According to a new report from Deadline, Disney is gearing up to make some announcements about its upcoming movie and TV show pipeline and specifically which films that were originally planned for a theatrical release are now headed to Disney Plus.
Deadline reported that Disney will make the announcements about its upcoming slate on December 10. On that day, fans can expect to hear that the company’s upcoming movies such as Pinocchio, Peter Pan and Wendy, and Cruella are indeed going to skip theatres and release on Disney Plus instead. On top of that, Disney will announce “new projects” from its major subsidiaries such as Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar that will span TV and film, according to the report.
The theatrical projects are just that–they are expected to debut in theatres. According to Deadline’s report, this is a “gesture toward not abandoning exhibitors.”
That’s a particularly notable line, given that another giant studio–Warner Bros.–recently announced that its entire 2021 movie slate would be available on HBO Max and in theatres. Longtime Warner Bros. director Christopher Nolan recently slammed the move and called HBO Max “the worst streaming service.”
If the Disney films do move to Disney Plus, it remains to be seen if they would be offered to subscribers at no extra cost as it’s doing with the Pixar movie Soul, or if there would be an extra fee like there was for the Mulan (which has since become free for all subscribers).
Disney would miss out on box office revenues, and also upset some exhibitors, by releasing its movies on Disney Plus instead of theatres. However, shifting these films to Disney Plus could help bolster the service that is already wildly popular. Just a year after it debuted, Disney Plus already has more than 70 million subscribers.
It’s still well behind Netflix’s 195 million members, but Disney Plus is growing faster than Netflix in terms of paying subscribers at this point in its lifecycle. Moving big movies like Pinocchio and others to Disney Plus could help encourage more people to sign up, which would in turn increase the amount of monthly revenue that Disney pulls in.
The next big Disney Plus TV show is WandaVision, starring Elizabeth Olsen (Scarlet Witch) and Paul Bettany (Vision) reprising their characters from the Avengers series. The TV show debuts in January 2021 on Disney Plus.
