By now we all know that lockdowns suck. Thankfully, there are a lot of ways to alleviate the boredom: reading a good book, learning a new skill, or even making your own COVID-19 masks. Oh yeah, and let’s not forget this one: watching a boatload of streaming content.
And judging by Disney Plus’s latest subscriber numbers, we all seem to be doing a ton of the latter. As Deadline reports, Disney has announced that it now has more than 50 million paid Disney Plus subscribers across the globe. That’s up five-fold from when the service launched just five months ago and up an astonishing 75% since the end of February when Disney revealed the service had 29 million subscribers.
While lockdowns are expected to have definitely contributed to that surge in subscribers, a few other factors explain the recent rise. The first is that at the end of March Disney Plus launched in another eight countries, all in Europe. Disney Plus also launched in India last week. And then there’s the fact that Disney Plus is slowly getting more quality content that’s drawing more users to the service, such as the global hit Frozen 2. Disney has also announced that at least one film, Artemis Fowl, once bound for the cinema before the COVID-19 pandemic took over, will launch on its streaming service instead, with chairman Bob Iger recently saying Disney could debut more films on the service in the future.
All this means that Disney Plus now seems to be a more attractive option from a value proposition standpoint, especially considering the service is only $6.99 a month. When Disney Plus launched last November, the company said it hoped to have between 60 million and 90 million subscribers by 2024. But if things keep up the way they’re going now, it looks like Disney Plus could hit at least the lower end of the range later this year.
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