Price rises keep the profits coming in, but Disney+ was losing subscribers at the end of 2024 – and the outlook is tricky.
The story’s been told many times over about the seismic gamble Disney took in launching its own streaming service. From pretty much shuttering its home entertainment division as it stood to spending over $70bn acquiring 21st Century Fox and its assets, Disney+ is going to need to be very profitable for a very long time to just cover all the interest payments.
Disney can handle it of course, but the latest numbers don’t make for particularly joyous reading. Subscriber numbers for the service were down by some 700,000 in the final three months of 2024. Netflix, by comparison, has added some 20 million subscribers worldwide. Its total crossed 300 million globally.
Disney+ now has a hardly shabby 124.6m subscribers, the small decline offset by price rises and a crackdown on password sharing. The immediate future isn’t much cheerier either, with Disney expecting over the coming year a further “modest decline” in subscriber numbers in the first three months of 2025. Streaming is profitable now for Disney at least, but – and here’s a reverse – it’s been cinema hits once again that have been the success story for the firm over the last few months. Never mind that films such as Moana 2 and Mufasa The Lion King earned pretty tepid revies, between the pair they’ve squeezed out $1.6bn at the global box office. This has made Disney executives very happy, and there’ll be a trickle down as they all head to streaming as well.
But there’s still the challenge of how to reverse the subscriber drops on the Disney+ platform. If you’re not particularly inclined towards the latest Star Wars or Marvel series, it’s been relatively slim pickings, particularly compared with the prolific output of Netflix (who is putting its prices up again this year). Furthermore, Disney+ isn’t demonstrating the quality control of Apple TV+ either.
There are outliers and good things to watch, of course. The pipeline is hardly empty. But once again, it’s the theme parks, cruises and movies that are keeping the Disney coffers swollen.
