what Disney’s failure with Mulan taught us in 2020

Netflix’s purchase of Warner reopens the debate about film exhibition windows. Warner’s primary (audiovisual) business has been focused on theatrical releases while Netflix’s is streaming. It only relies on limited releases with a two-week run when it wants to bid for awards and out of strict necessity, so the debate is open: what is going to happen now with the Warner licenses?

Reproducing the current model seems impossible, adhering to the restrictions of the big red N, commercial suicide. It is time to remember what others did before and why they failed… if we want to find a beneficial formula for all parties.

The 2020 COVID pandemic brought us many disappointments but, particularly for cinemas, it was devastating until we massively embraced the #YoVoyAlCine maxim when they reopened and it was demonstrated that there was no risk of contagion by following some basic instructions. But the unusualness of the situation also became a breeding ground for experimentation. Why not try to make films profitable in another way, taking advantage of the captive audience and the incessant search for novelties?

The redesign of the release format mutated from film to film: Disney Plus released the live action film Mulan directly on its platform through an additional service called “Premier Access”, which cost 21.99 euros. It is estimated that approximately 9 million households in the US paid to see the film in the first nine days since its release (September 4 to 12, 2020), generating approximately 220 million in revenue. This represented about 29% of the platform’s US subscribers at the time. In Spain, we have no data to rely on: the company chose not to break down performance figures into individual markets, suggesting that it was not the best idea in the world.

In fact, the next one to arrive, Soulin December 2020 it did so at no additional cost, as part of the standard subscription.

But Disney did not discard its “Premium Access” service so quickly: in 2021 it would continue to offer subscribers to watch film premieres from home by paying an additional cost to the usual subscription, although sometimes they were simultaneous hybrid premieres in cinema and platform.

It was the case of Raya and the last dragonthe live action version of Cruella starring Emma Stone, Black Widow y Jungle Cruise.

All of them became available to all Disney Plus subscribers at no additional cost after a few months. But be that as it may, the idea did not prosper much further. Simply put, the subscribers should not have endorsed the plan, in addition to the ordeal it meant for the creators, especially those at Pixar, who bitterly lamented that their films did not appear on the big screen, the place for which they had been conceived in the first place. Luca in 2021 or Lightyear y Redalready in 2022, they would not go through theaters and would go directly to streaming without extra costs on this occasion.

Since 2024 and after having the exhibitors’ union on its hands for several consecutive years, Disney reversed its policy of direct-to-platform releases, prioritizing theatrical releases for its large animated and Marvel productions, such as Inside out 2 y Deadpool and Wolverine which, by the way, were box office hits. Most of the films that came to Disney Plus were documentaries, concerts or limited series presented as original films for the platform.

Nothing is set in stone, but it doesn’t hurt to learn from the past. The most sensible option may not be the one being considered that all the films released by Netflix have a mini-window of 17 days before becoming part of its catalog because this would kill the cinema. The same thing is to have a flexible window system depending on each title, its box office projection and its reception by the public.

With as much technology as we have today, it should not be difficult to identify markers and define the parameters to guarantee better performance in one way or another. How many times have you thought that you would have liked to see a movie on the big screen and that on the contrary there are others that inexplicably only remain in the cinema circuit with a very short life?