Disney Plus Shares Viewership Numbers For the Second Time in a Month: Is This a Good Sign for the Strikes?
One of the most debated bullet points between the studios and the guilds during the ongoing dual labor strike has been the issue of streaming transparency. Actors and writers want fair compensation when their shows and movies are a hit, but that would mean that the studios behind the streaming platforms would have to open up their books and let the artists know how many people are actually watching WandaVision on Disney Plus or Peacemaker on (formerly known as) HBO Max. Which is a no-go for them, for a variety of reasons.
Despite that, Netflix constantly argues that they are the most transparent of all the services, as they actually list the top 10 streamed titles on their platform, which Peacock or Disney Plus do not do. Earlier this year they also started listing the number of millions of hours watched for each of those top 10 titles. But, of course, there are two big asterisks here: first, the top 10 is easily manipulated, not because they are making up the numbers (which we don’t really know that they aren’t), but because they can retool the algorithm to highlight whatever show or movie they are interested in you watching. And, of course, these are just the 10 most streamed titles, inside a platform that owns hundreds of other shows and movies for you to watch.
Disney Plus has never really shown any transparency, which often forces the media to turn to third-party services like Nielsen or Samba TV which can extrapolate some results based on TV devices they track. Exceptions of this would be Black Widow, which premiered day and date on the platform for an extra $30 cost — after the opening weekend, the company did announce they’d made $60 million off of the Scarlett Johansson-led movie (which did lead to a lawsuit of its own, but that’s another story). After the series premiere of Obi-Wan Kenobi last year, they also said that it’d been the biggest premiere ever for the service. But what about numbers?
Well, the platform opened up for the first time in late August, when they revealed that they had recorded 14 million views on the first episode over the first week of release (a view equals the watched runtime divided by the total runtime of the episode — we assume that for the sake of boosting the numbers, they take out the credits here). That was sort of weird at first and definitely oddly timed as the studios were just coming out of a heated negotiation with the writers, who were asking for data transparency. Maybe it was a way to boast some numbers without much context and do some promotion along the way.
However, on Monday this week, Disney doubled down, as they announced that the most recent live-action remake of The Little Mermaid had collected 16 million views over its first five days on the platform, making it the most viewed movie premiere since Hocus Pocus 2 last October (they didn’t disclose viewership data for that movie). Much like what happened with Ahsoka, we still lack a lot of context: How does this compare with everything else that is streaming on Disney Plus? How many million views did you record across the entire platform all five days? How does this compare to previous weeks?
There’s tracking to be done here as well: This was for the first five days, but what happens during the first month? With box office numbers, we get detailed reports every day of how much money each movie has made because the theaters also have access to those numbers; with linear TV, Nielsen comes in as a third-party mediator between ad sellers and networks. But Disney Plus can be extremely selective when it comes to disclosing these numbers, choosing whatever number they think will make for the best headline. We’ve now had two more episodes from Ahsoka debut on the platform (even if we don’t count the second episode, which came out the same day as the first, and Disney Plus didn’t report numbers for it either), and we don’t know how many million views they’ve had.
And yet, there’s an argument to be made that this is a huge step forward for transparency, especially since these numbers were reported back-to-back. Disney announced over the weekend that Haunted Mansion will be coming to the platform on October 4, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they also revealed viewership numbers for that, especially if it does well. That is also the day Ahsoka concludes its first-season run, though I doubt we’ll get anything from that, especially because the headlines will probably be about how many viewers the series lost along the way (as it’s normal for a streaming show, because people can just go back to it later). Loki season 2 is coming out on the 6th, and we could also get numbers for that, especially since it’s expected to lure in mass audiences.
My question is this: Is Disney already preparing themselves to start reporting viewership data more frequently? Is this a sign that the studios will eventually concede on the issue of transparency and let writers and actors see how much people are actually watching these services? I would say yes, especially in light of recent news that the studios are actually expressing to the guilds in private that they want to settle (the AMPTP issued a response calling BS, to which I call BS back).
However, the studios are actually afraid to let everyone know how many people are watching these massive shows — or rather, how many people aren’t. This is probably the sad reality that writers and actors will have to face: Gal Gadot will likely have to think twice before signing on to her next Netflix movie if the platform doesn’t pay her backend upfront, because nobody really watched Heart of Stone. But the studios also don’t want to disclose that information because they are afraid of Wall Street finding out they’ve been pumping billions of dollars a year into a streaming gamble that is not panning out.
Stay tuned as the situation continues to develop.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
