As the streaming wars continue to heat up, the various combatants are going to continue throwing more and more money at high-profile exclusive titles to try and increase subscriber numbers and gain an advantage over the competition.
Red Notice director Rawson Marshall Thurber recently admitted that $200 million was a very conservative budgetary estimate, but that investment has been repaid by the action blockbuster becoming Netflix’s second most-watched in-house movie ever after less than two weeks, and it’s going to smash almost every conceivable viewership record.
On the other side of the coin, there’s Quibi, which folded after less than a year despite a billion-dollar investment and a ton of star names boarding various short-form projects. Given the wealth of major brands at the company’s disposal, creating top tier film and television content for Disney Plus doesn’t come cheap, but even then, the latest numbers are a shock.
The Hollywood Reporter noticed that an SEC filing revealed Disney Plus was set to funnel an eye-watering $33 billion into its lineup of movies and TV shows for streaming in 2022 alone, which is quite frankly astounding. Sure, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars can’t be made for buttons, but that’s a lot of cash to be plowing into a library that doesn’t yet boast a roster of classics that were designed and created for the platform from the ground up.
