Investors suggest Disney put Black Widow on streaming

"Mulan" and "Soul" were originally scheduled to be released on the big screen, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Disney's streaming strategy, they eventually gave up on theatrical distribution, causing complaints from many cinema operators in the United States and Europe.

Recently, Disney investor Dan Robb said in an interview with Variety that Black Widow should abandon theatrical distribution and go directly to streaming media, mainly to compete with Netflix. If Disney really does this, cinemas will be in more trouble. The current release date of Black Widow is May 7, 2021.

“My understanding is that these conservative executives don’t want to take risks on big-budget movies, so they pushed Black Widow and other movies to May 2021,” said Dan Robb. “I don’t appreciate their approach of running away from the crisis. They could drive profits by moving to a subscription model, which has been adopted by everyone from Microsoft to Amazon, and the value-added of this model is too strong.”

“Netflix has a huge subscriber base (over 180 million) which allows it to invest heavily in content and amortize it to acquire more subscribers. Disney isn’t there yet, but they need to get there soon. If their subscriber base (54 million) doesn’t reach critical mass, they will always be at a disadvantage to Netflix.”

In Dan Rob's view, putting big-budget projects like "Black Widow" into Disney+ will give it an advantage over streaming competitors such as Netflix. If Disney really considers this approach, it will definitely attract more users and bring them more profits, especially if they use a pay-to-watch strategy, the effect will be better.

Disney has previously applied this strategy to the live-action version of "Mulan", but Disney has not yet released its financial report. It is not yet known how much revenue this subscription fee + additional payment method has generated.