Which fundamentally makes zero sense. D+ is a tiny fraction of the revenue they earn from their theme parks, hotels and box office receipts. It’s a great side business but their core is in deep shit until COVID is eradicated.
When Disney+ goes up to $8 / month (that's the plan for early next year), and reaches around ~150 million subscribers.. they will eclipse the total box office reciepts for their biggest year (if that monthly revenue was static for 12 months, in reality it'll just keep going up.)
They get pretty much 100% of the revenue from Disney+... they get 25-60% of box office revenue depending on where it's made, likely no greater than 50% overall.... and they have to manage distribution worldwide vs... hosting a streaming service (not cheap, but way less complicated, and getting cheaper and cheaper to do, whereas distributing things worldwide, not so much.)
I don't know why people aren't seeming to get how massive streaming is.
Eventually they'll be able to charge $10 a month and in a couple years will have 200 million subs.
That's 2 billion dollars every single month. $24 billion in revenue; they probably had at most ~$7 billion in revenue from their record 2019 box office. They may never hit that kind of number again at the box office, they certainly weren't doing it in 2020 even before COVID.
Now imagine a service with 300 million subscribers and options from $10-15 like Netflix... totally plausible.
edit: To be clear, streaming existing is also cutting into cable/TV revenue.. so it's all shifting a bunch of money around, but it IS the future, these guys are stuck with it.. just trying to keep the lights on everywhere else (TV/theater) while hoping to be one of the big streaming players.
www.theguardian.com
