Bob Iger Announces New Disney Plus Price Hike, Password Crackdown Coming in 2024
During Disney’s Q3 earnings call, Bob Iger announced a few new changes coming to Disney Plus, as well as new details on their plan to cut down on spending moving forward. Interestingly enough, this happened just a few hours after The Hollywood Reporter became the latest trade to join the speculation of Iger packaging the Mouse House to be sold to Apple, and amid many rumors of Disney being stripped for parts, with possibly selling ABC and Freeform, among other divisions.
Let’s break it down. For starters, Disney Plus will move its monthly, ad-free plan to $13.99/month ($139.99/year) starting October 12, in the US. The ad tier will remain the same, at $7.99/month (no annual plan). However, Canada and several countries in Europe will have the ad-supported tier option starting November 1, with prices set for $7.99/month in Canada and £4.99/€5.99 month across the Atlantic.
Another addition, this time to the US market, will be the ad-free Disney Plus and Hulu bundle, starting on September 6, for $19.99/month (no annual plan available). Interestingly enough, though, according to Disney Plus’ press release, ad-free Hulu will now cost $17.99/month starting October 12, and the ad-supported Disney Plus add-on will be $2, implying that it will be the same to have ad-free Hulu bundled with either ad-free or ad-supported Disney Plus. We’re a bit unsure about this part.
A recent revolution in the streaming market has been Netflix’s seemingly-successful implementation of the password crackdown, which led to that company to a six-million subscriber uptick in their last quarter report. That sent waves across Hollywood, and after Reuters reported earlier this summer that Disney Plus Hotstar (in India) would begin implementing that next, Bob Iger announced on the earnings call that they will be exploring it in other markets as well; via TheWrap, he said:
“We are actively exploring ways to address account sharing and the best options for paying subscribers to share their accounts with friends and family. Later this year, we will begin to update our subscriber agreements with additional terms and our sharing policies. And we will roll out tactics to drive monetization sometime in 2024.
We already have the technical capability to monitor much of this, and I’m not gonna give you a specific number except to say it’s significant. We certainly have established this as a real priority, and we actually think that there’s an opportunity here to help us grow our business.”
Iger also re-emphasized Disney’s intention of focusing on their core franchises moving forward, even if he acknowledged that they have had some misfires this summer — while didn’t mention it, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny comes to mind, with its $369M worldwide total on its $300+M budget (think that Harrison Ford’s last hurrah as Indy is outgrossed by an underpromoted Han Solo standalone movie without Harrison Ford). Iger repeated that they will be focused on theatrical films, parks, and streaming (even if they are now starting to explore the world of gambling).
Their strategy of cost-cutting will be successfully implemented this year due to the ongoing dual strike, which has caused Disney to spend $3 billion less on content than they had planned:
“We currently expect fiscal 2023 content spend to come in at approximately $27 billion which is lower than we previously guided due to lower spend on produced content, in part due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes.”
Whether this money-saving plan will affect Star Wars down the line, we don’t know yet. For now, it seems like Disney is more focused on reining in Marvel’s pipeline, and the company wants to put the galaxy far, far away back on the big screen, which comes at a great cost but also the potential of a great reward. The next Star Wars film is set for a May 22, 2026, date. In the meantime, we have Ahsoka coming out on August 23.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
