Marvel Studios
Baby Yoda will be back in October.
On Tuesday Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed the release dates for two upcoming Marvel shows coming to Disney+ and gave fans a firmer release window for the second season of “The Mandalorian.”
During an earnings call, Iger said “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” will arrive on the service in August, “WandaVision” will appear in December and “The Mandalorian” will return in October.
The release date reveal comes just days after the company gave fans a brief glimpse of those upcoming Marvel shows in an ad that ran during the Super Bowl on Sunday. The brief promotion also included a clip from 2021’s “Loki.”
Disney had a multipronged strategy ahead of its November launch of Disney+. The company released a number of high-profile films in theaters — “Captain Marvel,” “Avengers: Endgame,” “Aladdin” and “Toy Story 4,” among others — and teased new shows from franchises like Star Wars and Marvel, as well as sequels to beloved TV shows like “Lizzie McGuire.”
The company also promised to have hundreds of movies and TV shows from its catalog available on the service, including classics like “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Bambi” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Some of the films now available on Disney+ have been locked away in the Disney vault for year, unavailable to be purchased.
“The Mandalorian” was Disney’s flagship show. While it released few original series during the Disney+ launch, this was the one that garnered the most attention. The Child character, which many have dubbed Baby Yoda, took the internet by storm and enticed Star Wars fans and casual viewers to tune in each week to watch new episodes.
Some analysts feared that Disney would see a big drop off in subscriptions after “The Mandalorian” aired its eighth and final season one episode in December, however, the company said it didn’t see customers flee the service.
“We were actually heartened by the fact that after the original episodes [of “The Mandalorian”] were all made available, we really didn’t see significant churn from that,” Iger told Julia Boorstin on CNBC’s “Closing Bell” on Tuesday. “We continue to see subscriber growth from the end of the year.”
Additionally, the company revealed Tuesday that Disney+ had grown its subscribers to 26.5 million by the end of the quarter, up from the 10 million sign-ups it had registered by Nov. 12, the day of its launch. Most analysts had predicted Disney would report 25 million subscribers.
As of Monday, the streaming service had reached 28.6 million paid subscribers, Iger added.
He also said that 65% of the people who watched “The Mandalorian” watched at least 10 other programs on the service and 50% of subscribers watched movies on the service.
The strong subscriber numbers and the fact that viewers are sticking around to watch other programs on the service bodes well for Disney, especially as it slowly doles out new and original content.
“Clearly the original shows that we decide to invest in led by “The Mandalorian” have worked and we knew at launch that we are launching with a modest amount of original programming and that it would build over time. So as we look ahead, we are really comfortable with the volume of product that we are creating and don’t really feel that there is much we have to adjust to right now.”
Iger told Boorstin that Disney+ will never be a “pure volume play” and will “be about high quality.”
