Is that a good thing?
We’re still a few months away from the full release of Disney+, a brand-new streaming service that will start at $6.99/month (with just one ad-free option, similar to Hulu). It’s like Netflix, but with tons of newer Disney and Pixar films, short films, new original content, and the entire Disney Vault.
I’ve mentioned the service plenty of times before on this site, but it’s worth reminding just how enticing this service will be for Pixar fans. Next year, Disney+ will debut Monsters at Work, a spinoff series of Monsters Inc. with some of the original voice cast returning (of course, Mike and Sully aren’t the main characters).
Upon launch, it looks like some new short form content from Pixar will debut, including Forky Asks a Question, a series of clips highlighting the confusion and curiosity behind everyone’s favorite utensil from Toy Story 4. Later, the service will release Lamp Life, a short film about what Bo Peep was up to in between Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 4. It’s probably safe to assume Disney+ will also contain Pixar’s entire collection of short films and maybe even SparkShorts.
But what about all the movies? The service will include 18 out of 21 Pixar films at launch, excluding the three most recent ones: Toy Story 4, Incredibles 2, and Coco. According to Disney, those films will come along later. And there will be two more exclusive streaming series in addition to Monsters at Work, but we don’t know much about those yet.
It’s easy to compare Disney+ to Netflix, but it will probably feel more like the experience of using Hulu, especially if you pay for the version with ads. It’s also strange to see Disney fully embracing Pixar as one of its crucial content branches, perhaps on the level of Marvel and Star Wars. Their in-house-mouse animation arm is still intact of course (lest we forget the release of Frozen 2 this year), but Pixar’s healthy catalogue of beloved characters and stories is looking more and more like a contained universe of branded content Disney wants to expand even further, perhaps in an attempt to bridge the gap between entertainment for kids and adults.
And we can already see the ways in which Disney+ might be impacting Pixar as an animation studio. Toy Story 4 didn’t have a short film attached to it, breaking tradition, and though this was downplayed by the filmmakers as incidental, it’s easy to wonder if resources for short films are being stretched to other places. Pixar isn’t producing the content for these new original series, but they are contributing, apparently.
This makes me curious. Would you rather see a short film from Pixar, or a season of a Pixar-adjacent show on Disney+? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below, because until we see one of these shows, any guess is as good as mine.
I’d rather see an adjacent Pixar show, for sure. We’ve had quite a few shorts, but now I want to see how Pixar stories would look serialized
Me and my 5 year old son just love disney <3
Disney creates real stars though.
It’s a good thing.