Disney

In early 2022, Bob Chapek was Disney’s CEO, and it was “placing its bets on sports streaming and the metaverse.” Those metaverse plans evaporated, Chapek lost a petty war with Bob Iger, and ESPN is up for sale despite still making tons of money.

You can stream the movie starting December 1st. If you want to learn more about the movie, check out our review by Charles Pulliam-Moore.

On Monday night, NHL and NBA fans in Detroit, Minnesota, Milwaukee, Dallas, and other places covered by Bally Sports (which operates regional sports networks spun off in the big Fox / Disney deal), who subscribe just to watch their local teams got mostly error messages instead of games.

Somehow (see: the relentless passage of time) Loki season two is already two episodes out from its big finale. And this new teaser Marvel’s just dropped makes it seem like the Asgardian god of mischief (and friends) are going to be busy as hell keeping the universe from falling apart as this latest chapter draws to a close.

Marvel’s new Daredevil: Born Again Disney Plus series seemed to be in trouble earlier this month when the studio dismissed co-head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman, and announced that it planned to bring on a proper showrunner to lead the project.

During an earnings call on Friday, Charter CFO Jessica Fischer said that loss was still “less” than what the company initially expected. Charter execs also seem pretty optimistic about its cable bundle with Disney, with CEO Chris Winfrey saying the deal marks a “significant step forward for the video ecosystem.”

“The Star Beast” will air on November 25.

The Front Office Sports Today podcast has a segment digging into the annual 8-K financial report released by Disney this week.

Disney recently showed off bipedal droids that look exactly like something you’d see in a Star Wars movie, and now Disney’s Imagineers are testing the droids at Disneyland, as reported by Disneyland News Today. I love them!!

It’s a genuine possibility, according to Thomas Buckley’s incredibly juicy reporting over at Bloomberg that’s so chock-full of details about Disney’s CEO we already linked to it earlier today:

Bloomberg has a fascinating profile the recently-returned Disney CEO that’s packed with some juicy details about Iger’s and the company’s recent struggles. Like, for example: “On Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022, hours before Chapek was due to attend an Elton John concert broadcast on Disney+, he was fired.” Rough.

He has not been appeased. At least according to this story from the Wall Street Journal.

It’s not the first restoration for the 1937 movie — in 1993, long before the DVD, Cinesite did a 4.7TB digitization of the film alongside a special Kodak “dustbusting” technique. But Disney says it’s using new scans of the original negatives for a new 4K UHD version, coming October 10th to disc and hitting Disney Plus on October 16th.

Visual effects workers at Disney voted 13-0 to form a union with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) on Tuesday.

Wish is meant to blend modern CGI animation with the gorgeous watercolor animation Disney was originally known for. That should make it similar looking to films like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Those are gorgeously animated films with the latter looking like a hand drawn book brought to three-dimensional life.

The Hollywood Reporter has a good read this morning on the last-minute negotiations to end the writers strike. It seems to come pretty much entirely from the studios’ perspective, but it’s a good read anyway.

The company is planning to drive growth by pumping roughly $60 billion into its parks, experiences, and cruise lines, noting in a blog post that Disney parks have “significant room for further expansion on land and at sea.”

All 118 discs (including Pixar special features) are available exclusively at Walmart, and it’s $1,499.96. Before you run out and buy it, though, a word of caution: these are HD Blu-rays, so you won’t be watching Frankenweenie in crispy 4K resolution.