The Captain Marvel sequel has only managed $47 million in its opening weekend at the US box office. That may be respectable for some movies, but as Deadline notes, only two MCU movies have opened under $60 million, let alone $50 million.
The Marvels may get a lot right, as Charles said in his Verge review, but that doesn’t help if viewers don’t trust Marvel anymore.
Loki’s second season goes out with a big, existential bang that gives the god of mischief a glorious but confusing new purpose at the center of Marvel’s multiverse.
The entertainment giant is considering bundling some channels — including the History Channel and Lifetime — with A&E, sources tell the WSJ. Disney owns A&E as part of a joint venture with Hearst.
While it seemed like Disney CEO Bob Iger was looking to sell some of the company’s linear assets, Iger hinted that the company might just try to cut costs instead in a recent interview with CNBC:
We have been considering various strategic options for each of our networks, not necessarily all together, but each of them... While we’ve been actually taking a look at the linear networks, we’ve uncovered a number of really interesting opportunities to reduce costs and improve the business.
According to Disney CEO Bob Iger, the company has targeted 2025 to launch a direct-to-consumer version of ESPN as the cable market continues to shrink. In a CNBC interview ahead of its earnings, he discussed the possibility of finding “one or two” strategic partners that could add support via either technology, marketing, or content.
On the call with investors, Iger also hinted at how streaming ESPN could work:
The technology that we will have for ESPN, DTC will give us the ability to provide local sports in a pretty robust way basically, what the RSN ends are doing, but we’re not really aiming to do so by taking on significant risk. So if we can find the right kind of business arrangements and partnerships I think we will look very seriously at providing local sports as part of their platform.
That is even more interesting considering some RSN rights may return to the NBA and NHL next year.
Just ahead of Disney’s quarterly earnings release, CEO Bob Iger made a brief appearance on CNBC, where he shared that the company is “mostly focused now on delivering profitability” instead of increasing subs.
And I say that with love. Disney quietly refuses to host the second-season episode, which, as Polygon writes, lightly touches on gender as a concept.
With Bandit pretending to give birth as an entertaining, educational exercise, it sounds like it’s pretty standard Bluey fare. Here’s a YouTube clip from it.
Correction November 6th, 2023, 11:53AM ET: It was Bandit, not Bingo, who pretended to give birth. We regret the error.
In early 2022, Bob Chapek was Disney’s CEO, and it was “placing its bets on sports streaming and the metaverse.” Those metaverse plans evaporated, Chapek lost a petty war with Bob Iger, and ESPN is up for sale despite still making tons of money.
But the gambling thing — that’s still happening. The more than $1.5 billion licensing deal that will replace Barstool branding on a sportsbook and bring more gambling content to the network launches in force on November 14th.
Subject to final approvals, ESPN BET will go live in 17 states, which include: Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.
Additionally, ESPN is now using official odds provided by ESPN BET across editorial and other content.
[ESPN Press Room U.S.]
Marvel should be synonymous with a good time, but increasingly, it’s synonymous with bloat, bad VFX, and poorly scripted film and TV.
You can stream the movie starting December 1st. If you want to learn more about the movie, check out our review by Charles Pulliam-Moore.
