Before Disney + launched in November 2019, the Walt Disney Company hoped to cross the barrier of 90 million subscribers by the end of the year 2024. It is safe to say that they have annihilated this goal: today, the company reports that it has reached 95 million subscribers worldwide , three years ahead of schedule and just 14 months after its initial launch. This means that Disney + is already almost half of Netflix’s total global subscribers.
THR points out that Disney + added 8.1 million subscribers in December 2020 alone, accumulating with the 86.8 million subscribers it had earlier that month. This is probably thanks to the presence of Pixar Soul, which has performed consistently well in the charts of companies measuring audience in different streaming services. Of course, it also helps to have a huge archive of family classics, a ton of properties from the 20th Century Fox acquisition and an original series of phenomena like The Mandalorian, also. I wouldn’t be surprised if a large part of these subscribers came on the heels of Disney’s big investor day in early December, when he announced what appeared to be 9,000 new film and TV projects in an attempt to win a permanent place for himself in the pop culture landscape.
Netflix is still the King of Streaming Mountain, with just over 200 million subscribers worldwide, but Disney + is slowly making inroads. People who study these things much closer than I do suggest that the rapid growth of Disney + is due to international launches, which will soon decline and end up resulting in a plateau in the number of subscribers. I imagine that it will be a difficult fight to surpass Netflix, since this company has had a great advantage in the streaming space and continues to produce tons of content (most of them hit or miss, but the “hits” seem to drive tons of conversation).
Still, the fact that that it took nine years for Netflix to reach 95 million customers and it only took 14 months for Disney is quite impressive, and it really shows the arduous battle that Netflix was fighting in the beginning and how streaming services, once a niche, became second nature in our society.
But Disney’s quarterly earnings conference call was far from just bathing the glory of streaming subscribers. The company was hit by the pandemic, resulting in this jaw-dropping statistic:
Disney’s total profit from October to December, once taxes are computed, is … $ 29 million.
In 2019, it was $ 2.1 billion.
– Steven Zeitchik (@zeitchikWaPo) February 11, 2021
Wow. This really puts in perspective how important Disney’s theme park business is to the company’s financial results during a normal year. With Disneyland still closed, they had no chance of approaching what would be the numbers for a normal year.
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