50 Million Reasons to be Happy
Yesterday, Disney+ unveiled its latest press release and this one was a doozy.
Those are good numbers, no matter what. Disney’s original projections were that Disney+ would have 60 to 90 million global subscribers by 2024. At the end of December, they had 28 million global subscribers. Now, they have 50 million.
There are, of course, caveats. In the last few months, Disney+ has been released in global markets like the United Kingdom and India, with the latter accounting for 8 million signups. And, of course, there’s the whole “Everyone is stuck inside right now” business. Plus, as a few folks responded to me on Twitter, these numbers may well include some of the people who signed up for Disney+ through a free yearlong trial offered to Verizon subscribers. And so on.
But I look at this as proof of something I’ve argued for a while: the appetite for a Disney streaming service has existed for a while. In the years before Disney+ was live, it was possible to stream a large amount of Disney animated films, live-action titles, etc. But not under one roof. If you had Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Go, Showtime Anywhere, Starz, FXM, and so on and so on, you might be able to find lots of different Disney films. That’s if, and it’s a bit of a hassle, virtually speaking, to hop, skip, and jump from one app to the other.
Disney+ is far from perfect. It has a lot of work to go, and it’s very easy for subscribers to only watch the new and trending if they don’t explore beyond the home page. My fervent and likely naive hope is that numbers like these prove to Disney brass that there’s more appetite for the Disney brand beyond the obvious titles. I’m curious to keep track of these numbers throughout 2020, because there’s a very real chance we’re not getting any new content of serious import this year…unless you’re into something like this.
(I’m a cat person.)
Your Recommendation for Today
Someone reading this post may have been the game-changer for yesterday’s poll between Enchanted and A Goofy Movie. The 2007 live-action/animated hybrid won by, literally, a single vote. It goes on to live another day in the overall bracket of Disney Animation titles. Today, I’ve unleashed four polls on Twitter, as follows.
As the photo below the heading implies, I’m recommending just one of these titles, and it’s not even a film I would vote for! (I’m fickle.) The Great Mouse Detective is a modestly charming film, which means it was wholly successful when it arrived in the summer of 1986. As I’ve written about at length at Slashfilm, the Disney Renaissance of the late 1980s and 1990s only began when this film was able to prove the long-term viability of Disney Animation to the studio’s new executive leaders, Jeffrey “Quibi” Katzenberg and Michael “I Produced BoJack Horseman, No Joke” Eisner.
The Great Mouse Detective marked the directorial debut of Disney Legends John Musker and Ron Clements, and boasts an incredibly fun villain voiced by Vincent Price. The lead characters, Basil of Baker Street and Dr. John Q. Dawson (AKA…well, I think you know), are more blandly designed, but the rat-who-wants-to-be-a-mouse Ratigan is an inspired creation brought vibrantly to life by the animators and Price’s oily performance. There’s a reason why he’s the only regular character in the film with a song. (Hell, he has two songs.)
Now, go watch the movie. And then vote!