Previously Disney + the Walt Disney Company, launched in November 2019, hoped to exceed the 90 million subscriber threshold by the end of the year 2024. It is safe to say that they have destroyed the target: today the company reports that it has already reached 95 million subscribers worldwide, three years earlier than expected and just 14 months after its initial launch. This means that Disney + is almost halfway through Netflix’s global subscriber total.
THR points out that Disney + added 8.1 million subscribers in December 2020 alone, and the 86.8 million subscribers that had at the beginning of the month. This is probably due to the presence of Pixar’s Soul, which consistently performs well on the charts of companies that measure the viewing of different streaming services. Of course, it also helps to have a massive archive of family-friendly classics, a bunch of properties from the acquisition of 20th Century Fox and a phenomenon original series like The Mandalorian, too. I would not be surprised if a large portion of the subscribers come in the wake of Disney’s big investor day in early December, announcing what feels like 9,000 new film and TV projects in an effort to make a permanent place to carve for himself. the pop culture landscape.
Netflix is still the King of Streaming Mountain with just over 200 million subscribers worldwide, but Disney + is starting slowly. People who are much closer to these things when I study proposal that the rapid growth of Disney + is due to international launches, which will soon slow down and eventually result in a plateau of subscriber numbers. I imagine it will be a tough battle to actually surpass Netflix, as the company has had such a huge lead in the streaming space and is still expanding tons of content (most of it hits or misses, but the “hits” seem to tons of conversation).
Yet the fact that it took nine years to reach 95 million customers and it only took 14 months for Disney is quite staggering, and it really shows the uphill battle that Netflix fought in the beginning and how streaming services, once a niche- thing, has become second nature in our society.
But Disney’s quarterly earnings call was by no means just in the glory of streaming subscribers. The pandemic rocked the company, resulting in:
Disney’s total profit from October to December, once taxes are taken into account, is … $ 29 million.
In 2019, it was $ 2.1 billion.
– Steven Zeitchik (@zeitchikWaPo) 11 February 2021
Whoa. This puts a clear perspective on how important Disney’s theme park business is to a normal year’s business. With Disneyland still closed, they had no chance of getting any closer to what a normal year number might look like.
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