Disney+ Day! A celebration of releases! Or what little they had…
So today is apparently Disney+ Day, a day that Disney hypes up for its releases. So you would forgive me if I expected there to actually be a large number of releases… but they had barely enough releases to compare to a typical Netflix’s weekly release schedule.
The two big ones are the recent Thor movie, Thor: Love and Thunder, as well as the recent live-action adaptation of the Disney classic, Pinocchio. To that we add a Cars series, a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff (oh, that reminds me: a BTS concert documentary too), and uh…. episode 4 of She-Hulk? But that was basically it. Sure they also had this South-American show (which feels like they went to lengths to hide that fact, for some reason, making the primary language English by default and not clearly signifying which language was the original audio track, but we won’t get into that here), and some other stuff I scrolled past, but that was it! I think there were more trailers than actual releases. Definitely not enough for a semi-holiday type event.
“Oh, but they had a deal for $1.99 on your first month’s subscription!” Please… first of all, that only applies to new (okay, also “returning”) subscribers. Not those subs that patiently waited for years and years for releases to actually appear, at least in sufficient enough quantity to merit the subscription price. Maybe it was the magical feeling from the movies we watched as kids that gave us the feeling that it’ll be alright, Disney will treat us well, just like their Disney parks with the over $100 dollar per day ticket prices. It would’ve been great if they actually threw us existing subscribers a bone.
“But the quality of the shows is better than the junk on Netflix!” We’d assume so, right? But the recent Thor movie didn’t get great reviews (I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m not stating my official opinion about it yet), and She-Hulk, well, honestly I’m okay with it, but I enjoy it a little less than the Lincoln Lawyer series on Netflix (you slept on that one, didn’t you), which is not saying it is bad, just maybe not as great as people would’ve hoped. And this is considering that I am somewhat familiar with all the copyright, trademark, IP, etc stuff that comes up in She-Hulk. I’ll also admit that I enjoyed the Star Wars series they have been showing, such as Obi-wan, The Book of Boba Fett, and definitely the Mandalorian – even the Bad Batch animated series. But at the end of the day, quality is one thing, however how much viewing time you get and enjoy (probably two different things sometimes) is what really matters. And honestly, I enjoy more of what I can watch on Netflix than what I can watch on Disney+.
Which slides us into one other thing I should mention: most of the things I watch on Netflix are… you guessed it... Korean dramas. Some are exclusive to Netflix, sure, but others can be found elsewhere. On top of that, they are also releasing the episodes on a weekly schedule aka drip feeding. This has led me to frequently contemplate exchanging my Netflix subscription for a Korean drama focused one, such as Rukuten Viki or Kocowa. In the end, I didn’t pull the trigger because I did not want to be locked into just K-dramas since sometimes (yes, sometimes) I’m not in the mood for a Korean show.
It basically boils down to how much entertainment we can get versus the price. And to make that more calculable, we need to define things in a more measurable manner. So let’s just say hours of entertainment per dollar. If we take that as a metric, then something like a movie at a theatre (sans snacks) would be about $15 for a 2 hour movie, so about $7.5 an hour. Pricey. A good video game, on the other hand, might range from $3-$4 and hour (for a Call of Duty, without multiplayer) to less than pennies per hour. Of course, some are just a waste of money, period.
However when we’re comparing streaming service to streaming service, there is a wide gap. Even at Netflix’s higher price (about $15.5 for my plan, not including taxes) vs. Disney+ (now at $7.99, no taxes included), Disney+ still costs way more per hour of entertainment. We’re of course talking about stuff we actually watch or will watch, not all the potential watchable hours by way of just pure running lengths of everything on a service (Netflix would still win). Let’s say that Disney+ has two series and maybe a movie per month that I might watch (they usually don’t have two series because of the drip-feed method) which is approximately 8 episodes at around 40 to 50 mins each with a bit here and there to round it out to about 18 hours of content per month. Netflix... well, just 2 K-drama series (they usually put out 3-4) a month can wipe that out because, on average, there are 16 episodes per series and each episode is about an hour++ long (and Netflix usually releases them either all at once or in two episode chunks per week) – that’s 32 hours right there. Then we have all the miscellaneous stuff, such as maybe a series on par with The Umbrella Academy (which is “aite”, so the range can easily go up from there), or something that just fills the time. Oh, and sometimes anime or animations, too. Not to mention the stuff I completely ignore, like the reality dating shows or whatever, and so many other titles I gloss over every day while scrolling through the New & Popular section. On the other hand, I can check Disney+ once or twice a week, excluding a day I know that a new episode for a series comes out, and it barely changes. Someone once responded to a comment I made about the lack of content with an incredulous tone stating, “What are you talking about? There’s so much there!” Of course if he had thought for more than two seconds (or maybe stopped pirating his shows and actually subbed to both services) then it would be obvious that his statement was nonsensical. Maybe he was a kid, because Disney has a quite a few kids’ related shows, and kids love to watch things over and over again, which can create the illusion that there is more than there really is.
Anyways, Disney+ Day, was it worth the hype? I don’t know. I know people say to celebrate even your small wins as an antithesis to a difficult time (that is, feeling like you lose all the time), but if Netflix were to celebrate a day where their releases were on par as Disney+ Day, then Netflix Day would be almost every week or two. So if I had to choose between these two services, Netflix would win hands down… though I’d miss the Star Wars series, and maybe some of the MCU series as well. Hopefully that choice won't come up for a while.
With that said, I am looking forward to Andor, the upcoming Star War series. So there’s that to celebrate. Maybe.
