By Disney CEO Bob Iger says the company will continue licensing some of its content to third parties, but will not give away its core brands.
Speaking to investors as part of the company’s quarterly earnings call today, he says they have been licensing content to Netflix and plan to continue. In fact, he adds that “we’re actually in discussion with them now about some opportunities”.
One thing he does make clear though is he does not expect to license the core brands to them or anyone else. Those brands are differentiators and offer a competitive advantage for Disney:
“Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, for instance, are all doing very, very well on our platform, and I don’t see why, just to basically chase bucks, we should do that when they are really really important building blocks to the current and future of our streaming business.”
Numerous other streamers have also been licensing content to Netflix and other rivals, resulting in success stories like NBCUniversal’s recent “Suits” success on Netflix.
Iger also commented on the company’s losing streak with films in the past year or so, saying:
“At the time the pandemic hit, we were leaning into a huge increase in how much we were making and I’ve always felt that quantity can be actually a negative when it comes to quality. And I think that’s exactly what happened. We lost some focus…
I feel really optimistic about the slate going forward, which is going to be a balance between some really strong sequels to some very, very popular titles, as well as some good original content.”
The comments come as Disney expects to cut billions of dollars from its content budget in fiscal 2024 – reducing it to $25 billion down from $27 billion in fiscal 2023, the strikes having impacted the spend for fiscal 2024. Of that spend, $10 billion is on sports and $15 billion is on entertainment.
Source: THR
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