Is Disney’s Eye-Popping $33 Billion Production Plan Actually Enough?

On the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Disney dropped off its annual report at the Securities Exchange Commission, just in time to head out for turkey and cranberry sauce with the fam while watching the latest Marvel superhero series on Disney Plus.

Tucked into that Thanksgiving-eve report was one particularly tasty little morsel: Disney plans to make more shows like Hawkeye, the new series about yet another second-tier Avenger. In fact, the studio plans to make a lot more shows, for all its streaming services.

Planned spending on content next year at Hollywood’s biggest studio will jump nearly a third, from $25 billion to a mildly astonishing $33 billion, the annual report says, mostly to beef up streaming.

“The increase is driven by higher spend to support our DTC expansion and generally assumes no significant disruptions to production due to COVID-19,” according to the annual report.

That’s a big number, but it’s worth asking if $8 billion is big enough. Can Disney truly compete for broad audience attention against deep-pocketed, legacy-free competitors such as Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, never mind the combined WarnerMedia-Discovery due early next year (more on that later)?

For comparison, Netflix spends around $17 billion a year, 80 percent of it on originals. Amazon spends around $8 billion. And Apple, now valued at $2.7 trillion, said it plans to roll out a new show every week in 2022. That’s a lot of competition for attention.

Disney’s Latest Big, But Lonely Hit

Certainly, when Disney Plus does make a new series based on its big franchises, it tends to do very well. You’d probably expect that from a service with around 115 million global subscribers creating a show featuring two Oscar nominees in a spinoff of one of its premier franchises (and launching the show at the start of a four-day U.S. holiday).

Third-party analytics companies suggest Hawkeye was one of last week’s biggest debut series both worldwide and in the United States, tussling with Amazon’s mega-budgeted fantasy franchise The Wheel of Time for top dog.

Hawkeye was briefly tops in the global demand share metric compiled by Parrot Analytics before giving back No. 1 to Wheel when the latter’s fourth episode debuted. Both had more than 70 times the demand share of the average show, Parrot said.

Hawkeye had mid-week to itself, and grabbed No. 1 before episode 4 of The Wheel of Time debuted Friday and retook the lead (Source: Parrot Analytics)

And Whip Media’s weekly list of U.S. series put Hawkeye ahead of Wheel for No. 1 during the Thanksgiving week. For Disney’s purposes, it had two wins on the week: Hulu’s “occasionally true” historical dramedy The Great grabbed third.

Hawkeye scored a bulls-eye in the United States, but Netflix covered the target with hits. (Graphic courtesy of Whip Media)

Worth noting, however, was the rest of that Top 10 list, which included a whopping five Netflix shows: the live-action remake of Cowboy Bebop, Tiger King’s second season, a new season of reality show Selling Sunset, You, and Arcane, the animated spinoff from Riot Games’ League of Legends game franchise.

On the feature-length list, Disney (and HBO Max) did better, grabbing three of the top 10: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Jungle Cruise, two late-summer theatrical releases that hit free access on Disney Plus in mid-November, and last summer’s movie about another lesser Avengers character, Black Widow. But here too, Netflix had four of the top 10, led by smash hit Red Notice.

Both sets of data show a bigger problem for Disney. Its current tempo of distinctive content production for Disney Plus can certainly find plenty of fans for whatever Marvel or Star Wars show arrives. But those shows simply seem overwhelmed by Netflix’s inexorable flood of shows that are popular enough, and give subscribers plenty of options to watch.

The issue of content adequacy is even worse on Hulu, regardless of The Great’s well-deserved success. Most pressing are repeated rumors suggesting Hulu may soon lose exclusive access to NBCUniversal content as Comcast claws those shows back for its own underfed service, Peacock.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the issues with ESPN Plus, which despite the billions Disney has invested in sports rights for most major sports leagues from the NFL to Indian Premiere League cricket, still feels bereft of games or other original content you’d like to pay for regularly.

So, will $8 billion, spread across four services (including Star/Hotstar internationally) be enough to fuel success for Disney’s bundle of services, while also financing its sports-rights obligations, and the needs of legacy broadcast and pay-TV outlets such as ABC, FX, Disney Channel and ESPN?

Adding both ESPN Plus and Disney Plus to the Hulu Plus Live TV skinny bundle (and bumping prices up $5, to $70 a month), as the company also did last week, will help a tiny bit with subscriber adds. It might even reduce churn a bit, and marketing costs. But the Mouse House really needs to get its content machine cranked up to another level fast.

A Better Use For WBD “Synergies”

Meanwhile, Disney wasn’t the only old-line Hollywood giant dropping bon mots in the SEC in-box just ahead of the holiday weekend.

A few days before the Disney annual report arrived, AT&T and Discovery filed more details on their planned entertainment merger, to be called Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD is the ticker symbol). Of note, the shared company anticipates some $3 billion in “synergies,” Wall Street-speak for layoffs and job cuts.

Long-time media kingpin John Malone, who’ll be one of Liberty’s six members of the 13-person board of directors, earlier had said those synergies would be between $3 billion and $4 billion.

A big savings number like that is sure to gladden the pocketbook of an old-school corporate roll-up champion like Malone, who perfected the approach while crafting (and then selling) long-ago cable giant TCI (many of whose assets are again part of another Malone-controlled company, Charter Spectrum). But it may not be the best strategy for success once WBD heads out into the world, shorn from the protective bosom of vast AT&T.

Recent books and other reports suggest that AT&T’s crippling debt load held back WarnerMedia programming plans for HBO Max in its first 18 months, to the frustration of CEO Jason Kilar, who wanted considerably more new shows to keep up with Netflix.

CEO-to-be David Zaslav said the combined company will spend $20 billion a year, though that includes legacy operations such as the former Turner networks, CNN and its planned streaming spinoff, sports rights, and more.

So here’s a thought: instead of banking those $3 billion in savings made from dis-employing people, as Hollywood mergers have long done, how about plowing the money back into the product, to give the new company a better chance to succeed?

Radical idea, I know, but the latest merger will cause another 18 months of dislocation and distraction for Warner’s long-suffering workforce, while Netflix, Amazon and Apple keep cranking out shows and building their subscriber bases, and Disney will do what it does.

This is a new era for media and requires new business models. It’s not just another cable operation with a limited shelf of programming needs. WBD’s old-dog leadership needs to figure out how to build a company to succeed in the media future, not their own storied pasts.