Disney is one of the biggest movie companies ever, famous for so many classic animations, but in the last few years, they’ve been taking a different direction. They picked up some huge franchises in Star Wars and the Marvel universe and they’ve started expanding rapidly.
They have a deal with Netflix which gave them the rights to all of their movies and TV shows but in a recent announcement, they revealed that that could change soon. Loads of film companies and TV networks are starting to take their stuff off streaming sites and creating their own dedicated streaming service instead. There is a lot of debate about whether this model is going to take off because if everybody did it, that would mean people having to buy lots of different subscriptions rather just one which is more of a hassle and far more expensive, especially when there are so many great cheap alternatives.
Whether it’s a good idea or not, Disney is doing just that. You won’t be losing all of that content immediately but Disney has said that the licenses will end in 2019. A spokesperson from Disney said that the company believes that direct relationships between the production companies and the customer is the future of TV and movie entertainment, only time will tell whether they’re right or not.
At the moment they’ve said that this applies to all of their live action Disney and Pixar movies but it’s unclear about whether the rest of their franchises will be affected. There is a chance that Star Wars and Marvel movies and TV shows will remain on Netflix but there have been some indicators that the future looks bleak for them as well.
At the moment, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is on there but Star Wars: Rebels hasn’t appeared yet, which might suggest that they don’t plan to keep the series on Netflix. Read more from Netflixupdate.com here. There have been rumors that Netflix is picking up 3 new Star Wars shows and there are even whispers of them developing a brand new show of their own, but none of that has been confirmed by either Disney or Netflix so it’s probably just hearsay.
The situation for Marvel fans looks more promising as Disney and Netflix recently signed another deal for more shows that follow on from the recent set of Defenders TV shows. However, once the Disney streaming service is up and running, it’s likely that they’ll move those shows over as well.
Netflix isn’t phased by the move by Disney and are already looking into alternatives. They’ve recently purchased comic book publisher Millarworld that is responsible for recent hits like Kingsman and Kick-Ass. Find out more at Reuters.com.
If Disney’s new streaming service is a success, it might spell the end for services like Netflix as more companies follow suit and they struggle to get any good content in. Having said that, some of the most popular content on there is the programming that is produced by Netflix themselves so they may end up following the same model. The only downside is that people are going to have to buy loads of different services and if there isn’t a seamless way to use them all together, it might not take off.
