Disney+ is no longer the only place to stream the Avengers movies, and the Mouse House seems to be increasingly comfortable licensing out its precious IP to its competitors.
While Marvel Studios and The Walt Disney Company were once highly protective of their proprietary movies and TV shows, it seems that the financial hardships of the last couple of years have convinced them to be a little bit more flexible. It could be that the Disney+ streaming platform is costing them billions of dollars every year, even though its price has more than doubled since it launched in 2019.
It could be that Marvel movies aren’t making the amount of box office that they used to, though Deadpool & Wolverine may be the key to turning that around.
Regardless, the last year has seen Disney make some unprecedented moves toward working with its competitors, including bundling Disney+ and Hulu (which it majority owns) with Max, Warner Bros. Discovery’s proprietary streaming service. The company has also been increasingly working with tech giant Apple, particularly with its new (and extremely expensive) Apple Vision Pro device.
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Now, it has been announced that four Marvel Cinematic Universe movies will be available for streaming for the immersive Apple Vision Pro. Forbes reports that The Avengers (2012), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Ant-Man (2015), and Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) will all be available on the device, meaning that a collective near four billion dollars worth of box office grosses has just been licensed out to a theoretical competitor.
Additionally, Apple Vision Pro will get an exclusive immersive background environment courtesy of National Geographic, a Disney subsidiary, as of its purchase of Fox in 2019. The Apple device offers environmental experiences, which currently include a lakeside view of Oregon’s Mt. Hood and the desert around Joshua Tree National Monument. Those will be joined by the UNESCO world heritage site Thingvellir National Park in Iceland; this will be National Geographic’s first Apple Vision Pro project.
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National Geographic EVP David Miller describes it as “Creating this immersive environment was a natural next step for us to take to build on that legacy and to continue enabling audiences to experience the beauty of our natural world and see places they may never go to otherwise.”
Disney might someday regain its financial footing enough to stop constantly renting out its property to other giant corporations, but it does not seem that day is today.
Have you used an Apple Vision Pro?