Each week of the pandemic brings with it another layer of, shall we say, exciting entertainment news. Within the last few days, it’s been Disney’s turn to shine with a couple of big announcements.
The first of these announcements was mostly unsurprising, in part because it centered around a single film and its new release pattern.
The second announcement came earlier this week and feels a lot harder to parse, because why make things easy?
Let’s talk about Soul first. In the last few weeks, there were rumors that Soul would skip theaters, so the fact that these rumors were confirmed to be true is pretty much par for the course. Once No Time to Die was pushed back to the spring, and once Regal Cinemas closed down its U.S. locations, it was all but inevitable that other major studio releases would be delayed further or sent to streaming.
One overall note: if you want to know how successful Mulan has been for Disney+, you need only look at how Disney has handled its other upcoming releases. Note that Soul, which is now arriving on Christmas Day, will not be charged separate of your Disney+ subscription. It’ll just be there, like Artemis Fowl or Hamilton were over the summer. Maybe audiences would be more willing to pay if the price was lower, or maybe the word-of-mouth on Mulan was just too weak. But the point is simple: if Disney wanted to make you pay to buy Soul and thought you would, they’d do it.
Where this connects to the larger update hinted at in the CNBC tweet is simple: by pronouncing that they’re shifting further to streaming, Disney is, if not flat-out giving up, acknowledging that theatergoing is not going to be the biggest part of its portfolio moving forward. Frankly, it’s disappointing that Soul isn’t just being delayed further until it’s safer for audiences to go to theaters. While I’m not champing at the bit for theaters to reopen now, I am willing to wait to see certain films. Since its premiere at the London Film Festival last weekend, we can safely presume that Soul isn’t being kicked off to streaming because it’s bad. Instead, the early buzz is enormously positive.
(OK, that last one is maybe just me enjoying Ben Mekler’s humor.)
We can wonder now how much of the praise is because people are happy to see something new, something new in theaters, or they want to like a Pixar film automatically. But the point is simple: Disney felt confident enough to premiere the film at a film festival, and the audience went nuts for it. They’re not carting Soul to Disney+ because they think there’s no money in the film.
They’re doing it because, well, they’re shifting more firmly to streaming. Now, on one hand, I’m in favor of this. Years before Disney+ was official, I was talking on my now-defunct Disney movie podcast Mousterpiece Cinema about the need for a Disney streaming service. The concept of Disney+, and the notion of the larger company standing behind it, is great.
Where the headline — and since we’ll likely not know much more until an investor day in mid-December, it really is just that for now — throws me off is simple. What exactly does Disney+…y’know, have right now that merits such a seismic shift? Yes, they have a new season of The Mandalorian coming in a couple weeks, along with Marvel shows. They have Soul, too. But the majority of the new content from Disney+ is stuff like Clouds, the new inspirational drama based on a true story that premieres this Friday, or The Right Stuff, the TV-series remake of the Tom Wolfe book. Most of the new content Disney+ has, in short, are not world-beaters. They don’t raise the needle. They’re just…there.
And yes, of course, Disney will ramp up production…in the middle of a seemingly never-ending pandemic. Making this shift makes sense. I guess I’m just not sure how much sense it makes right now. It’s in part because I don’t want to give up on theatergoing, and I feel like this announcement is Disney preemptively throwing in the towel.
I hope I’m wrong. But seven months ago, I would’ve said there was no way Soul would go to Disney+. Hell, over the summer, I all but said that, implying that if films like Mulan and Soul did so, it would be a sign that movie theaters were dead. And now…well, they just might be.
Sigh.