Despite only launching in November, Disney Plus has already racked up almost 55 million subscribers around the world, which admittedly isn’t much of a surprise given the company’s monolithic stature in the entertainment industry. With the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, Pixar, The Simpsons, almost their entire back catalogue of animated classics and their live-action remakes all available to stream, the Mouse House are making the most of their vast portfolio.
However, subscribers have been a little starved for original content when it comes to Disney Plus, although that’s to be expected for a platform that’s only existed for a few months. The Mandalorian may have captured the imaginations of Star Wars fans, but apart from that there haven’t really been any in-house projects that have generated any real buzz, unless you count the recently-released Artemis Fowl which grabbed headlines for all the wrong reasons.
With Mando’s second set of adventures set to arrive later this year though along with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and WandaVision bringing the MCU to the small screen, the studio are slowly but surely building up their original projects. But until then we’ll have to make do with Disney’s pre-existing library – though there is one brand new movie heading to streaming in August along with a handful of blockbusters.
The One and Only Ivan was originally set to hit theaters in August but will now go straight to Disney Plus instead, and even though there hasn’t even been a trailer for it yet, the studio will no doubt be hoping it fares better with fans than Artemis Fowl did. Based on the children’s book of the same name about a gorilla held in captivity, the cast boasts some heavy hitters including Bryan Cranston, Angelina Jolie and Danny DeVito.
Bulking out their franchise-orientated content, Ant-Man and the Wasp and Alice Through the Looking Glass will also be arriving alongside the billion-dollar Beauty and the Beast remake, while one of Disney’s more forgotten blockbusters will debut when Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time lands on the first Friday of the month.
A lot of people have been canceling their subscriptions recently given the lack of options available to them, so hopefully the higher-ups take this on board and continue to add to August’s list of new arrivals or they could see more and more folks follow suit.
