Streaming being the primary focus for record labels is nothing new in our industry, but in Hollywood it’s still a major talking point.
Witness Disney’s announcement yesterday that the company is having a strategic reorganisation of its media and entertainment businesses “designed to further accelerate the company’s direct-to-consumer strategy, in light of the rapid success of Disney+”.
This isn’t Disney abandoning cinemas entirely, of course, but the announcement did make it clear that it’s now the company’s own streaming services (note the plural: Hulu and ESPN+ are included here) that come first, and the “legacy distribution business” second.
The news came shortly after Disney announced that the next Pixar film, ‘Soul’, will debut on Disney+ in December, amid the continued Covid-19 disruption of cinemas.
“I would not characterise it as a response to Covid,” CEO Bob Chapek told CNBC. “I would say Covid accelerated the rate at which we made this transition, but this transition was going to happen anyway.”
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