Disney is starting to feel the financial pain as an economy seemingly on the precipice and its content getting woker and woker convince Americans to pass on parting with their hard-earned cash to watch Disney slop. Its movies have been massive, money-losing flops and now Disney+ is cutting its price to the bone for a short period in an obvious attempt to reel back in subscribers.
Now, those who subscribe to Disney+ through September 20th will, if they subscribe to the tier with commercials, have to pay just $1.99 a month for the next three months, after which the price reverts to $7.99 per month. Though only for a short period, that’s a pricing slash to the bone.
The reason why Disney would be willing to take such an obviously desperate and drastic pricing measure is clear: Disney+ shed millions of subscribers last quarter, including hundreds of thousands of domestic Disney+ subscribers.
As of early August, Disney+ subscribers around the world fell a whopping 11.7 million, crashing from 157.8 million to 146.1 million subscribers in just one quarter, doubling its already painful subscriber losses from the quarter before. Included in that subscriber collapse were 300,000 fleeing subscribers in the US and Canada, in which subscribers are down to 46 million.
That period also saw painful financial losses stemming from Disney+, with the streaming service losing $512 million for the quarter. Though down from over a billion dollars lost in a quarter alone at that time last year, the losses were still fiscally painful for the financially troubled company.
Beyond the financial problems from the streaming service and its massive subscriber losses, Disney+ has hurt the company, as even CEO Bob Iger admits, by overtaxing its content creators and forcing them to produce more, lower quality content instead of less frequent but better shows and movies.
Iger, commenting on the issue, said, “Marvel is a great example of our focus on streaming content. We ended up taxing our people way beyond their time and their focus, they had not been in the television business at any significant level. Not only did they increase their movie output but they ended up making a number of television series, and frankly, it diluted focus and attention, and that is more the cause [of the poor box office] than anything else.”
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