More General Entertainment Content Coming To Disney+ (US)

Today, Disney added several new general entertainment titles, including the hit ABC comedy series, “Black-ish”, “Grown-ish”, and “The Wonder Years”, plus a Star Original series from Korea, “Snowdrop”.

Disney CEO Bob Chapek mentioned these titles in his opening statement during the latest quarterly financial investors call:

Going forward, integrating more owned general entertainment into our services, especially Disney+, will be a priority. In fact, just today, we added episodes of Grown-ish, Blackish and the Wonder Years to our domestic Disney+ service.

And during the same call, Disney CEO Bob Chapek was asked about how they are hoping to continue to grow subscribers in the United States.

Bob Chapek said that he still believes new original content from the core Disney+ brands, Marvel, Star Wars and Disney, will drive more subscribers in, but that they’ve realised that Disney+ needs more general entertainment content since over 50{44affb6c5789133b77de981cb308c1480316fee51f5fd5f1575b130f48379a33} of Disney+ subscribers coming from households without children, it means they’ve realised they need more content for adults.

So on the Disney+ U.S. side, you mentioned that we’re roughly 1/3 penetrated. We still have some headroom in each one of our major franchises in terms of those viewers, those fans that have expressed interest in subscribing. So we are not nearly tapped out on each of the major franchises if someone identifies as a Lucas fan, Star Wars or as a Marvel fan or as a Disney fan. The biggest opportunity in terms of significance is with general entertainment being added to the service

We mentioned that today that we’re adding in Grown-ish, Black-ish and a few other titles into our service. I think that will be a trend of us taking more general entertainment and moving it over to Disney+ because, as you know, about 50{44affb6c5789133b77de981cb308c1480316fee51f5fd5f1575b130f48379a33} — slightly over 50{44affb6c5789133b77de981cb308c1480316fee51f5fd5f1575b130f48379a33} of our consumer base on Disney+ do not have kids. It’s a very broad general service, of course, driven by the Disney brand and driven by families, but what we’ve seen time and time again is that the elasticity of Disney and its brand is much greater than we might have given it credit.

And since the addition of the general entertainment brand, Star, across Europe, they’ve been impressed with the engagement that Disney+ has gotten with having access to more shows.

Bob Chapek mentioned the new shows that were added today and has said more will be coming in the future.  No specific details were revealed as to what we should expect.

While this wasn’t an announcement regarding bringing Star into the US or merging with Hulu, it does show that Disney+ in the United States is going to be “growing up” a little, with more content for adults.

What do you think of Disney+ adding more general entertainment content in the US?

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