Live Action Mulan: Success or Failure?
With Mulan having been out for a few weeks, many are wondering (whether you’ve seen the film or not) exactly how the film has faired with its premium cost of $29.99. According to a recent piece on The Motley Fool it looks like the decision to take the film straight to Disney’s streaming network has indeed paid off!
As the article tells us, Disney+ downloads increased by 68% over Labor Day weekend prior to the weekend before. That’s just slightly under the 74% jump that the streaming network experiences when Hamilton came out on July 4th weekend. In addition consumer spending went up 193% due to the fact that subscribers were charged a $29.99 fee to stream the film.
When compared with Tenet, it looks like Disney’s decision to bypass the theaters was a good one! Christopher Noland’s spy thrill for Warner Brothers brought in less than $30 million in the box office since it debuted on September 3rd.
Source: Disney
So the next real question is whether Disney success with Mulan means that other films slated for release this year will bo straight to Disney+. Earlier this year CEO Bob Chapek referred to Mulan as a “one-off” but also said, “We find it very interesting to be able to take a new offering, our premier access offering, to consumers at that $29.99 price and learn from it and see what happens not only in terms of the uptake of the number of subscribers that we get on the platform but the actual number of transactions on the Disney+ platform that we get on that PVOD (premium video on demand) offering.”
The success of Mulan is too fold, not only in that the film was able to re-coup on production costs and make a profit during a pandemic but also in that it encouraged more people to subscribe to Disney’s streaming network. Chapek said, “All I’ll say about our research is that it shows that such an offering under a premier access offering not only gets us revenue from the original transaction from the PVOD but also acts as a fairly large stimulus to sign up for Disney+.”
As of going to print, it remains to be seen whether other films like Pixar’s upcoming Soul or Black Widow will go the Disney+ path or the theater path. This is a story that we’ll follow closely here at MickeyBlog so keep checking in with us for further news and updates!
Source: The Motley Fool
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