Has Disney+ Failed?

What can Disney's streaming service offer besides a subset of family fare?

According to USA Today, this past May, Disney+ has the third-most streaming subscribers behind Netflix and Prime Video. Of course, the real question is how profitable that popularity has been for Disney. Netflix has ruled the roost ever since streaming began, but when it came out in April 2022 that they were now losing subscribers, Netflix scrambled to stop account sharing and introduce an ad tier. This feels like a band-aid to the larger problem of profitability, since we simply don’t know what streamers are spending on content relative to what they’re earning via subscriptions and ads. We don’t know if it’s a sound business or not.

But looking at Disney (and without knowing its financial situation), I still feel like it’s in a bizarre situation relative to the other streaming services. The streamer’s biggest selling point is the Disney brand, as well as the brands that Disney owns like Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. This brand awareness makes Disney+ a safe bet for families. If you want a streaming channel that your kids can watch, then arguably Disney+ is the place to go.

And yet it seems like Disney+ is also incredibly stagnant. It is Disney, but it is nothing else. Other streamers, in addition to creating their own movies and TV shows (like Disney+), also have licensing deals. Perhaps those licensing deals will expire and these streamers will have less, but for the time being, I can see a film like Spy, which was made by 20th Century Fox (now owned by Disney), over on Max (owned by Warner Bros. Discovery). Even Hulu, which Disney also owns, cycles in titles from other studios. But Disney+ is a walled garden. It solely offers Disney’s family-friendly fare¹ and the movies and shows Disney produces for the streamer.

The problem here is that a lot of people don’t really care about those movies and TV shows, including Disney. Even the biggest brands that were supposed to be the pillars of the service when it came to new movies and shows are doing more harm than good. In a big “We’re all trying to find the the guy that did this,” claim, Disney CEO Bob Iger said that Marvel had “diluted focus and attention” by making too many shows. Wasn’t the whole point of starting a new streaming service to wring even more content out these brands, whether people wanted it or not?

And now, due in part to the writers strike, Disney has drastically pushed back its release calendar of upcoming Marvel shows. This comes on the heels of Disney+’s latest Marvel show, Secret Invasion, coming under fire for being a gigantic waste of time. Is it any wonder that Disney is now cutting back its 2023 programming to just the second season of Loki (arguably its most popular Marvel show) and a second season of the animated What If…? that can play over the holiday break when people will watch anything half-decent?

Even if you don’t think the entire streaming business is a house of cards (and I think it is, and the current strikes threaten to expose the entire model as unsustainable), I have no idea what the long-term viability of Disney+ is supposed to be. Young kids are not adventurous viewers. They tend to find a handful of things and watch them incessantly until their parents go insane. Once kids get older, they start having mixed feelings about the stuff they enjoyed when they were younger and now want to break away. The idea is to keep them in the fold with material that skews older like Marvel and Star Wars, but now that has to compete with everything else from every other streamer, and as the last couple of years have shown, the shine is off those brands. Disney cranked out too much Marvel and Star Wars stuff, and now they no longer can capture the zeitgeist in the way they once did.

Part of the reason people keep their Netflix subscriptions is that even when all the stuff that Netflix makes is largely garbage, there’s still comforting material that captured people’s attention outside of Netflix Originals. I have no interest in watching Heart of Stone, but I can chill out with A League of Their Own or The Dark Knight. Disney has plenty of its own classics, but it’s all the same kind of family-friendly classic, and at some point, a parent has to ask themself, “Why am I paying $10.99 a month for a handful of movies I could just buy?”

Disney wanted the answer to be, “Because of new Star Wars and Marvel shows!” Of course, that answer only works if the shows are uniformly terrific and rewatchable. But they haven’t been. People clamored for a standalone Obi-Wan Kenobi story, and what we got was quite poor. How eager is anyone to return to Falcon and the Winter Soldier? At this point, exclusivity becomes not a draw for Disney+, but a burden. They now have programming that they’re not licensing to other distributors, and that programming isn’t making the case that viewers should make sure that Disney+ should be on their monthly bill.

When Disney+ came on the scene, there was the sense that as a streaming service it would be indispensable because Disney is so massive that it can just throw its weight around and dominate any place where it shows up. But we’re coming up on the streamer’s fourth anniversary, and it doesn’t seem to be particularly well positioned to contend. You can’t be both niche and a dominant force in the streaming space. On some level, it feels like Disney thought that Disney+ could be like one of their theme parks where it’s the same stuff all the time, and that people are so fond of Disney they’ll show up. But despite what the marketing buzzwords claim, Disney+ is not a “destination,” and what it’s offering isn’t particularly memorable.

1. But also R-rated Marvel stuff like Deadpool and Logan, and also missing Touchstone Pictures movies and other Disney subsidiaries that don’t exist anymore.