During an earnings call with investors on Thursday, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced some big news: Several new TV series based on popular Disney brands are in development.
Iger specifically said that new series based in the worlds of Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar’s Monster’s Inc., and High School Musical are in the pipeline and will be exclusively available through their forthcoming streaming service that will compete with Netflix.
Notably, the Star Wars show will be live-action — this will be the first live-action Star Wars TV show, so it’s big news (it arrives just months after CBS launched Star Trek Discovery). Obviously Marvel, Monster’s Inc, and High School Musical are other very large brands that will drive the new streaming service to success.
The High School Musical project might be related to the High School Musical 4 that began casting in early 2016.
What’s more, Disney will be pulling all of their TV shows and movies from Netflix once their current deal runs out at the end of 2018. They will all fly over to Disney-flix.
A complete library of Disney TV shows, movies (including Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar), plus big-brand exclusives will surely be a major draw. This thing could become just as popular as Netflix, couldn’t it?
Further helping get people to sign up will be the price: Iger said that the monthly cost will be “substantially below” Netflix because they will have far less titles at launch.
Speaking of Star Wars, Iger also announced that a new trilogy is set to be created by The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson. Hot damn.
On the same earnings call, Iger confirmed that their ESPN streaming service will launch in the spring under the name ESPN Plus.