Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Well… that didn’t last long. Just a little over a year after Netflix announced an exclusive partnership with Disney, one that would guarantee the streaming service exclusive access to the House of Mouse’s big movies, Disney has announced that they’re getting into the streaming game. That means bye-bye Netflix, hello whatever-Disney-decides-to-call-its-streaming-service.
This is a major bummer for Netflix subscribers, as that Disney deal has brought in titles from Pixar (Finding Dory), Marvel (Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange), Lucasfilm (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story), and Disney proper (Moana, Pete’s Dragon, Zootopia, The Jungle Book) over recent months. Netflix just started delivering the Disney goods, and now it’s all over! This is worth freaking out about!
In 2019.
That’s right, 2019. Take a deep breath, relax, and keep adding Disney flicks to your queue. While it’s definitely a bummer that Disney and Netflix are drifting apart, Captain America and his rebellion of anthropomorphic animals aren’t moving for a while. Your family will get to hang with Moana and visit Zootopia for another year.
With that in mind, here are just a few of the 2017 and 2018 movies that you’ll still be able to watch on Netflix over the next year and a half: Beauty and the Beast, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Cars 3, Thor: Ragnarok, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, A Wrinkle In Time, and many, many others.
Details about Disney’s streaming service are still up in the air, which is to be expected since they just dropped that bombshell earlier this week. What is known right now, though, is that Disney’s deal with Netflix ends with the start of their 2019 film slate. Disney-owned streaming services for ESPN and Disney content will arrive in 2018 and 2019, respectively. It’s still so early in the process that Disney isn’t even sure what’s going to end up on their streaming service. The Disney and Pixar movies will definitely end up there, but Disney CEO Bob Iger is still not sure where Disney-owned franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars will end up. They could end up exclusive to the Disney service, or they might keep fighting the good fight on third-party platforms.
And while it’ll definitely require some budget adjustments, it might actually be really great having a Disney-only streaming service–especially if they bring all of the Marvel and Star Wars films with them. As our own Kayla Cobb found out, the Marvel movies are spread out further than the Nine Realms. It would cost anywhere from $100 to $500 just to watch (or own) all of them! If this streaming service means that we finally get a real MCU streaming service, then that’s pretty rad. Even if it just means all the Disney films–everything from Snow White to Moana–on one service, that’s enough to make me hum “Hakuna Matata.”
Still, we’ve got at least a year and a half to before this happens, and Disney’s got a lot of time to make their plans clear. In the meantime, take this (modified) advice from Dory and just keep streaming.
