Credit: Inside the MagicDisney+ was launched as a family-friendly streaming service combining classic Disney animation and live-action with Marvel, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones. Still, it turns out that its biggest success is a brutally violent, critically acclaimed new show ported over from Hulu.
While the Walt Disney Company has not yet been able to make streaming content anywhere near profitable, CEO Bob Iger is determined to make it the cornerstone of his plans. Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ have all been deep in the red quarter and quarter, but there is a new strategy: mash all those services together into a single, very expensive app that will give audiences access to all the content it can.
Related: “Evil” Price Hikes Prompt Wave of Cancelled Disney+, Hulu Subscriptions
In theory, this is not a terrible idea, considering that streaming subscribers have increasingly been frustrated at the cost of paying Disney+, Max, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, and all the rest each month just to avoid cable fees. However, many subscribers have been aghast that the service is being merged with the adult-oriented fare of Hulu, meaning that it has to be locked down with new parental controls to prevent children from watching the sex-filled Poor Things (2023) or the profanity-laden culinary show The Bear.
But Disney has very little incentive to stop porting over movies and shows with mature themes to its previously child-oriented service because it just achieved a record-breaking premiere by streaming the new series Shōgun on both Hulu and Disney+.
Shōgun is officially an FX production (one of Disney’s linear TV branches), but it also streams on Hulu and Disney+. According to a press release from Disney, the premiere episode of the series achieved 9 million global views across Hulu, Disney+, and Star+ in six days, making it the “No. 1 scripted General Entertainment series premiere globally.”
Not only that, but the company explicitly says that streaming Shōgun on Disney+ boosted it to the number one FX premiere ever, beating out The Bear season 2. Internationally, it beat out The Kardashians to be number one across all General Entertainment series.
In short, Shōgun is an enormous hit despite the increasingly brutal violence of the show; decapitations, executions, and a man being boiled alive all feature in the premiere episode, and the third episode of the show escalated things to full-on bloody battles. This may be concerning for some parents who worry about their children being exposed to ritualized violence in 17th-century Japan, but with those viewing numbers, Disney will likely push it on every streaming service it has.
Related: Disney CEO Bob Iger Admits Netflix Is Better Than Disney+
Shōgun stars legendary actor Hiroyuki Sanada as Lord Yoshii Toranaga, a fictionalized version of Tokugawa Ieyasu, a powerful warlord during a tumultuous time in Japanese history. The fragile truce between Toranaga and his rival Ishido Kazunari (Takehiro Hira) is broken when John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), an English pilot based on the real-life William Adams, arrives via shipwreck. In addition to deadly Japanese political scheming, Toranaga and Blackthorne also have to deal with the Portuguese attempting to force a trade monopoly on the country and, once again, extremely brutal violence.
But it’s good numbers for Disney+, so there will be a lot more feudal decapitations next to Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
Are you watching Shōgun? Let us know in the comments below!