Disney Rivals With Netflix Over New Streaming Service: Disney+

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Andy Mourelatos, A&E Editor

For the past several years, services that allow you to watch movies and TV shows on-demand have been taking over the way we consume these forms of media. These “streaming” services allow you to subscribe for a monthly rate to get access to its content. The subscription-streaming market has been dominated by juggernaut Netflix for the past several years. With almost 150 million subscribers, no other streaming service has been able to rival them. However, a new powerful contender is stepping into video-streaming, the Walt Disney Company.

Disney+ is Disney’s own streaming service that will offer a plethora of Disney original animations, films, TV series, short films, and other content from companies owned by Disney (Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, National Geographic, 20th Century Fox, etc.). Releasing on November 12th, it will cost $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year to subscribe, which is much cheaper than Netflix’s $8.99-$15.99 a month plan. The full lineup of content that would be available at launch was announced on October 14th via a massive twitter thread and a YouTube video that was over three hours long. The lineup includes Disney’s first movie released in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Drawfs, up to modern Disney films and TV shows.

Disney+’s layout

In recent months, Disney has announced a multitude of original films and series coming to the platform in the coming years. The day one original series include The Mandalorian, a series based on the Star Wars universe, The World According to Jeff Goldblum, and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. The only day-one original movie will be the live-action interpretation of Disney’s Lady & The Tramp. Monsters at Work, a Monster’s Inc. spinoff, a new Phineas and Ferb movie, and 12 new episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars are also planned to come to the platform within the next year. Marvel is supporting Disney+ with four new original series, these being The Falcon and The Winter Soldier in 2020, and Loki, WandaVision, Hawkeye, and Marvel’s What If…? in 2021.

In terms of missing content, Disney+ will only offer 7 Marvel movies apart from the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) on day one. Those movies are Iron Man, Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark WorldAvengers: Age of Ultron, Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, and Captain Marvel. The two newest movies in the Star Wars series, Solo and The Last Jedi are also missing from the lineup. Other Disney films missing are the controversial Song of the South, Tarzan, and Pixar’s Up.

By the end of its first year, Disney+ will have more than 25 original episodic series and 10 original movies; and the service will have over 7,500 series as well as over 500 movies available to stream in the first year alone.