Disney+ loses 2.4M subscribers, lays off 7,000 workers

[Andrew NDB]

Not looking good for Disney+.

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/disney-layoffs-7-000-its-employees-as-streaming-subscribers-decline-3766191

[Cowabung-Gal]

They had it coming.

As Jiminy Cricket would say, “You buttered your bread, now sleep in it!”

[Andrew NDB]

I guess nobody liked Willow or Cassian.

[IMJ]

I guess nobody liked Willow or Cassian.

Amongst other things....

[Roseangelo]

This isn't a Disney+ layoff, this is all of Disney. The article also mentions the loss of subscribers and tries to correlate the two, but Disney has lots of issues in all its departments.

[ChosenOne]

Something, something, go broke.

[AquaParade]

Audience pushed back and they didn't listen. Or maybe the ship is just too big to make a sharp turn.

As for the movie department, Mark Millar, the comicbook author, let it slip that he talked to someone who works behind the scenes at the MCU and that person was basically saying their plan is that 'first they storm the beach, then they storm the town'...
which essentially means they think they've got all the hardcore fans in the can already, and they can now focus on trying to make every other demographic an MCU fan...thus all the pandering, I suppose.
Millar's commentary on that was "You're going to lose the beach". I think he was spot-on and they are now seeing that.

I can't believe how checked-out of the MCU I am. I don't even finish these movies anymore and I certainly don't see them in theaters. If you had told me I'd feel this way, after Endgame, when I was all-in on the MCU, I'd have a hard time believing it. There was such a momentum a few years ago. Not even just narrative-momentum, but meta-momentum. We were seeing the MCU get bigger and greater in front of our eyes. Now it feels like we are regressing. You can see it in the story, the characters. You can plainly see it in the visual effects.

I just don't care anymore what happens in the MCU movies. It's not that I've lost all hope in the MCU, but my stance is a firm "wake me up when this gets back on track".

As you guys already said, this is bigger than the MCU though.

[IMJ]

Something, something, go broke.

Exactly.
And then they doubled down on it and expected the allegedly "woke" audience to show up and pay $2,000 a night for a Star Wars hotel.

Hellloooo? These people just run their mouths online and gather in the streets to cause damage under phony righteousness. They have zero interest in taking their family to an overpriced Disney experience when they have no family and can dye their hair blue from the safety of Twitter.

These people just want to know that there is a She-Hulk show or a Velma show that has mastered insulting white males, but they don't want to support it financially. It's not a "movement". It's just the online coalescence of the life-angry with dysmorphia disorders of various types. But Disney execs thought they were ahead of a curve by appeasing a culture that they themselves don't even care about.

There is a lot more of this to come from the years of clown-world. Buckle up, @$$holes....

[Cowabung-Gal]

There is a lot more of this to come from the years of clown-world. Buckle up, @$$holes....

Nope. I’m outta here.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/b5193ee31a15f24bfb963022c15bf595/tumblr_inline_p98lm2QchK1tvvsht_500.gif

[Sumac]

I can't believe how checked-out of the MCU I am. I don't even finish these movies anymore and I certainly don't see them in theaters. If you had told me I'd feel this way, after Endgame, when I was all-in on the MCU, I'd have a hard time believing it. There was such a momentum a few years ago. Not even just narrative-momentum, but meta-momentum. We were seeing the MCU get bigger and greater in front of our eyes. Now it feels like we are regressing. You can see it in the story, the characters. You can plainly see it in the visual effects.

I just don't care anymore what happens in the MCU movies. It's not that I've lost all hope in the MCU, but my stance is a firm "wake me up when this gets back on track".

As you guys already said, this is bigger than the MCU though.
I wasn't tracking everything MCU and never watched their TV shows, but I was kind of following movies and was trying to watch them at home, if they were not broadcasted on TV.

I kinda was interested in the story, but after Endgame I felt like that's it for MCU for me: the story had reached it height and there is no way to get back to that point. Besides, for me, with the end of both Iron Man and Captain America, who were my favorite characters in the MCU, it felt like "whatever". In some way, it felt like my reaction to the Metal Gear Solid 4: I had no interest in later games in the series, since MGS4 put a fat dot on the story.

In case of MCU it seems they don't even try to match the hype of Gauntlet Saga: no teases, no direction, I don't know neither care who the **** this Kang is and he even visually he doesn't look all that interesting. Like he is just a human. What kind of Thanos-sized threat is that?

Maybe MCU will fix it, but I think they've seriously believed they are infallible and irreplaceable and they can make piece of **** with Marvel logo and it will make billions. It seems fall of Star Wars didn't teach them anything. And it is hard to backdown from this mentality.

[Papenbrook]

Nice to know that the Disney corporation is still largely toxic.

Hopefully, those workers will find better jobs.

[TurtleManiac]

Sad to see this happening to Disney, they’ve had some great memorable movies and cartoons over the years, but lately they seem to have gone off the deep end. Then the layoffs maybe they learned from Elon Musk laying off thousands of Twitter employees and still running the business the same.

[Andrew NDB]

Sad to see this happening to Disney, they’ve had some great memorable movies and cartoons over the years, but lately they seem to have gone off the deep end. Then the layoffs maybe they learned from Elon Musk laying off thousands of Twitter employees and still running the business the same.

And that's an important thing to note. Everyone crying about Twitter will surely self-combust with all of these layoffs, we were to believe. In like a Y2K fashion. And yet nothing. Nothing. It's fine. No article revisions or pullbacks.

[neatoman]

About the subscriber count, is it that the amount of subscribers they've lost is a disastrous number or is it a disaster because they never reached enough subscribers in the first place? I know it could technically be both, you don't want to lose customers if you don't have enough to begin with, but there is a big difference between getting 1000 customers to then lose 600 and only getting 100 to lose 20, you know? Both are bad scenarios, I'd just like to know which type of scenario we are looking at here.

[ChosenOne]

And that's an important thing to note. Everyone crying about Twitter will surely self-combust with all of these layoffs, we were to believe. In like a Y2K fashion. And yet nothing. Nothing. It's fine. No article revisions or pullbacks.

You mean things will still work exactly the same, if not better, in the absence of whiny, irresponsible wokextremists? Shocker.

[IMJ]

About the subscriber count, is it that the amount of subscribers they've lost is a disastrous number or is it a disaster because they never reached enough subscribers in the first place? I know it could technically be both, you don't want to lose customers if you don't have enough to begin with, but there is a big difference between getting 1000 customers to then lose 600 and only getting 100 to lose 20, you know? Both are bad scenarios, I'd just like to know which type of scenario we are looking at here.

The subscriber loss is a multi-fold metric, although shielders and people who need a win will deny it.

It basically is representative of ongoing income stream for Disney, but can also translate into a metric of wider rejection that has translated into Park sales and so on. Disney "fans" are historically all-in on Disney almost as a lifestyle so many of those metrics intersect.

They compartmentalize their park structure in earnings and several of their attractions have had a hard time maintaining a routine fill level.

Investors saw Disney as "on the rise" for many years, but a lot of that investor traffic was brought on by the hype that Disney was buying and expanding I.P.'s. But in realized application it hasn't gone as well as they thought it would.

Another aspect of this is that Disney is so large that when it has to make corrections those corrections are going to be proportionately as large. So there's that too.

[Mayhem]

Still doesn’t answer the question, and we probably won’t know, what percent of the number of subs is 2.4M a loss against. 5%? 10%? More?

And I’m a Disney fan, in terms of the animation output, have been since a kid but I have never been all in on the experience. Only ever been to a park once, and that was the one in Paris 25 years ago.

[Galactus]

Disney+ loses 2.4 million subscribers...mostly in Asia. Now that could be because a lot of their programs are considered 'woke' or it could be them losing the streaming rights to one of Asia's biggest sports. I know what my money would be on.

[ChosenOne]

My money's on both, Asians (rightly) despise wokeness.

[IMJ]

Again, when your model to go global isn't authentic but rather an ignorant attempt at "inclusion" then the implosion is at the global scale. The swing is bigger.

Disney isn't "going out of business", there is nothing that "ashame" about this other than the lost livelihoods. The company itself is operating in a system wherein this kind of thing is the fix. I just wish that more 7 figure salaried higher-ups would pay for their top-down edicts as opposed to some blue-hair working a concession stand at a park. The blue-hair has the louder-mouth of course, but the blue-hair only pushed for "hate" policy - it's the higher-ups who employed it.

[Andrew NDB]

How ironic would it be if placating Chinese audiences finally leads to Disney a good outcome?

[IMJ]

How ironic would it be if placating Chinese audiences finally leads to Disney a good outcome?

They did that with Iron Man 3, and a few others IIRC as well.

[Andrew NDB]

They did that with Iron Man 3

That's to a bad outcome.

[IMJ]

That's to a bad outcome.

I guess what I'm saying is that they've done it so much in the past and it doesn't work. I can't see it changing.....

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

Things will not become better once well-known Disney characters enter public domain.

[Galactus]

My money's on both, Asians (rightly) despise wokeness.

So since Western markets aren't seeing huge drops they love woke?

How ironic would it be if placating Chinese audiences finally leads to Disney a good outcome?

That'd be quite an ethical conundrum. A few years back Hollywood studios pandering to China was seen as weak and stupid. As soon as China and a few middle eastern countries start banning these for including some slight gay of vaguely feminist stuff it's suddenly "we must be sensitive to the cultural attitudes of these countries". Besides some of these Asian countries were Marvel movies are banned recently lifted their ban so I don't think there's any problems there.

[IMJ]

Besides some of these Asian countries were Marvel movies are banned recently lifted their ban so I don't think there's any problems there.

What countries did this and for which flicks? Just curious....

[ChosenOne]

So since Western markets aren't seeing huge drops they love woke?

How many shoehorns do you own, man?

[Galactus]

What countries did this and for which flicks? Just curious....

The big one is China itself which has banned all Marvel Studios movies for about three years now. They recently lifted the ban.


How many shoehorns do you own, man?

Just following your argument to it's natural conclusion. If people in Asia are unsubscribing from Disney+ because of supposed woke content then sure that means if people in the rest of the world aren't unsubscribing that that means they must like or at very least be okay with this same woke content.

Things will not become better once well-known Disney characters enter public domain.

What's that going to do? How many major Disney projects have the core Disney characters like Mickey, Donald and Goofy etc?

[Andrew NDB]

The big one is China itself which has banned all Marvel Studios movies for about three years now. They recently lifted the ban.

It was an all-out blanket ban, or was a it a case-by-case situation where most recent Marvel Studios movies were being rejected because of content? Because I thought it was the latter.

[IMJ]

How many shoehorns do you own, man?

Sometimes someone comes up with an articulate encapsulating-statement that nails someone else's bull$#!9 completely. I'm swiping this one for my own lexicon. It's brilliant, in general.


The big one is China itself which has banned all Marvel Studios movies for about three years now. They recently lifted the ban.

Oh okay, see based on your last post I thought you had some new information about this. But this isn't indicative of any kind of cultural change or deeper meaning about how China operates. They lift bans there as a matter of theater, only to reinstate them later in repetition. It's the same strategy in how the manipulate fiscal policy. It's the same strategy in how they spy.

It's a diversion tactic that implies "measured response". It's disingenous. It's SOP for China.

So I'm not sure how:

Asian countries were Marvel movies are banned recently lifted their ban so I don't think there's any problems there.

Is valid when they'll just do it again over a black guy on a movie poster or something like that.

[Andrew NDB]

More cuts:

https://www.darkhorizons.com/disney-filing-indicates-more-cuts-soon/

[LeotheLateBloomer]

Wondering if buying the rest of Hulu is going to help them financially. I'm not so sure...

[TurtleManiac]

Disneyland has drag queen greeting children as they walk into the Disney Princess dress store

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1663451923603677184

Talk about creepy

[Andrew NDB]

ltv6DPF4UMA

[Barkworm]

Yeah, that video was pretty funny until the commercial for their bigot books started.

[Andrew NDB]

Yeah, that video was pretty funny until the commercial for their bigot books started.

What's so bigoted about them? It just looks like they don't have any gay content in them.

[Barkworm]

I'm pretty sure that it counts as bigoted if you advertise your books as "gay free".

[Cowabung-Gal]

Yeah, that video was pretty funny until the commercial for their bigot books started.

What's so bigoted about them? It just looks like they don't have any gay content in them.

Right? I mean, you prefer books like this for kids?

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/06/07/11/71860891-12168561-image-a-6_1686135348583.jpg

Don’t care if it’s straight or gay, kink does not belong in a kids book.

[Sumac]

I'm pretty sure that it counts as bigoted if you advertise your books as "gay free".
I think its not bigoted - contexts had changed.
LGB was infected with trans decease and other perverts, so nothing bad about getting rid of this, until LGB won't clean their act.