Once the public face of squeaky-clean, harmless family entertainment, the Walt Disney Corporation has evolved into a widespread conglomerate known as much for the properties it controls as the films it produces. With subsidiaries including Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, National Geographic, A&E, 20th Century Fox, ESPN, Hulu, and Pixar, Disney has a commanding control of some of the world’s most lucrative franchises, plus an extensive library of film and TV classics. Its streaming service Disney+ signals a new interest in controlling its own online distribution, setting aside decades of licensing partnerships. Follow along with The Verge as we look at Disney’s new films and shows, and its strategies for dominating the box office and the streaming dollar.
The Muppets Mayhem lasted just one season before Disney canceled it. Variety reported today that the show won’t get a second season on the platform.
The show followed Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem Band as they tried to record an album. Bummer for fans of the Muppet Show’s house band.
Disney has already confirmed a Frozen 3 is on the way, but now CEO Bob Iger said Frozen 4 might be “in the works” during an interview on Good Morning America:
I don’t have much to say about those films right now. But Jenn Lee, who created Frozen, the original Frozen and Frozen 2, is hard at work with her team at Disney Animation on not one but actually two stories.
Can you make an app that’s good for music, podcasts, audiobooks, discovery, library management, and like 100 other things? That’s what Spotify’s trying to figure out. Meanwhile, Disney is out here trying to eat the entire entertainment business one brand at a time. And trust me, friends: it’s going to be called Disney Plus.
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.
On Monday night, NHL and NBA fans in Detroit, Minnesota, Milwaukee, Dallas, and other places covered by Bally Sports (which operates regional sports networks spun off in the big Fox / Disney deal), who subscribe just to watch their local teams got mostly error messages instead of games.
In a statement to the Detroit Free Press, Bally Sports SVP/GM Greg Hammaren blamed the outage on Okta and problems with its Auth0 platform.
Of course, it’s not Okta that still blacked out local access to the games via other platforms despite the outage.
Somehow (see: the relentless passage of time) Loki season two is already two episodes out from its big finale. And this new teaser Marvel’s just dropped makes it seem like the Asgardian god of mischief (and friends) are going to be busy as hell keeping the universe from falling apart as this latest chapter draws to a close.
Netflix is at an all-time high. Disney is cracking down on password sharing. And Apple TV Plus has doubled its prices. Will the streaming squeeze ever end?
Marvel’s new Daredevil: Born Again Disney Plus series seemed to be in trouble earlier this month when the studio dismissed co-head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman, and announced that it planned to bring on a proper showrunner to lead the project.
It wasn’t clear then just how long the hunt for a showrunner might take, but according to The Hollywood Reporter, Marvel has just tapped Dario Scardapane — who showran Netflix’s The Punisher — to step in.
[The Hollywood Reporter]
During an earnings call on Friday, Charter CFO Jessica Fischer said that loss was still “less” than what the company initially expected. Charter execs also seem pretty optimistic about its cable bundle with Disney, with CEO Chris Winfrey saying the deal marks a “significant step forward for the video ecosystem.”
[The Hollywood Reporter]
“The Star Beast” will air on November 25.
“Wild Blue Yonder” will air December 2.
“The Giggle” will air December 9.
All three episodes will air on BBC in the UK, and Disney Plus in the US and elsewhere. They’ll also mark the official return of David Tennant as the Doctor (it’s complicated), Russell T. Davies as showrunner, and Catherine Tate as the best of the modern companions, Donna Noble.
The Front Office Sports Today podcast has a segment digging into the annual 8-K financial report released by Disney this week.
For the first time, it includes ESPN’s revenue and profit details — handy timing if you’re hoping someone will buy a part of the sports network — showing that even with the cable market much smaller than it was a few years ago, in 2022 it had $16 billion in revenue and $2.9 billion in profit. That probably explains why Netflix is about to test a live sporting event too.
Disney recently showed off bipedal droids that look exactly like something you’d see in a Star Wars movie, and now Disney’s Imagineers are testing the droids at Disneyland, as reported by Disneyland News Today. I love them!!
It’s a genuine possibility, according to Thomas Buckley’s incredibly juicy reporting over at Bloomberg that’s so chock-full of details about Disney’s CEO we already linked to it earlier today:
Iger’s deputies are pushing him to consider a bolder transformation of Disney from gaming licensee to gaming giant through, say, an acquisition of Electronic Arts. But, as with everything else, he’s been noncommittal.
[Bloomberg]
Bloomberg has a fascinating profile the recently-returned Disney CEO that’s packed with some juicy details about Iger’s and the company’s recent struggles. Like, for example: “On Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022, hours before Chapek was due to attend an Elton John concert broadcast on Disney+, he was fired.” Rough.
He has not been appeased. At least according to this story from the Wall Street Journal.
Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management has an enormous stake in Disney, and to keep Peltz appeased, Disney has done a lot this year, including looking into selling ABC and big chunks of its business in India, finding a “strategic partner” for ESPN, and folding Hulu into Disney Plus.
But unfortunately, Disney’s stock price, much like my entire retirement portfolio, has not been doing great this year. So Peltz is still looking to get some seats on the board.
It’s not the first restoration for the 1937 movie — in 1993, long before the DVD, Cinesite did a 4.7TB digitization of the film alongside a special Kodak “dustbusting” technique. But Disney says it’s using new scans of the original negatives for a new 4K UHD version, coming October 10th to disc and hitting Disney Plus on October 16th.
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