Disney’s New Streaming Service Will Include ‘Star Wars,’ Marvel Movies
Netflix’s scramble to cut some kind of deal with Disney after the company announced their own Disney-exclusive streaming service last month seems to have come to naught, as CEO Bob Iger announced that Marvel and Star Wars movies would also be among the films appearing exclusively on the new app Disney hopes to launch by 2019. Better get those Moana viewings in fast, folks.
The Wrap uses the word “exclusive” in their report that Marvel and Star Wars properties would migrate from Netflix to Disney’s service, so it sounds like whatever deal Netflix was hoping to make fell through. It’s not a total surprise — a Disney- and Disney property-exclusive streaming service was just beyond the horizon as streaming has become exponentially more popular in recent years, but it’s a bit frustrating for those of us who finally got our Netflix, our Amazon Prime, our HBO Go subscriptions and were thinking, whew, that’s it, we’ve got it all. Now, we’ve gotta pay up some more whenever we have a hankering to rewatch Mulan 20 times in one weekend.
One big draw Iger mentioned is that the new service will include “four to five original films exclusively for the app,” as well as “four to five Disney-branded TV series” and “three to four television movies that are Disney-branded.” That, coupled with the library of 400-500 movies, sounds pretty irresistible.
A Disney-exclusive streaming service is cool for those of us who’d rather skip all the non-Disney, Marvel, or Star Wars offerings at other streaming sites, but it does ask an ominous question: are boutique single-company streaming services our future? Will we have to choose between paying a subscription to a million different companies instead of having a random selection of offerings all under one roof, like Netflix or Hulu? The Criterion Collection moved to their own Filmstruck last year, ending their deal with Hulu. And all the already established streaming services have made big pushes in recent years for their own original content, perhaps foreseeing that other studios, like Disney, will gradually make the move to their own platforms. Regardless, we have until 2019 before things start to get hairy, so there’s plenty of time to rewatch The Force Awakens to your heart’s content.