Confirming what I told you yesterday, following another drop in Disney’s stock, now Wall Street analysts are doubting the streaming service and are skeptical of both Marvel and Star Wars.
Yesterday saw Disney release its Q4 investor report where the amount of Disney Plus subscribers didn’t live up to expectations, which saw the stock drop.
As I reported yesterday on Disney leaker WDW Pro’s insider information, Marvel is not growing Disney Plus, which is evidenced by the fact that both Black Widow and What If? were released during Q4, and the amount of subscriber growth saw a sharp decline during the fiscal fourth quarter.
Today, Deadline reports on how the Disney stock continues to drop (down over 7%) where Wall Street analysts are skeptical of the Disney Plus streaming service and its Marvel and Star Wars brands’ ability to bring in new subscribers (note: bold my own).
“We wonder if Disney+ is too narrow a product and requires much greater investment in non-Disney content to widen out the product’s appeal,” said MoffettNathanson analysts. “The admission that Disney+ growth will re-accelerate when content spending re-accelerates is consistent with the recent experience at Netflix, where the growth slumber created by the pandemic’s pull-forward of subscribers was finally shattered by record amounts of new content dropped in the last few months of this year,” the firm said. “Taken together, this reality brings us back to the Warren Buffett quote above that he used to describe the airline industry, but that we think applies to streaming as well: “The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money.”
Doug Creutz of Cowen, an American multinational independent investment bank and financial services company, added the following about Marvel and Star Wars.
“We remain somewhat skeptical that more Star Wars/Marvel/animated/family content will be sufficient to grow the Disney+ audience out to parity with Netflix,” said Creutz.
Disney needs quality Marvel and Star Wars content
Regarding Marvel, we can also add that the release of Black Widow on Disney Plus also did nothing to bolster the number of subscribers, as Disney let it be known that less than 2% of subscribers paid the additional $29.99 to watch the film, and recently saw the box offices for Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and Eternals tank big time, with the latter, the worst MCU movie of all time at the box office and amongst critics and fans.
WDW Pro did offer up that Disney wants to focus on its Star Wars brand, as Disney is said to be extremely happy with the reception to Boba Fett, but I think the issue regarding Star Wars is that there just isn’t enough content.
Echoing what the analysts think, Netflix has a ton of content, but Disney Plus really doesn’t have that much, as Disney’s streaming service really only debuts a new series every few months or so, and regarding Star Wars, there hasn’t been anything new since Dec. of 2020, with Boba Fett set to debut a year later on Dec. 29, 2021, so that is an entire year without Star Wars content.
On the flip side, Disney appears to be playing the long game, as this Friday sees their big Disney Plus Day where they are offering new subscribers a month of service for only $1.99, which is an obvious attempt to get those new subscribers to sign on full time, and new content is incoming from both Marvel and Star Wars, but the obvious question is will that content be any good and will the content be good enough to grow subscribers?
The major problem I see with Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars, is that if it continues to put out content that fans don’t like (Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Eternals, Disney Star Wars Trilogy) and tick off fans (firing of Gina Carano), no matter what they do, Disney Plus subscribership won’t grow.
