What The Initial Disney+ Line-Up Says About The Streaming Service’s Longterm Goals
(Welcome toThe Disney Discourse, a recurring feature where Josh Spiegel discusses the latest in Disney news. He goes deep on everything from the animated classics to the theme parks to live-action franchises.)Let it be said that if the Walt Disney Company knows one thing, it knows how to market itself. Last week, the Disney+ Twitter accountbasically took a hold of the entire social-media platform and used it to promote itself. Depending on how you look at things, theirthreadof more than 600 tweets, each one announcing a different film or TV show, in chronological order, that would be available on Disney+ on November 12, was spam or brilliance. (Or maybe both.) What the thread ended up highlighting was how the future of Disney+ lies not with flashy newStar Warsshows or the latest Marvel title, but with their past.
Everything but the Kitchen Sink
Until this week, Disney+ had been fairly cagey and noncommittal on what was arguably the most important question anyone had regarding the streaming service: what older titles would they showcase? When the service was first unveiled in April at an investors' event, executives gave brief lip service to the idea that there would be hundreds of films and thousands of episodes of TV shows on Disney+. But aside from that kind of generic comment and a screenshot or two of a PowerPoint slide with lots of catalog titles, there wasn’t much confirmation on what Disney+ would have that separate of films likeNoelleand TV shows likeThe Mandalorian.The decision to reveal all (or, presuming that a few more titles will get unveiled before November 12, reveal almost all) via Twitter ended up capturing people’s attention as much as, if not more so, than an investor presentation ever could. Almost by sheer will, the service became a trending topic, and people’s responses ranged from wondering why they were being spammed toaskingif certain movie titles were made-up (yes,Sammy the Way-Out Sealsounds like it’s fake, but it was a very real episode of theDisneylandanthology TV series you may know now as theWonderful World of Disney), to happily swimming in the waters of nostalgia over more obscure titles that will have their HD-streaming day in the sun soon enough.In effect, what happened on Monday was a reminder to the other big streaming service arriving in November that it’s in trouble before it starts. The shows that Apple TV+ is offering, starting on November 1 (and if you’re thinking, “Boy, that sure is coming up fast!”, you are correct), may well be entertaining. They offer a spectrum of genres, from ripped-from-the-headlines drama withThe Morning Showto alternative-history science-fiction withFor All Mankind. At first glance, too, Apple TV+ is cheaper than Disney+: the former is $4.99 a month, with the latter being $6.99 a month. The difference is in the tweets, though.
A Big Library
With Disney+, sure, you can watchThe MandalorianorThe World According to Jeff Goldblum. But you can also watch almost every Disney animated feature, most of theStar Warsfilms, plenty of Disney Channel shows, and more. With Apple TV+, you can watch…well,The Morning ShoworFor All Mankindor whatever else they have that’s new. As recentlyemphasizedin a sprawling profile of the service in the Hollywood Reporter, Apple TV+ doesn’t have a back catalog. Seven dollars a month with Disney+ is a small price to pay to see HD-quality versions of plenty of films that have previously never been available in that format. That’s not even to note that, if you’ve taken advantage of the various discounts Disney has pushed in the last couple months, you might not even be paying that much for the first year or the firstthreeyears. (The latter deal, which has since expired, let people even with a free D23 membership pay just $3.99 a month for the first 36 months for the service.)Yes, it was easy to joke about little-seen films likeThe Biscuit Eaterwhen they got included in the thread. But now you can see it for yourself. And Disney+, simply by highlighting its own older films, now has more than 100 movies from before 1990, just eightfewerthan Netflix. (What this proves, if nothing else, is that Netflix has a shamefully low number of older films available for streaming.) That number should get larger soon enough, as there’s more than a hundred movies from the Walt Disney Company not yet accounted for on Disney+.
