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Disney Is Pulling Star Wars and Marvel Films From Netflix (arstechnica.com)
Disney CEO Bob Iger announced on Thursday that his company will pull the full catalog of films from the Star Wars franchise and Marvel universe from Netflix after 2019. Last month, Disney announced it would be pulling a number of Disney titles from the Netflix catalog, but left the door open to keeping the Star Wars franchise and Marvel films. That door has since been slammed shut, "choosing instead to use movies like Iron Man, Captain America, and the forthcoming Star Wars: Episode IX as a draw to a new Disney-owned streaming service," reports Ars Technica. From the report: It's not clear exactly which films are affected by Iger's announcement. A Netflix spokesperson told The Verge last month that "we continue to do business with the Walt Disney Company on many fronts, including our ongoing deal with Marvel TV." That refers to a collaboration between Disney and Netflix to produce several live-action television series based on lesser-known Marvel characters Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage. Some of those series are still being actively developed. It's a high-risk gamble for Disney. It makes sense for Disney to bring its best-known franchises back under its own roof to give the Disney streaming service the best possible chance of success. But Disney is leaving a lot of money on the table by not doing a deal with Netflix or one of its competitors. It could be an expensive mistake if the Disney streaming service doesn't get traction.
As per previous discussions on this. FUCK YOU DISNEY! I will not support service proliferation in this manner no matter what movies you have that I may want to watch. You are basically trying to create the exact same licensing, package lockin and distribution restrictions we fled to these streaming services to escape.
People have been demanding "a la carte" cable for decades.
Well, we finally got it - you can buy all the individual channels you want. Thing is, each one is now its own individual streaming service, with its own account and billing and app interface and media catalog.
Give it another five to ten years and there'll be services that bundle these services for you, and then we can start complaining about how Cable 2.0 is charging us too much for packages we don't use when all we want is Hulu and Netflix.
Hopefully this cozy relationship between media creators and distribution channels will eventually be unraveled. Long ago, movie studios used to have ownership stakes in the theaters their movies were shown in. The government put an end to that. I'd like to see the same competition law kick in and force Disney to keep streaming contracts with outside firms.
Considering Disney makes literally the worst POSSIBLE choices every time as far as distribution of their product, I'd say Netflix should see this as validation.
VHS? Disney ran SCREAMING away from it, insisting it was going to destroy filmmakers, finally grudgingly dragging itself back to VHS...about the time DVDs came out.
DVD? Hahaha, Disney (insisting such tech would destroy filmmakers and the entire industry) backed the original Divx, which was a rental scheme by which you could buy the disk for about triple the price of a movie rental, and you could then play it (once it validated itself and your purchase in what was essentially an early IoT-locked dvd player) for 48 hours. If you wanted to play it past that 48 hours, you could pay again. (http://www.dvdjournal.com/extra/divx.html)
So...pretty much any tech that Disney's terrified of will soon become the defacto standard.
-Styopa