Disney+ Has Hit Over 60 Million Paid Subscribers
By George Robbins
Ever since the world was forced to go into lockdown back in March, people have been doing their best to try and find things to do that will keep them busy. For the most part people have managed to do just that and they have found ways of keeping themselves busy until they were able to leave the house. That being said, even though people can now leave the house to some degree, there is still not much for them to do since everything is limited capacity. With this fact in mind, people still mostly prefer to stay home rather than go out of the house. I’m certain that this will probably continue to be an issue for the foreseeable future.
Even though there are limitations in place, people are still finding ways to keep themselves busy at home with little in the way of entertainment. Companies are all too happy to help them as well because it means that they can still peddle their wares to people and more than likely, those people will buy them. This has made it possible for some entertainment companies to keep themselves afloat while they are, in essence, shut down to the general public. One example is Universal who have managed to make some money where they might have lost it by releasing some of their films straight to digital, forgoing any theatrical release. This decision of their’s was made after they saw this was a perfect chance to check out if this system would work.
Universal then managed to get themselves into trouble with AMC by saying they planned to do this with all of their films from this point forward. Until recently, AMC has said that they would no longer show Universal films in their theaters. However, an agreement was made recently where, after a period of only 17 days after a theatrical release, Universal would be allowed to put their movies out digitally. In an unprecedented move, they then offered this deal to many other studios including Disney. This works out very well for companies like Disney that have their own streaming services. With Disney+, they would stand to gain a lot by releasing their films so soon after release because they would get the surge of money from the first couple of weekends from theaters and then they could sell the movies on their service.
This deal could be seen as a major win for Disney because they can sell the newly released movies on their service like they are going to do with ‘Mulan.’ In doing this, they can then say that it is so that people can see the movie long before it becomes free on the service. This could end up making them a fortune because they have so many people now using their streaming service. They just recently reached an incredible 60.5 million paid subscriber mark for their service, which is way over what they thought they would have by this point. They launched in November of last year and have since exploded into a service that has many people paying for it every month which gives them a bit more leeway for whatever they choose to do moving forward.