This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Disney Plus Inches Closer Towards Bringing Back Cable
Happy Sunday! I’d like to begin this issue of “This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away” by congratulating our friends from The Resistance Broadcast on reaching their 700th episode this past Monday. The show will be undergoing some changes from now on, which they broke down on their social media, given James’ departure. I want to wish James, a good friend who I met in person in the past two Celebrations, the very best in his future endeavors!
I wish I could say that in honor of their feat, given their past ties with SWNN, we decided to not have a new episode of SWNN Live! this week. However, that was because of some virus getting the best of some of the team. What we did get, however, was a new episode of The Bad Batch, which Josh reviewed here for the site — I mostly agree with his take, for the record.
It’s been a pretty slow week for news, but there were still a couple of interesting things to discuss. Without further ado, let’s get on with it!
Three Things That May Have Flown Casual
- The Acolyte minor updates: According to insider Jeff Sneider, David Harewood of The CW’s Supergirl fame will have a minor role in The Acolyte. The show, which debuts in little over a month, dropped a new image this week via Total Film Magazine. Amandla Stenberg also talked to the outlet about the show, though it wasn’t exactly a revolutionary statement, in which they discussed the prequel-to-the-prequels vibe that the show gives away.
- Comic news: A new Inquisitors comic series is coming later this year, Lucasfilm announced this week. We also have a preview of July’s output here. And if you haven’t read them yet, our great publishing team at SWNN is keeping up with all things comics, reviewing this week Darth Vader #45 (Rosalie), Mace Windu #3 (Jay), and The High Republic Adventures: Saber for Hire #1 (Nate).
- Latest from Hasbro: The toy company is tired of reusing the same clone mold for different repaintings and has moved on to Mandalorian figures. New The Mandalorian season 3 toys were announced this week.
Quote of the Week
“I looked for cuts in the film to make the ad break, moments where actors reached for something or looked over at something. I never touched or intervened with the film itself.”
A few weeks ago, on another edition of this series, I shared a video that was then starting to go viral on social media: a beer promo that had been edited into A New Hope by a Chilean company when the original films aired on national TV 20 years ago. 24 hours later, the promos (more were found along the way) were featured on every news bulletin and led to thousands of fan-made cuts — including multiple from our own Nate Manning, who has made posting these on our Twitter his new life obsession. And we’re all here for it.
Ignacio González, a director at Efex! (the company behind the ads) at the time, recently opened up about the once-forgotten ads in an interview with The Guardian.
Runner-up
“I don’t know whether I’ve ever done anything as important as these 24 hours of storytelling we’re doing now.”
That was Tony Gilroy, after being given a lifetime achievement award at last week’s WGA Awards, talking about Andor. Season 2 will debut early 2025 on Disney Plus — and it cannot get here fast enough!
What’s Old Is New Again: Disney Plus Inches Closer Towards Bringing Back Cable
It’s a slow news week, so we’ll take a small detour to discuss an issue tangent to the Star Wars franchise. Earlier this week, The Information reported that Disney is planning to introduce a new feature similar to TV channels, where re-runs of Star Wars or Marvel shows would be available on a 24/7 loop. Let us add some historical context to this and try to understand why this is an important move.
In 2022, Wall Street, and as a consequence, Hollywood studios, freaked out over Netflix’s disastrous Q1 earnings, where the streamer reported its first-ever subscriber loss. That prompted the company to introduce a lower-priced ad tier and also start cracking down on password sharing. Disney followed suit shortly thereafter.
In late 2022, they raised the price of the standard Disney Plus package, and kept the $8.99/month plan as an ad-supported alternative. In 2024, Disney is making more money per user from people in the ad tier than they are from people in the ad-free option. They have also announced plans to start hunting down password-shared accounts. Disney sees a future where each household owns a Disney Plus user login and they have to watch ads in the middle of their Moana daily session.
That’s already reminiscent of the old cable bundle, where you’d pay a fee each month to get a huge load of channels that were profitable (generally speaking) because of carriage fees along with the ads they showed. Bundling is seen as the final frontier of streaming. Most analysts foresee a future in which multiple companies will team up to offer a combined subscription to their respective streaming services, for a lower price. Peacock and Paramount Plus, should they survive the next couple of years, are two prime candidates for that. Max is also a good bet.
Disney has already started to implement this idea internally. They’ve been offering a bundling package of Disney Plus + Hulu + ESPN Plus over the past few years that’s been improving slowly. Now, after Bob Iger decided to buy out Comcast’s participation in Hulu, they have folded that division into Disney Plus as another tile on the main page — similar to how the STAR banner functions outside of the US. Of course, this is lightyears away from inter-company bundlings, but it at least signals that Disney is not as in love with their family-friendly brand on streaming as they once said they were, now allowing –parental controls withstanding– Pam & Tommy to live right next to Bluey on the main page.
Leaving bundling aside and understanding that it is something that will happen eventually, there was another term in that definition of the cable package that was left untouched: the idea of channels. For the consumer, this would be the solution to one of the great problems of the streaming era: opening up the app but simply not being able to figure out what to put on. It’s the curse of being given the choice (and a scary problem to think about in a much larger scope). Maybe we prefer to have a place to go to where we know there will likely be something that we’re interested in. Channel surfing used to be fun, after all!
But how does this benefit Disney? It’s an additional option for the consumer, which perhaps keeps them coming back to the service at least to see what’s on. After all, how many of our readers open up Disney Plus hoping to find something interesting? At least, I know that I don’t log in unless I have something in mind, because unlike Netflix or Max, I usually know what’s in there waiting.
I think this goes beyond that, though. Having channels that people can just put on and not have to figure out what to watch, or decide whether they want to see the next episode by the time the credits roll is also a way to keep the engagement levels up — which is crucial when Disney TV chief Dana Walden goes out looking for ad buyers. The more people spend time on Disney Plus, whether it’s because they like the shows that are being made, or because they can just have it on like they used to have the TV, the better the 2024 metrics for streaming look.
And those metrics are consistently more similar to the ones we had back in the cable era. Netflix announced this week they will stop reporting on subscriber numbers starting in 2025, as they are more focused now on profitability (a field in which they tower over everyone else, even more so than in subscriber numbers) and engagement, which they can then sell to advertisers to increase the revenue per user on the ad tier. Those two metrics are pretty much remnants from the cable era and another sign that in TV, what’s old is new again.
Before I wrap up, allow me to quickly plug a great read by our own Jay Goodearl about his concerns with how Ubisoft is handling the release of Star Wars: Outlaws. Everything, from the game pass plans to worries about game preservation is in there, and it’s especially interesting for people who are more casual gaming fans (like myself). Check it out here!
And speaking of past SWNN members, do you like Marvel and are you excited for Fantastic Four? Fran J. Ruiz, a past contributor and editor of this site, has a recollection of the latest updates on the new film by Marvel this summer on Space.com. And you know I’m interested in it — if only for my interest in Pedro Pascal’s schedule alone.
What did you think of the latest edition of “This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away”? Let me know your thoughts and suggestions down below in the comment section. You can also send them, or reach out with any information tips, directly via our Contact page.
Have a great week!
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.
