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Credit: Disneyland Resort (background) / Disney Animation (Mickey Mouse)Everyone knows that Disney’s cutting content. But there’s a difference between removing shows and quiet-cutting. That can alter the viewer’s whole experience, and possibly memory, of the show. It’s not the first time Disney changed content with the goal of formatting; consider dubbing. What’s happening now is the deletion of small bits to get back ad time and maintain a narrative.
Disney Cutting Content, Differently this Time
Sure, Disney+ is in the hot seat for rolling out its ad-tiered streaming service, even with The Globe and Mail citing this as a sensible move. It’s also received much fan dissent against the mass removal of content. While the Walt Disney Company might be clear-cutting material like it’s getting out of Dodge, the quiet-cutting phenomenon is different. It applies to the content that remains on-site.
It only happened with the onset of the streaming wars. And it means losing small bits, the parts viewers are most likely not to miss, per neuroscience. There are plenty of examples, like losing the death scene of Pudge the fish in Lilo & Stitch or skipping the violence at the onset of Tarzan. Other examples include a whole section missing from Zootopia and in Frozen.
These cuts have always been par for the course of formatting a movie to its blockbuster length. Now, with streaming kicking things up a notch, the cuts from things like Mulan or other Disney+ can be shorter. Instead of losing a whole section, it might be a mere moment. A glimpse that the viewer was likely to forget nonetheless.
Disney Cutting Content Quietly
Instead of Disney CEO Bob Iger in the spotlight for Disney+ and issues at Disney World, this focuses on a silent killer: forgetting. When enterprises like Disney plus HBO Max and Warner Bros Discovery adapt content to include ads, it results in some game changers. These show up in forgotten scenes from Star Wars and Marvel Studios.
If you’ve ever watched a show and sworn that the line went differently, there’s more than the Mandela effect to explain it. The secret is tucked in the Disney Vault, and on streaming servers across the world. Essentially, if a program was made for streaming, it lacks the timed-out pauses for advertisements that the new setup would use.
Content Quality in the Disney Entertainment Streaming Platform
Targeted advertising is a method of content curation that takes streaming content and intersperses it with ads that are likely to yield the most success. With the Walt Disney Company moving its online TV series and original content to an ad-based structure, there is the matter of adjusting that content to fit.
Titles of all sorts have scenes that separate the narrative, and whether it’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Indiana Jones, there’s an expectation of flow. In comes the quiet cutting. Basically, it shaves off a part of a sentence or deletes a scene entirely. It allows the TV shows to format according to the ad structure, for the narrative to flow, and for the streaming service to survive.
What Disney Quiet-Cutting Content Does
The cost of this ad-tiered content curation? A quirky quote missing from the footage. Perhaps an extra lost to the process. That said, the Walt Disney Company gets a lot of traction on its deleted scenes and bloopers.
Taken separately, this type of content curation has next to no entropy. When considered altogether, those missing moments add up to the ability to use neuroplasticity to change the memory of Disney movies themselves. And it looks like ads will be the replacement.
What do you think about the quiet-cutting phenomenon at Disney entertainment? Make your mark in the comments below!