Sony To Take Over Disney's Physical Media Production

Sony will take over production of Disney's DVD and Blu-ray media beginning later this year. According to Bill Hunt at The Digital Bits, Sony will do everything from the actual authoring of the discs to the physical distribution of media. Hunt's article says that since the home entertainment division was essentially functioning as part of the digital/streaming side of Disney, it involved numerous decisionmakers involved with each release, with the actual people involved with distribution of physical media often not included in those conversations. The Club had shut down in Canada earlier this year, and Disney had stopped releasing Blu-rays entirely in some parts of the world in 2023.

The Disney Movie Club, which was founded in 2001 to sell VHS and DVD movies direct to consumers, will soon close down permanently. The service, which offers attractive teasers like "five movies for a dollar" in order to convince fans to join a subscription service for access to exclusive discs, will end its run as part of Sony's just-announced takeover of Disney's physical media production. Fans will have three months -- until May 20, 2024 -- to make their final purchases before the club closes down.

While Disney and Sony have not yet made an official announcement to confirm the news, fans started to notice late last night that a pop-up notice would warn fans of the Disney Movie Club's impending closure if they signed into their accounts. The DMC website is currently down, presumably as a result of current users rushing to the site before potential stock issues start to pile up.

Hunt's report doesn't have details as to what movies specifically Sony will be distributing. Given Disney's long history of keeping some of its content in "the vault," it would not be surprising to see most of their catalog titles -- many of which are only available on Disney Movie Club even now -- phased out of the physical media space.

Disney has been an outlier in the physical media space in the last few years. While sales are down, the average price you can expect to spend on discs is up. That includes plenty of boutique Blu-ray labels, lots of special editions of fan-favorites, and deep cuts that simply would not be affordable if they had to be sold for $12 at Walmart. While some studios have been digging into their libraries to find movies they can restore for that higher price point, Disney has been sitting on years of movies not only from their old labels like Touchstone, but also from the recently-acquired 20th Century Fox.