Disney has invested a huge amount of money into shifting to streaming content, but it seems that the Mouse is finally starting to lose its nerve and swerve back to good old-fashioned cable TV.
In the last decade, virtually every entertainment corporation in the world, from The Walt Disney Company to Chick-fil-A (for some reason), decided that streaming content was the only form of media that anyone should want or need.
In large part, this was due to a sense of FOMO by Disney and its competitors, who had seen an unexpected rival emerge at Netflix and figured that if an upstart DVD-by-mail company could corner a market, they could do just as well.
Well, they were wrong. Disney launched its namesake streaming service, Disney+, in 2019 and has lost an astronomical amount of money on it since. CEO Bob Iger blamed the company’s floundering strategy on entering the field in a “very, very aggressive way, we tried to tell too many stories. Basically, we invested too much, way ahead of possible returns. It’s what led to streaming ending up as a $4 billion loss.”
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Basically, Disney+ launched with an industry-low subscription price of $6.99 a month, no ads, and exciting original Star Wars and Marvel content like The Mandalorian and WandaVision, hoping that it would crush Netflix in one fell swoop.
It hasn’t. Instead, the service has lost money for the company virtually every fiscal quarter for five years, despite doubling its price, adding commercials, deleting content, and pretending that the revenue from ESPN+ makes it worthwhile.
It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that Disney is starting to crack under the pressure of making streaming its main content stream and is porting original shows onto cable. For the first time, a Disney+ original show is being shown on regular cable, indicating that the Mouse is no longer quite as confident in the new ways and is looking back at the profitable past for some pointers.
Goosebumps, the Disney+ original series based on the young adult book series by R. L. Stine, will be shown in its entirety on Freeform on Friday, October 25, as part of the 31 Nights of Halloween holiday event.
The cable event will include other spookily themed movies and shows like Beetlejuice (1988), Hocus Pocus (1993), Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Casper (1995), Halloweentown (1998), Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), and Haunted Mansion (2023).
This is not unusual in itself. Many streaming, broadcast, and cable platforms/channels promote holiday-themed “event” programming to boost viewership, so a bunch of spooky stuff on Freeform in October is not all that surprising.
However, the Freeform premiere of Goosebumps is a strong sign that Disney is becoming more flexible with its streaming-focused approach of the last half-decade and is moving back to more traditional forms of release.
Goosebumps Season 1 premiered on Disney+ in 2023, developed by Rob Letterman and Nicholas Stoller. In a change from the beloved 1990s anthology series from Scholastic Entertainment, the streaming series focused on a single ten-episode storyline that brought in elements of multiple entries in the series by R.L. Stine.
The show starred Ana Yi Puig, Miles McKenna, Will Price, Justin Long, Zack Morris, Isa Briones, and Rachael Harris and was a moderate success for the streamer.
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Goosebumps has been renewed for a second season, apparently unrelated to the events of the first season, although it’s difficult to think that a certain living dummy might not show up at some point. The mere fact that it got another season at all, when Disney+ is shutting down virtually every project that doesn’t have Star Wars or Marvel in the title, is pretty impressive.
It is also notable that Disney+ appears to be trying to cross-platform its original content back to cable programming with Goosebumps, which probably means that the company expects that the R.L. Stine series has more name recognition separate from its streamer than some other more notable shows.
But, at the very least, this hints pretty strongly that the Disney brass isn’t as confident in streaming as it pretends.
Did you watch Goosebumps Season 1?