Over the last six years, Disney+ has become one of the biggest streaming platforms in the world. According to Disney’s Q3 2025 report, it currently has a staggering 128 million subscribers worldwide, behind only Netflix and Amazon. And yet, as impressive as this may seem, streaming was always high-risk for Disney.

Disney CEO Bob Iger knew this. The streaming boom was already beginning to disrupt Hollywood, but the launch of Disney+ would accelerate it; existing business models, ones that were working, would be put on pause or become less important. “And one more thing,” he remembers saying in his autobiography The Ride of a Lifetime. “It won’t make money for a while.“

Streaming only became profitable for Disney in late 2024, almost five years after the Disney+ launch. The problem, though, is that the disruption has persisted; and, looking back, the pivot to Disney+ has done mᴀssive damage to three of Disney’s biggest brands.

The Disney+ Era Of Star Wars Hasn’t Been Pretty

Most viewers were introduced to the bounty hunter Boba Fett 45 years ago, in The Empire Strikes Back; a mysterious and efficient warrior, he was said to wear iconic “Mandalorian” armor. Over the decades, the Star Wars Expanded Universe built a whole mythology around the Mandalorians.

And then, in December 2019, Mandalorians went mainstream. The Mandalorian premiered alongside the launch of Disney+, and it was an absolute hit. According to Nielsen, season 1 amᴀssed a staggering 5.42 billion minutes of viewing time during its run (the week of the finale reached 1.15 billion in itself).

It all got off to such a promising start, and The Mandalorian season 2 — which released only a few months later, in 2020 — was just as successful. In December 2020, Lucasfilm (pushed by new Disney CEO Bob Chapek) announced an ambitious slate of projects for the next five years.

And then it all went badly wrong. Lucasfilm lacked the bandwidth to maintain the pace of production, and quality suffered. Cheaper shows sadly looked it (the Obi-Wan Kenobi finale featured a strategically-chosen battle on a shadowed planet, where costs could be controlled). On other shows, costs spiraled, but there were diminishing returns in terms of viewership.

Leslye Headland’s The Acolyte is the perfect case in point. The Acolyte‘s eye-watering $230 million budget means it was one of the most expensive Star Wars shows ever made, but it just didn’t draw in the numbers. As Jimmy Doyle, a film and TV analyst at Luminate analytics, explained in a 2024 review with ScreenRant:

“The Acolyte… had lower viewership than most of the other Star Wars shows when it premiered, and then it didn’t gain viewership. It actually lost a little bit of viewership during its run. So with that loss of viewership, in addition to the critical reception to the show, those two things kind of lead you to that cancelation.“

Six years after the launch of Disney+, there’s constant chatter about “Star Wars fatigue;” as though Disney has unfortunately diluted the brand by putting out too much content far too quickly. Star Wars is finally returning to the big screen, but the first trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu has landed with a whimper, not a bang.

This, it seems, is the legacy of Disney+; and it remains to be seen whether Star Wars can overcome it.

The MCU Expanded On Disney+ And Marvel Suffered For It

When Disney+ launched in 2019, Marvel Studios was riding high on the success of Avengers: Endgame, which closed out the franchise’s first decade of storytelling to a staggering $2.799 billion box office haul. At the time, it seemed like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its chief architect, Kevin Feige, now president of Marvel Studios, could do no wrong.

However, the mandate came down from Disney that Marvel — like many of their brands, including Star Wars and Pixar — needed to make content that would be exclusive to the company’s new streaming service. Marvel went full-tilt on green-lighting television shows that would be instrumental to the overarching narrative of the post-Endgame MCU, to disastrous results.

At first, it seemed like Marvel’s expansion onto Disney+ was going well, with shows headlined by some of the MCU’s biggest stars: Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany in WandaVision, Tom Hiddleston in Loki, and Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. However, the timeline of connecting these Disney+ shows to the MCU movies was messy at best; in the case of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, its film follow-up, Captain America: Brave New World, came out nearly four years later.

But the delay between story threads was just one problem created by the MCU’s expansion into television. Prior to the launch of Disney+, Marvel released at most three movies a year. Then in 2021, due in part to playing catch up after the pandemic, Marvel released four movies and five TV shows. This slate tripled the MCU’s typical output, and exponentially increased its time commitment.

Audiences simply couldn’t keep up. And neither could Feige. A Wall Street Journal report published earlier this year stated that creatives would spend weeks fine-tuning MCU projects only for that work to be made “irrelevant once [Feige] weighed in.” It was so difficult to get time with the Marvel boss that “desperate staffers resorted to chasing Feige in the halls to get answers.”

Marvel felt the strain of producing Disney+ shows alongside their movies, which led to a decline in quality. There were negative reviews of shows like Secret Invasion, and movies like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and the increasingly untenable storylines of the Multiverse Saga (which encompᴀsses everything released post-Endgame). The result is that the once-great MCU has fallen so far from the heights of 2019, it’s mind-boggling.

Not all of Marvel’s problems can be attributed to Disney+, of course. Ballooning budgets made it nearly impossible for the movies to turn a profit, and Endgame was perhaps too perfect of an ending, giving audiences a natural jumping off point from the franchise. Unfortunately, Marvel hasn’t managed to hook viewers the way they did in the early days of the MCU, and the expansion to Disney+ made it increasingly difficult for those who want to stay to stick around.

Like Star Wars, Disney+ led to a wave of Marvel fatigue that the MCU is still trying to rebound from.

Disney+ Irreparably Changed How Audiences Watch Pixar Movies

While Kevin Feige staunchly protested releasing Marvel movies on Disney+ during the pandemic — though Black Widow was ultimately released concurrently in theaters and at an extra cost on streaming — Pixar didn’t fare as well. Soul (2020), Luca (2021), and Turning Red (2022) all released directly on Disney+ at no extra cost, which has had lasting effects on the animation studio.

Apart from Inside Out 2, which earned $1.699 billion, Pixar’s recent theatrical releases have struggled at the box office, even Lightyear, a spinoff from the studio’s lucrative Toy Story franchise. In fact, none pᴀssed the $500 million benchmark, especially those that were released theatrically only in markets where Disney+ wasn’t available.

Comparatively, Pixar’s pre-pandemic slate included mᴀssive hits like Incredibles 2, which earned $1.243 billion; Toy Story 4, which took in $1.074 billion; and Coco, which garnered a respectable $814.3 million. With its tentpoles earning over $1 billion and its original films garnering more than $800 million, Pixar was certainly more successful before the pandemic, when Disney’s decisions turned it into a streaming-only brand.

Of course, some of the decline can be attributed to the changing theatrical landscape, where non-IP family movies have especially struggled. Encanto, from Disney Animation Studios, was a veritable flop at the box office, taking in only $261.3 million. But Encanto became such a viral success when the movie hit streaming, that it’s become one of Disney’s newest and most exciting properties.

It’s clear that Disney+ changed the way viewers expect to watch animated movies, both from Pixar and Disney Animation. The decision to release so many Pixar movies direct-to-streaming created an environment where audiences came to expect it; especially in the case of original stories, the knowledge that the movie will be free to watch on Disney+ soon removes the necessity to see it in theaters.

Is There A Way Back For Disney?

Bob Iger, the Disney CEO responsible for the initial roll-out of Disney+, returned to that role in November 2022. He was presented as the one saving the company from the missteps of Bob Chapek, but there’s more than a little irony in this. After all, Iger was the one who set the direction and momentum for Disney+.

The next few years will be the true test of Iger’s legacy; can he successfully find a way to reverse the damage done in the last few years? We’ve already seen dramatic reductions in the number of Star Wars and MCU shows coming out — we only know of one live-action Star Wars show in production right now, Ahsoka season 2, and Kevin Feige has said Marvel will be limited to releasing only two MCU shows a year going forward. The hope is to reverse the brand dilution.

But the real test will come on the big screen. Star Wars is in the unusual position of having two sH๏τs at fixing the problems; next year’s The Mandalorian and Grogu, followed by 2027’s Star Wars: Starfighter. The latter comes out in the franchise’s 50th anniversary year, which means it should land with impact – whatever happens to The Mandalorian and Grogu.

For the MCU, it’s a matter of securing a future after the (inevitably successful) Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. With the MCU expected to lean into the X-Men post-Secret Wars, as well as go through a soft reboot, Marvel could come back stronger than ever.

As for Pixar, Inside Out 2 offers some much-needed hope. If the animation studio can lure audiences back to theaters with known properties — like the upcoming Toy Story 5, Incredibles 3, and Coco 2 — perhaps that will reestablish the franchise as one to see on the big screen. If it has a knock-on effect, original films Hoppers and Gatto could be more successful and top that $500 million benchmark.

Making matters worse, though, all this is happening in a fraught political environment where a single misstep can result in a boycott. If Iger can pull this off, if he can reverse the damage of Disney+, then he will have earned his place in Disney’s annals of fame.