The big announcement of the day if not week hit just a few hours ago as Disney Pictures announced that its live-action “Mulan” remake will not only be coming to cinemas on September 4th, but will be available as a quite highly priced premium rental within the subscription streaming service.
For years there’s been talk of which studio would have the balls to do a real PVOD experiment with a big-budget blockbuster. “Trolls World Tour” was a start but the $200 million all audience-targeted “Mulan” will be a real test not just for the Disney but the movie industry as a whole as it tries to find a new normal.
One obvious question that has come up is will the next major cab off Disney’s rank, Marvel’s “Black Widow” in early November, follow in the footsteps of “Mulan” should it prove a success? For now, Disney CEO Bob Chapek has squashed that talk but does leave the door open for the situation happening again on other titles. He says (via Collider):
“We’re very pleased to be able to bring Mulan to our consumer base that has been waiting for it for a long, long time. Mulan is a one-off. That said, we find it very interesting to be able to take a new offering to consumers at that $29.99 price and learn from it and see what happens not only in terms of the uptick of the number of subscribers we got on the platform, but also the number of transactions we get on that PVOD offering.”
“Mulan is a one-off” is a pretty definitive statement, but the rest of the statement also implies they are going to be watching the numbers closely and see how things go.
Disney is already very happy with one particular set of numbers – Disney+ subscriptions. The service was hoping to reach 60-90 million subscribers by the five year mark after launch, they’ve now reached the lower end of that scale in less than a year.
