Disney+: What You Can Watch at Launch (and How Much You’ll Pay)
Disney this week pulled back the curtain on its three-headed streaming monster, the star of which is Disney+, which arrives in November at a surprisingly affordable price.
By Rob Marvin
The streaming-industrial complex keeps on churning. We finally know what Disney’s much-hyped Disney+ streaming service looks like, how much it’ll cost, and which properties and originals to expect at launch.
At the company’s three-hour Thursday Investor Day, much of which focused on Disney+, the entertainment giant confirmed a Nov. 12 launch date for its direct-to-consumer streaming app, which will cost $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year for ad-free streaming. This puts Disney+ at the cheap end of the price continuum, undercutting Netflix’s $8.99-per-month Basic plan.
We also got our first look at the Disney+ interface, which functions much like every other streaming app, but has one big differentiator: better brands and franchises than its rivals.
First Look at Disney+
Front and center atop the Disney+ home screen are tiles for the five main brands, franchises, and channels that make up the Disney film and TV library: Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic.
The rest of the interface is laid out as you’d expect. There are personalized user profiles (including an age filter to only show kid-appropriate content to underage users), and library-style rows of different categories and personalized recommendations as you scroll down the home page. As with Netflix, there are rows like Recommended For You and Continue Watching.
Disney+ users will also be able to pull up the left-hand menu bar to quickly add shows and movies to their watchlists or jump straight to a full library of movies, series, or a dedicated page solely featuring the new Disney+ originals.
One important feature is a downloads tab, so Disney+ users will be able to download shows and movies for offline viewing. Disney+ will launch with support for Roku and PlayStation 4, and the app demo showed how Disney+ will look on smartphones and tablets. However, Disney said it plans to offer the service on as many devices as possible, including smart TVs, media streaming devices like Chromecast and Amazon Fire TV, and other game consoles, including Xbox and Nintendo Switch.
When we spoke to Disney Streaming Services CTO Joe Inzerillo for our Digital Edition cover story earlier this year, he hinted that Disney was cooking up some fresh storytelling mechanisms to bring its major franchises — the Marvel and Star Wars cinematic universes — to viewers in fresh ways.
“The thing I find so incredibly compelling about [Marvel and Star Wars] is that it’s they’re one enormous narrative with a bunch of stories around it,” Inzerillo said at the time. “So the user interface of a company’s streaming service that makes epic sagas like that needs to be user-connected and one narrative designed to showcase the content for you and put it in front of the fans that love it, not get in the way. But it also needs to be personalized. It needs to be able to do all sorts of things. So it’s the fusion of all those components to create this vision of a constant narrative.”
What to Watch
Unlike the Apple TV+ reveal, where showrunners and stars came on to talk about their original movies and shows but didn’t show any footage, Disney showed investors a slew of clips for upcoming Disney+ originals. Unfortunately for everyone watching on the live stream, Disney cut to b-roll and elevator music whenever that footage rolled.
At Launch: At launch, Disney+ will have new Star Wars series The Mandalorian starring Pedro Pascal, a live-action Lady & The Tramp remake, a new National Geographic show called The World According to Jeff Goldblum, a new High School Musical series, Kristen Bell’s unscripted Encore! series, Marvel’s Hero Project documentary series, and Forky Asks a Question starring the new animated character from Toy Story 4.
Disney’s $71.3 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox means Disney+ will feature the entire series run of one of the most popular TV shows of all-time, The Simpsons.
Year One: At the end of year one, Disney expects to have 7,500 episodes of television and 500 movies on Disney+. That includes originals like a Monsters, Inc. sequel series Monsters at Work with Billy Crystal and John Goodman reprising their roles, Marvel’s Falcon and the Winter Soldier series with Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, Marvel’s What If…?, the new season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a new original film called Noelle starring Bill Hader and Anna Kendrick, The Phineas and Ferb Movie, and more.
Year Two: In its second year, Disney+ has another slate of big-budget originals dropping, headlined by the Star Wars: Rogue One prequel series starring Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor and the Alan Tudyk-voiced droid K-2SO, a Marvel series starring Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, and the Marvel series WandaVision starring Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch and Paul Bettany’s Vision.
There’s more coming, too. This week, Variety reported on a TV series reboot of The Sandlot and said Jeremy Renner will star in a new Hawkeye series in which he trains the next Hawkeye and passes the torch to Marvel Comics character Kate Bishop.
Interestingly, we may not be able to binge these shows all at once. Disney said the first episodes of The Mandalorian will be available at launch, but not the entire first season.
Disney+ will also be the exclusive home of all Disney’s theatrical releases, including Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, Aladdin, Toy Story 4, The Lion King, Frozen 2, and Star Wars: Episode IX. However, the theatrical release window won’t change. It’ll still take seven to nine months after the films debut in theaters for them to show up on Disney+.
The service is rounded out with Disney’s vault, including a wealth of selectively chosen movies and shows from 21st Century Fox. There will be roughly 400 films from Disney’s library and at least 5,000 episodes of old Disney-branded television shows like Hannah Montana and Lizzie McGuire on top of Disney animated and live-action films from Pirates of the Caribbean to National Geographic’s Brain Games and the documentary Free Solo.
More Disney films will arrive over the next four years as licensing deals with other streaming services expire.
The Three-Headed Streaming Behemoth
Beyond the Disney+ fanfare, execs from ESPN+ and Hulu also took the stage to talk up the other prongs of Disney’s streaming strategy.
Hulu CEO Randy Freer said the service plans to increase the number of Hulu originals, and Disney chief Bob Iger has previously mentioned plans to use FX, acquired in the 21st Century Fox deal, to serve as “an engine that will be able to supply…Hulu with a lot of high-quality content.”
Kevin Mayer, the chairman of Walt Disney direct-to-consumer and international,also confirmed that Disney plans to bundle Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu together. Details were scant, likely because Disney can’t release that bundle until it has full control of Hulu. The Mouse currently has a 60 percent ownership stake, but Comcast NBCUniversal still owns 30 percent and Time Warner has 10 percent.
Disney’s projections are high. The company told investors it expects to have 60 million to 90 million subscribers worldwide for Disney+ by the end of 2024 (Netflix currently has 139 million subscribers). Hulu added 8 million subscribers in 2018 for a total of 25 million, and ESPN execs touted 2 million subscribers for ESPN+ and a 29 percent year-over-year growth in total minutes users spent viewing content.
Disney is still very much invested in making sure people have cable subscriptions, but its now-complete streaming portfolio gives it a global direct-to-consumer footprint to be reckoned with in the streaming wars.
Following its November US launch, Disney+ will arrive in Western Europe in Q2 2020, with plans to launch in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America within the next year.
Between Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Disney’s offerings, NBCUniversal’s streaming service, CBS, and WarnerMedia’s impending streaming service combining HBO, Turner, and Warner Bros content, consumers will soon have a lot of choices to make when it comes to which services — or how many of them — are truly worth their monthly entertainment dollars.
This story was originally published on PCMag.com.
