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 lawsuit from movie financier TSG Entertainment alleged that Disney used tricky accounting to withhold millions of dollars from it. For instance, TSG believes it was underpaid by “at least $40 million” for The Shape of Water, making it harder to invest in other films, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The reported settlement’s terms were undisclosed, the Reporter writes.
Rumors have said Disney wants the NBA and NFL to become part owners of its sports network. A Friday New York Post report indicates that’s close to reality for the NFL, which is said to be in “advanced talks” to gain an equity stake in ESPN.
According to The Athletic, ESPN would take over NFL Media, which includes the NFL Network. That’s as Disney plans to make ESPN a streaming service in 2025.
[The Athletic]
Disney Plus’ Echo limited miniseries feels like the studio’s first successful attempt at matching the energy that made Netflix’s Marvel shows great.
Okay. So there’s something called a “Disney Day Drinkers Club” (more than 85,000 members!) and their mascot is a trash can called “Binny.” Disney has moved the trash can.
Too many people were lining up for photos with Binny, blocking the pub’s entrance and causing safety issues, says a Disney spokeswoman.
Moving Binny was a big deal, says Sher, the founder, because of Disney superfans’s obsessive attention to detail, and fandom that can border on fanaticism.
After a debut in the Hawkeye Disney Plus series a couple of years ago, the Echo show starring Alaqua Cox starts January 9th. Other than serving as another link to the Netflix shows with appearances from Vincent D’Onofrio (Kingpin) and Charlie Cox (Daredevil), it’s appearing on both Hulu and Disney Plus, even as those experiences overlap.
And it’s the first Spotlight-branded Marvel show, which means:
...in the case of Echo, focusing on street-level stakes over larger MCU continuity...our audience doesn’t need to have seen other Marvel series to understand what’s happening in Maya’s story.
Disney just released season 2 a few days ago. Now Marvel has posted a “look into the future” of the alternative timeline Avengers series, featuring a younger Red Guardian, the Winter Soldier, and a car chase.
The video leaked early when fans found it unlisted on Marvel’s YouTube channel, according to BGR.
What If’s second season is at its best when it’s exploring the edges of Marvel’s established cinematic canon.
In his year-end Screenwriter newsletter, Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw seeded some new TV rumors while laying out why the spinoff apocalypse is nigh.
According to Shaw, Netflix is considering an Uncle Fester spinoff from Wednesday and is making two Peaky Blinders shows. And maybe it’s not a new rumor, per se, but Shaw says Disney really is making that new, Ryan Coogler-produced X-Files.
TechDirt published a helpful reminder yesterday that the 1928 “Steamboat Willie” iteration of the Disney character will become the people’s mouse on January 1st, 2024. The article also points to a Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain guide for using the early design.
You could take a page out of the Winnie-the-Pooh: the Deforested Edition playbook and create “Steamboat Willie: the Climate Change Edition,” in which Mickey’s boat is grounded in a dry riverbed. You could create a feminist remake with Minnie Mouse as the central figure. You could reimagine Mickey and Minnie dedicating themselves to animal welfare.
[web.law.duke.edu]
We’re just weeks away from a new year (no, really, I checked), but before the calendar flips over, the MCU will deliver a new season of its animated What If...? series on Disney Plus.
They reworked the 12 Days of Christmas carol as a reminder it’s on the way, just in case anyone forgot.
Disney is licensing a bunch of its shows to Netflix, including This Is Us, Prison Break, and Lost, Deadline reports. I implore you all to watch Lost again when it hits Netflix on July 1st, 2024, so that you can agree with me that the finale ruled.
As part of the deal, Grey’s Anatomy, which has been a hit on Netflix, will also be available on Hulu for the first time. I bet it will be a big deal on the Disney Plus / Hulu one-app experience.
The lawsuit, which was certified on Friday, is “the largest ever certified under California’s Equal Pay Act,” Variety reports.
Even as big advertisers exit, sports Twitter has continued going strong. But now the official Threads account announced that sports/NBA Twitter’s newsbreaker Adrian Wojnarowski “has landed” and is doing a Q&A Friday.
If “woj bombs” are on the move, it might be about more than hashtags — Wojnarowski works at ESPN, which is still owned by Disney. Musk singled out Disney CEO Bob Iger with his “go f yourself” comments last week, then followed up with more attacks and accusations today while misspelling Iger’s name and saying “He should be fired immediately.”
You might have thought Bob Iger returning to Disney would have smoothed things over with the board and investors, but activist investor Nelson Peltz is back baby.
Peltz and his firm, Trian Fund Management are looking for two seats on the board. When Iger was asked about it yesterday at New York Time’s Dealbook conference he demurred.
But today the company responded to the proxy fight accusing Peltz of collaborating with Ike Perlmutter (who owns most of the shares Peltz is relying on). Perlmutter was fired from the board this year after losing more and more of his once iron grip on the Marvel franchise. He once called women-led superhero films a “disaster” and attempted to scuttle both the hugely successful Black Panther and Captain Marvel films for exactly the reasons you think.
Disney is one on a growing list of companies that have stopped advertising on X, formerly known as Twitter, following antisemitic posts from Elon Musk.
During his interview at the DealBook 2023 event, Bob Iger didn’t comment on whether Disney would ever go back to advertising on X, but he had this to say about the decision:
By him taking the position he took, we felt that the association with that position, and Elon Musk and X, was not a positive one for us.
Speaking during the NYT DealBook Summit 2023, he did not blame the actors’ strike and lack of publicity for the film’s performance. Nor did he blame the weird hatred of the film driven by sexism coming from a small and vocal cadre of Marvel fans upset over a film helmed by three women.
He did blame the sheer volume of content being created for making it more difficult to maintain quality and said, “The Marvels was shot during Covid, and there wasn’t enough supervision on set” from executives.
But given that overreliance on executive creative control is one of the things that have driven the Marvel brand to its current nadir... that’s certainly an interesting assessment.
Responding to a DealBook question about recent box office disappointments, Iger says, “we need to get more realistic” about what a hit looks like in the streaming age.
The Disney CEO also says it was a “definite mistake” to increase output for streaming and that an increase in quantity led to diluted quality.
How Agatha Harkness: Darkhold Diaries will address the events of WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is anyone’s guess.
But in a new WandaVision behind-the-scenes feature reel which also includes some new Darkhold Diaries production footage), Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness appears to be back to her old seld, and messing with the kind of magic that tends to get people roped into big crossover events.
The first of three new Doctor Who episodes is about to premiere at 6:30PM GMT (1:30PM ET, and if you’re not in the UK or Ireland, you’ll find the new episodes on Disney Plus now). And after fans watch “The Star Beast,” for the first time, there will be an official post-show podcast (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts) to extend the experience.
The only odd thing about this is that Doctor Who didn’t have one before, and if you’re still wondering why every new show has a podcast, Hot Pod has tried to answer that very question.
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.
