Disney Should Finally Put Its Streaming Originals on DVD

With streaming losses driving a huge culture change at the Walt Disney Company, now is the time for the studio to finally release some of its streaming originals on physical media. With no official release for, among other things, their Star Wars and Marvel TV shows, Disney has ensured that they will hang onto some of their subscribers — but they have done so at the cost of cold hard cash, which could be really helpful at a time when hundreds of millions in streaming losses are driving a content slowdown and layoffs at the company.

It’s easy to think, given the prevalence of streaming platforms and the death of brick-and-mortar video stores, that the money you could get from DVDs and Blu-rays would be fairly limited, but the numbers suggest otherwise. It isn’t quite as rosy as the days when you could sell a million discs in your first week of release, but a number of recent Disney movies have earned a fair amount on disc.

According to The Numbers, one of the few sites that still tracks physical media sales (although they seem to have stopped late last year), Ant-Man and the Wasp made over $50 million in its first three months on DVD and Blu-ray. Black Widow earned around $25 million during that same timeframe, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker earned $68 million. Those are obviously all high profile projects, and some have done better than others. Black Widow being a day-and-date streaming title may have hurt its appeal on disc, but it still outperformed Marvel’s Eternals, which earned about $6 million in its first few months.

For comparison, other streaming exclusives have fared pretty well on disc in recent years. Zack Snyder’s Justice League earned around $16 million in its first three months, despite being available to stream for free on HBO Max for its entire existence. Netflix’s crown jewel Stranger Things only released its first two seasons on disc, but earned $20 million from that.

These might sound like small numbers for things that were huge hits and, in some cases, billion-dollar movies — but Warner Bros. reportedly killed Batgirl in order to get about $30 million as a tax writedown. Suddenly $107 million in disc sales for Avengers: Endgame seems like the kind of thing that really can change the minds of a studio executive.

Discs will never have the kind of massive market penetration they did in the heyday of video stores, when a studio could break even just by selling a few thousand copies to Blockbuster. Still, there remains a market for movies that release exclusively on DVD and video on demand, including a thriving market for Warner Bros. to relase animated adaptations of DC comics characters. 

Increasingly, physical media is speaking to the collectors in the marketplace — people who buy it for the quality, the bonus features, or just to have on the shelf next to all their other matching discs. And that marketplace is one that Disney captures effectively in almost every other way. “Disneyana” is a whole class of collectibles unto itself, and both Marvel and Star Wars have people who are determined enough to own these things that they will buy imports from countries where Disney has less reluctance to release The Mandalorian on DVD.

And, of course, there is a whole other discourse that has been developing around physical media. While for the last few years, it has been basically collectors, or people who are not comfortable with streaming technology, who make up much of the customer base for DVD and Blu-ray, another pocket of the marketplace has recently been opened up: those who are buying discs in order to get around their streaming service of choice losing a show. Whether it’s animated series being removed entirely from the internet, causing the cost of existing DVDs to spike (like Infinity Train) or Disney and Warner toying with the idea of licensing content away to make a profit, it seems like it’s no longer guaranteed that keeping any given subscription active will keep your favorite movie or show on tap. That fear is driving some fans to buy back into physical media, trying to stay ahead of the next disappointing surprise.