[mschuster91]

> Disney+ is huge, and it got there so fast. It's absolutely dizzying to think how fast they are going to blow past Netflix with Disney+ alone.

Well. No surprise given how much buy-ups and mergers the regulators tolerated... Out of the list for popular franchises, Disney owns the top two (MCU/26 B$, Star Wars/10 B$) and has significant involvement in the third place (Spider-Man). Additionally, they own Avatar (which is the most profitable movie ever made), The Simpsons, Indiana Jones, the entire catalog of Pixar, the entire classic and re-made OG Disney IP and a ton of other stuff [1].

Of the really popular stuff, the only things Disney doesn't own are Harry Potter (which is a complicated dumpster fire not just given the tendency of JKR to set her own life work ablaze, but also IP-rights-wise [2]), the DC Universe (which hasn't managed to stay even close to competitive with MCU), Star Trek (which went off Netflix to Paramount+) and James Bond.

The future of entertainment is scary - Disney needs to be broken up, or the government needs to step in and mandate that copyright holders have to provide fair and equal streaming rights to everyone, similar to the music industry (which managed to get the hint on its own, and now there's more than healthy competition in the market with OG Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, Tidal and a boatload of smaller ones).

[1] https://ifilmthings.com/disney-owns/

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/16/22770469/harry-potter-st...

[kerbs]

Yeah I'm ambivalent about if what they do is good. I do think that what they've done with Star Wars is better than whatever Lucasfilm did with the franchise between 1983 and when they sold.

Should new Star Wars be a big part of what I watch? I enjoy them, but I'm undecided.

MCU just feels like rubbish, but it prints money for reasons I just can't figure out.

[mschuster91]

Going to disagree on Star Wars. The prequels at least had a somewhat coherent story line (aside from the great Darth Jar Jar conspiracy) and artistic direction, the new sequels are... just WTF? It's still blowing my mind what went wrong there. It seems like they didn't have any sort of plan beforehand and just went with whatever they came up with, completely ditching decades of Expanded Universe lore.

In contrast, the MCU is the perfect execution of "how to make a movie out of a boatload of source material". IMHO, them sticking to the lore well enough that the die-hard nerds don't have much to whine was the key decision that made the MCU what it is... but now that the MCU has gotten so absurdly large, it's going to be interesting if they can keep up with that attention to detail.