Luca which was an absolute ratings monster through the second half of 2021) and the near-weekly diet of Star Wars and Marvel Cinematic Universe “content.” Correction: The two seasons of The Mandalorian and the near-weekly run of live-action MCU shows, all due respect to What If? and Star Wars: Visions. That’s not to say the other Disney+ originals are bad. I’m not exactly the target audience, but I will happily admit that the likes of Big Shot, Turner and Hooch, High School Musical: The Musical The Series are polished, well-made, well-cast and at-worst surface-level entertaining “original” television programming.
