What to expect with Disney Plus
No R-rated fare, little series bingeing
BURBANK, Calif. – The company that earned its fame from a 1928 silent cartoon short featuring an animated mouse is betting the bank on a new streaming future with Disney Plus, which launches Tuesday.
Disney CEO and Chairman Robert Iger calls the new subscription video service “the biggest project” undertaken by the company under his tenure. The entertainment giant invested $1 billion in programming alone, in an attempt to make Disney+ a must buy for consumers.
How so? For starters, all movies produced by Disney from 2019 and beyond – such as “Frozen 2” and “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” – will air exclusively on Disney Plus after their theatrical and home video runs. To stoke demand for the service, those movies are unlikely to air anytime soon on Disney-owned ABC, the Disney Channel, the Freeform or FX channels, or any other pay cable network.
Disney Plus will be stocked with movies and TV shows from its core brands – Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilm (Star Wars) – as well as selections from Disney’s most recent acquisition, 21st Century Fox, which includes National Geographic.
Not everything created by Disney’s roster of studios will appear on its streaming rival to Netflix.
Disney Plus will not show films that are R-rated, for instance. “There will be nothing on Disney Plus that’s not branded or family friendly,” Kevin Mayer, the chairman of Disney’s direct to consumer division, said during a recent preview event at the Disney studios here.
Instead, Disney is positioning Hulu as the adult streaming alternative to Disney Plus, and it likely will be the home, Mayer says, for R-rated content such as the “Deadpool” films, produced by Fox but starring Marvel characters.
Hulu, begun as primarily a consortium of three broadcast networks – NBC, ABC and Fox – is now majority-owned by Disney. Fox’s
stake was part of Disney’s $71 billion acquisition of the Fox movie and TV studios, which became official earlier this year.
Also this year, the Disney-controlled Hulu paid $1.4 billion for the 9.5% stake owned by AT&T.
At the preview, journalists were given access to try out the Disney Plus app on iPads, iPhones and Apple TV. A search through the Disney animated film classics showed most of the expected titles – but not the controversial “Song of the South,” long derided by critics as a racist revisionist history of slaves in the south.
However, Disney is chock-full of content from the library, including the old Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons, live-action nature documentaries produced by Walt Disney in the 1950s, a new live-action Star Wars series, “The Mandalorian,” new reboots of Disney Channel fare like “Lizzie McGuire” and “High School Musical” and a new, live-action re-do of “Lady and the Tramp,” featuring real dogs in place of the animated characters.
What you won’t be able to do on Disney Plus, at least at launch, is binge on multiple episodes of new series, as you can on Netflix. New episodes will drop, one by one, each Friday at 12:01 a.m. PT.
Folks who start watching Tuesday will get two episodes of new shows this week, with the second airing on Friday.
Disney Plus costs $6.99 monthly, an aggressive price move that’s almost half of the most popular tier for No. 1 streamer Netflix, and $2 more than Apple TV Plus, which just launched Nov. 1.
The family-oriented channel is also available as a bundle, with ESPN Plus and Hulu, for $12.99 monthly. New customers to Verizon cable TV, broadband or cellular service can get Disney+ free for one year, too.
Disney Plus will be available on most of the usual streaming devices, including Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Google Chromecast and assorted TVs with smart TV functionality.
Disney executives predict the new service will have between 60 million to 90 million subscribers by 2024.