Disney Makes Changes to Pixar Release Dates

Disney is making moves this week as they pushed their new streaming service, Disney+, out into open water for the world’s consumption. Now, the company is trying to reshuffle the deck around a ton of their future releases. This staggering number of titles includes offerings from animation powerhouse Pixar. While not as many as some of the live-action Disney offerings, there are still two titles that have seen their debut dates adjusted in the wake of this announcement. An untitled Pixar Animation production that was previously slated for March 18th of 2022 was moved up to the 11th of that month. Along with that title, another unannounced project from the studio is now scheduled for a release on June 16th of 2023. These are all part of a larger movement as the company is trying to get their ducks in a row following all the fervor around their acquisition of 20th Century Fox.

Amid concerns about streaming piracy and password sharing with the new streaming platform, Disney CEO Bob Iger seemed unfazed. “I think it’ll be similar to what others are doing. It’s obviously something we’ll be mindful of,” Iger said to CNBC . “We’re setting up a service that is very family friendly, we expect families to be able to consume it — four live streams at a time, for instance. We’ll watch it carefully with the various tools, technology tools, that we have available to us to monitor it. But it’s obviously something we have to watch.”

Disney’s fourth-quarter earnings call was a little more robust than your typical corporate briefing. Iger told the attendees that Disney+ was proving to be a four-quadrant product with broad interest. The CEO added that the four-stream feature was “very popular” with users during the Netherlands test run for the service. That can only bode well as people are looking for the best deal with so many options on the table.

“We also saw that people’s interest in the product itself was very, very broad meaning across all of the brands,” Iger said during the call, as he gestured towards the streaming service’s five main brands: Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and National Geographic.

“We learned that some of the features, including the 4K, the HDR movies were very, very popular,” Iger continued. “The fact that you can have four concurrent live streams was very popular, the personalization was also quite popular, and most importantly, the ability to download without restriction was very, very popular.”