Richard Plepler

That's Alana Pena again. In 2023, this incoming call, sort of a head-scratcher for Pena. After a two-season run, Diary of a Future President had already been canceled, a while ago. The exec got right to the point. She told Pena that Disney Plus was taking Diary off its platform, scrubbed, erased, not a trace of its 20 episodes to be found. Not because the show was bad.

A lot of people really loved it. But because its non-existence was worth something to the company. Removing shows allows platforms to write them off for tax breaks. Lots of streamers turned to this option during the Netflix correction, including Disney. The company purged dozens of original shows across Disney Plus and Hulu.

But this purge was buying Disney some time, allowing it to recoup a little money while it figured out how to shift strategy in this new era, where Wall Street was demanding real profits and growth. Here's Jessica Reif-Ehrlich, longtime analyst for B of A Securities.

Disney needed to be ruthless with controlling costs. And it didn't stop at erasing existing content. Disney cut way back on commissioning new shows. And yes, there were lots and lots of layoffs. Because despite trying to spend like a tech company, Disney just wasn't one of them.

Companies like Amazon and Apple could drop a bajillion dollars on original content because streaming was a side business.

For Netflix, streaming wasn't a side business. It was just business. But it also had the advantage of being first with the greatest brand recognition in the streaming space. Disney didn't have any of this. And yet, its strategy to compete with Netflix had been to try to become Netflix. the company needed a new strategy. It didn't need to stop acting like a tech company entirely.

Streaming was still core to its business. But maybe there was a more Disney way to go about things. A way to lean into 100 years of experience surprising and delighting audiences.

And perhaps no other choice had more brand awareness or affinity than the Walt Disney Company. Generational love, nostalgia, memory, and myth-making. That's all Disney.

It was time to look to the past and look within in order to define the future.

That means not trying to appeal to every possible subscriber. It means leaning into the content it already does well. Disney fairy tales, Pixar robots, the Avengers, Luke Skywalker may not be for everyone, but they're indispensable to a lot of people. So indispensable that people will keep paying, even after price hikes.

Today, if you want to subscribe to Disney Plus without ads, without bundling it with Hulu or ESPN, you have to pay $13.99. When it launched, it was $6.99 per month.

It seems the path forward for Disney is to be Disney. Sure, it can infuse its business with lessons from tech competitors, but it can also lean on its deep roots and delighting audiences, and even its experience with the cable bundle. Disney recently decided to strike a wartime alliance with Warner Brothers Discovery to create a sort of unified offering.

You can now get access to Disney+, Hulu, and Max at a discount. This is Tech Meets The Bundle. And it's an example of Disney getting out of Netflix's shadow to fight the streaming wars on its own terms. Netflix is still winning those wars despite the dip in subscribers back in 2022. It has more members than any other service. But Disney is number two, and it leads in another distinctly Disney way.

Nielsen reports that Americans spend more time watching Disney platforms, streaming shows, cable channels, ABC, than any other company's platforms. And in terms of profitability, Disney streaming platforms are, for the first time, generating some cash. It's still modest, but a lot better than where they were last year, which was losing hundreds of millions of dollars.

In other ways, though, Disney Plus still has a long way to go. The interface is clunky, and its algorithm doesn't hold a candle to Netflix's. Churn, people canceling their subscriptions, is a major problem. But all of these issues wouldn't even exist if not for the fact that Disney is now a company that is much more expansive and innovative in the digital space than it was even a decade ago.

Over the course of our season, we've looked at how Disney has been able and sometimes struggled to push itself forward into the future while preserving the company that Walt Disney and his brother Roy founded at the beginning of the 20th century. Streaming might just be the hardest leap that Disney has had to pull off, but Ball also sees it as the most promising.

It's not yet clear how tech will augment the ways in which people, children and families included, experience Disney, other than just a tool Disney uses to squeeze out more money from its park-goers or gather data to inform its algorithm. What is clear is that Disney is a company that grows in order to stay relevant.

It bought Capital City's ABC just in time to ride the cable wave, acquired Pixar, Marvel Entertainment, and Lucasfilm to expand its IP universe and its audience, and dotted the globe with its theme parks. Integrating streaming is the latest version of this strategy, growing, evolving Walt's Flywheel, and still remaining Disney. That's it for our season.

Land of the Giants, The Disney Dilemma is produced by Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Special thanks to Brandon Santos, Darian Mucha, Brian LaBombard, Jillian Robbins, and Liam Brooks. And of course, thanks to my colleagues at Vulture, Rebecca Alter, Bilga Abiri, and Chris Lee for joining me as hosts this season.

This episode included clips from HBO, Disney, the podcast Sway, Warner Brothers Discovery, CNBC, and CBS Evening News. Charlotte Silver is our lead producer. Joe Lee Myers is our editor. Claire Cronin is our fact checker. Brandon McFarlane composed the theme and mixed and scored this episode. Neil Janowitz is the editor-in-chief of Vulture. Art Chung is our showrunner.