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Bob Iger Talks Disney’s Relationship With Netflix

Disney posted its fiscal Q3 earnings on Tuesday. The company had a record quarter with earnings per share up 27% from the prior year. CEO Bob Iger said, “Our strategy of building strong brands and f...
Bob Iger Talks Disney’s Relationship With Netflix
Written by Chris Crum
  • Disney posted its fiscal Q3 earnings on Tuesday. The company had a record quarter with earnings per share up 27% from the prior year.

    CEO Bob Iger said, “Our strategy of building strong brands and franchises continues to create great value across our company. This quarter we delivered the highest EPS in the company’s history, and we’ve now generated greater EPS in the first three quarters of FY 2014 than we have in any previous full fiscal year. We’re extremely pleased with these results and we are also thrilled with the spectacular performance of Guardians of the Galaxy, which holds great promise as a new franchise for our company and once again reinforces the tremendous value of Marvel.”

    Something else that is bound to continue to help Disney’s Marvel brand is the set of shows coming to Netflix. We’re not expecting anything Guardians of the Galaxy-great with those, but it’s hard to imagine they won’t draw in the viewers.

    Late last year, Netflix and Disney announced a deal for at least four different shows and a mini series including shows about Daredevil (the first one up), Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage. The miniseries will be The Defenders. This will all stretch over multiple years starting with Daredevil in 2015.

    This is not the first time the two companies have partnered. They made a big movie distribution deal in 2012, which will see theatrically released feature films from Disney appear on Netflix starting in 2016. Netflix will be the exclusive U.S. subscription TV service for first run movies from Disney, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar Animation Studios, Marvel Studios, Disnynature, and Lucasfilm. The two companies also have a deal in Canada.

    Suffice it to say that there is a lot of Netflix in Disney’s future.

    Disney didn’t bring up Netflix in its earnings report, but was asked about it by analysts on the earnings call. Iger had this to say about the companies’ relationship:

    Netflix, we’re growing our business with Netflix, first of all because we believe in their platform and its future. And we have from the beginning, when we did the output deal with the studio and we also believe that our brands can be well monetized on their platform, which is evidenced what they are paying for our brands and our content. So as long as that continues, which I think it will, not just domestically but internationally our business is expected to be robust with them or even grow. So it’s a good combination. We’ve got brands and content that they want and they have a platform that we like and that we want and they are willing to pay the right price for our content, good prices for our content. I think it’s mutually beneficial.

    CFO Jay Rasulo added:

    I’m not going to put shadow what revenue we’ll come off with Netflix in the future but everything that Bob says I believe applies to every market that Netflix would enter in the future.

    Netflix is, of course, already offering streaming customers some Disney titles. It even exclusively got the final season of Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: Clone Wars . In the coming years, however, Disney’s presence is going to be felt much more on the service.

    You can find Disney’s full earnings release here.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

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