THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 60 OCTOBER 16, 2019
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During the
first weekend
of October, Bob
Iger took a break
from his book
tour and fired up an episode
of a television series about
two years in the making. The
Mandalorian won’t be released
until November, but Iger had
just received the finished first
episode of the Jon Favreau space
Western, which follows Pedro
Pascal’s bounty hunter on a new
adventure through the Star Wars
universe. No surprise, he loved
it. “[There’s] nothing like it on
the air,” Iger tells THR a few days
later. “If you’re going to do a live-
action Star Wars series, this is the
way to do it.”
With Mandalorian, Iger is
setting course for a destina-
tion even more distant than a
galaxy far, far away. The series’
Nov. 12 premiere marks liftoff for
Disney+, his multibillion-dollar
attempt to break free from the
cable TV shackles that have kept
his business earthbound and
directly challenge streaming
leader Netflix and its 152 million
global subscribers.
Over the past two years, Iger
has been singularly focused on
reorienting The Walt Disney
Company, founded in 1923 at
the dawn of the motion picture
industry, for its streaming
future. He's invested $2.6 billion
to acquire the necessary tech-
nology, shuffled his executive
ranks to create a new direct-
to-consumer division, forgone
$150 million in annual income
by ending the studio’s output
deal with Netflix and even spent
$71.3 billion for the 21st Century
Fox assets to beef up Disney’s
production capabilities and
content library. Though it’s a
risky bet for a company that most
recently generated $6.7 billion in
quarterly revenue from its legacy
television business, Iger argues
that it would have been a bigger
risk to sit back and do nothing
as customers ditch cable for
streaming options. “This is nec-
essary,” he says. “The risk would
have been essentially maintain-
ing a status quo approach to how
we were managing our content.”
With its plan to distribute
directly to consumers, Disney
is a key instigator of what has
exploded into an all-out war for
streaming dominance. Disney+
is one of the first in a string of
new services, including Apple
TV+, HBO Max (from AT&T) and
Peacock (Comcast), expected to
roll out over the next six months.
But Disney+ will be hard to top:
For $7 per month, customers
will have access to nearly 500
Disney titles (from classics like
Sleeping Beauty to modern hits
like Moana); more than 7,500
episodes of television, including
all 30 seasons of The Simpsons; a
suite of such original films as a
Lady and the Tramp reboot star-
ring Tessa Thompson and Justin
Theroux; and new TV seriesmay have helped juice signups,
too.) “The early response has
been great,” notes Iger. Still,
despite the high volume of inter-
est from parents whose children
watch Frozen on repeat and
lifelong Star Wars fans who will
pay for the full Skywalker saga,
there’s lingering doubt about
how Disney+ will entice more
casual fans to sign up. Ponders
Cole, “They’re always going to
have the kids, but can they keep
the late teens and the adults?”
Disney executives are, not
surprisingly, downplaying the
challenges. The company is pro-
jecting between 60 million and
90 million global subscribers
by 2024, more than the 28 mil-
lion U.S. members that Hulucurrently has and in line with
the 83 million that Netflix had
within five years of separating its
streaming subscription service
from its DVD plans. “We like the
hand we have,” says Kevin Mayer,
who leads Disney+ as chairman
of the company’s direct-to-
consumer and international
division. “We’ve collected some
of the most preeminent brands
in the entertainment sphere and
we’re using them aggressively.
We have the timing. We have the
right price point.”
Iger remembers the exact
moment when he realized Disney
needed to throw out the legacy
media playbook and chart a
streaming future. It was Aug. 4,
2015, and he was on a conferencelike High School Musical: The
Musical: The Series. “Disney is
betting the whole company on
streaming,” says Jeffrey Cole,
director of the USC Annenberg
Center for the Digital Future.
“You can feel [them putting]
pedal to the metal.”
Disney+ will launch as a
completely realized product.
The promise of 35 originals in
the first year alongside a mix
of kids’ programming, old Star
Wars films and, eventually, the
full Marvel library was enough
to cause lines to form inside the
Anaheim Convention Center at
fan event D23 in late August as
people signed up for the service.
(A limited 33 percent discount
on a three-year subscription12 3