Disney is feeling a bit wobbly these days on multiple fronts, but nothing is stranger than its Disney+ philosophy. While it’s often a must-sub for parents with kids, as a larger streaming service attracting older audiences, it feels like at most there is a single show airing at any given time that crowd will want to watch.
Either a Star Wars show, or a Marvel show.
Granted, the pace of these has picked up. It used to be one or two a year. Now, it’s gotten into this rhythm where they are putting a bunch of them back to back to back so fans won’t dare cancel their subscription. For instance, there were exactly two days between the ending of Ahsoka season 1 and the start of Loki season 2.
And yet, it is insane to me that Disney thinks this can go on indefinitely. Even within this plan, Disney has admitted they are already spending way too much on disjointed, expensive shows, culminating in the $200 million failure Secret Invasion. Now, Kevin Feige is slimming down productions and making more actual TV shows than miniseries setting up movies.
But that doesn’t solve the problem. It’s still the same thing, a string of Star Wars and Marvel shows because Disney does not have anything else to offer. They’re scraping their IPs in desperation, which is why we’re getting things like a live action Gargoyles(?) show now.
You can say that technically Hulu is the “adult” version of the Disney+, but bundling that costs way more. This past week, the price of Hulu went up to $18 from $15 a month, Disney+ is now up to $14 from $11 a month. There are five bundles total to package all these together, a few of which include ESPN plus. A version of Disney+ and Hulu, with ads, costs $15 a month now. Ad-free is $20 a month.
It’s a bizarre system, and more than any other service, we are just getting straight up back to cable. And it is truly bizarre to have one of these services offering really just a single Star Wars or Marvel show at any given time while rivals like Apple or Max offer much more, or Netflix, despite its faults, has a giant, ever expanding content library. It may be digging to find gold, but it’s there. And it’s there a lot more often than on Disney+.
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