According to a new rumor, Disney may soon make a desperation play by licensing out some of their Disney Plus exclusive series to other content providers in order to help pull the streaming services’ operational costs out of the red.
RELATED: Ousted Disney CEO Bob Chapek Reportedly Cooked The Books To Hide Disney Plus Financial Losses
This whisper regarding the potential future for the House of Mouse’s premier streaming offerings was first raised by noted scooper Doomcock on February 10th via a video published to his YouTube channel Overlord DVD.
Following his standard disclaimer that “What I am about to share with you is information provided to me by a longtime source who claims knowledge of the situation, but since I cannot personally verify this information, I am presenting it as unverified rumor and I ask you to please take it with a grain of salt,” the masked supervillain asserted that as per his one of his long-time Disney sources, “If what I’ve heard happens, it is 100% proof that Disney plus is a failure. Period, no spin, and no s–t. There’s a rumor that Disney is planning to sell content to other publishers.”
Expanding on their claim, the source alleged that the services being eyed for a potential Disney licensing deal were Apple, Paramount Plus, Peacock, and unidentified “other random service”.
As for the notable absence of Disney’s own Hulu service from that list, Doomcock’s source allegedly noted that “Disney more or less owns Hulu at this point, but for some reason, Hulu is not even considered”.
Speculating that a supposed recent meeting between Disney CEO Bob Iger and Apple was held in order “to get this idea off the ground”, the source then detailed that the shows supposedly up for licensing include The Mandalorian Season 1, The Orville Season 1 (and possibly 2), Loki Season 1, WandaVision Season 1, Andor Season 1, Bad Batch Season 1, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Willow, and “a few others”.
Notably, Doomcock’s source provided relayed this supposed information just days after the company confirmed at their Q1 2023 earnings call that not only was Disney Plus still operating at a significant loss despite reducing its cumulative debt by $400,000, but that the service had also seen the loss of roughly 2.4 million subscribers (an exodus motivated in large part by Disney’s terminating their licensing deal with India’s Hotstar television network).
Speaking to Disney Plus’ current (lack of) performance, Iger told shareholders during the call, “First of all, we were, as a company, in a global arms race for subscribers. And it was — the number of subscribers that have become kind of the primary measurement of success not only here in the company, but among in the investment community. And in our zeal to go after subscribers, I think we might have gotten a bit too aggressive in terms of our promotion, and we are going to take a look at that.”
“We want the quality on the screen, but we have to look at what they cost us,” he asserted. “So, we’re going to continue to go after subs, but we’re going to be more judicious about how we do that. we’re going to look carefully at pricing. We’re going to reduce costs, both in content and of course, infrastructure.”
Like Doomcock noted in his video, as of writing, this information remains an unverified rumor.
