Disney Has No Plans to License Marvel, Star Wars Content to Netflix

While DC fans have seen some films make their way to Netflix, don’t expect the same for major Disney properties anytime soon. According to Disney CEO Bob Iger during the Walt Disney Company’s fourth quarter earnings call, while Disney is already licensing some content to Netflix and plans to continue to do so, they don’t plan to license their “core brands” such as Star Wars, Marvel, and Star Wars as they are already important to Disney’s own streaming business.

“We’ve actually been licensing content to Netflix and are going to continue to. We’re actually in discussion with them now about some opportunities, but I wouldn’t expect that we will license our core brands to them. Those are obviously competitive advantages for us and differentiators. Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars for instance, they are all doing very, very well on our platform and I don’t see why just to basically chase bucks we should do that when they are really really important building blocks to the current and future of our streaming business,” Iger said.

Warner Bros. Discovery has been licensing titles from DC as well as other services like HBO to Netflix with movies such as Man of Steel, The Suicide Squad, Batman v. Superman, Wonder Woman, and Justice League all arriving on Netflix in December.

A Combined Disney+ and Hulu App is Coming in March

Also on Wednesday, Iger announced that the combined Disney+ and Hulu app, which had previously been announced in an earnings call earlier this year, will be released in beta form in December and will be available to the general public in March 2024.

“Speaking of Hulu, we were pleased to announce last week that we will acquire the remaining stake in Hulu held by Comcast, which will further Disney streaming objective,” Iger explained during Disney’s quarterly earnings call on Wednesday. “We remain on track to roll out more unified one app experience domestically, making expensive general entertainment content available to bundle subscribers via Disney+….We expect that Hulu and Disney plus will result in increased engagement, greater advertising opportunities, lower churn and reduced customer acquisition costs, thereby increasing our overall margins. We will launch a beta version for bundle subscribers in December, giving parents time to set up profiles and parental controls that work best for their families ahead of the official launch in early spring 2024.”

“In December, we launch a beta version of Hulu and Disney plus combined. We feel really good about that. I saw some basically some demos of that just yesterday. As a matter of fact, we are basically putting it in beta so that we can prepare parents largely to basically implement parental controls, because you’ll be able to access Hulu programming on the same app. And then in late March, we’ll launch it basically in full form and think we have opportunities in terms of upsell capabilities. In terms of increasing engagement. We found that where we bundled, we lower churn, and again, these are steps that are all taken to ultimately turn this into a great business.”