‘Mulan’ to Stream Disney+ in the U.S. at Premium Price
Mulan is one of Hollywood tentpoles whose spring and summer release dates delayed several times due to the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent theater closures.
It is also the first time Disney has offered a film on Disney+ at a top-tier price, thus creating its own premium video-on-demand service at a time when PVOD is gaining strength across the industry because of COVID-19.
Mulan will be made available to Disney+ customers in Canada, New Zealand, Australia and many Western European countries.
Niki Caro directed the live-action adaptation that stars Crystal Liu as Mulan, a woman disguising herself as man to spare her elderly father from military service.
In territories where it doesn’t debut on the streaming service, Mulan will be offered to cinemas.
Of all the major Hollywood studios, Disney has been viewed as the biggest proponent of theatrical windows. In a call with investors, Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Chapek stressed that Mulan is a “one-off.” Yet he also addressed the potential of PVOD.
“We’re very pleased to be able to bring Mulan to our consumer base that has been waiting for it for a long, long time as we’ve had to unfortunately move our theatrical date several times,” Chapek said. “We are looking at Mulan as one-off as opposed to saying there is some new business windowing model that we are looking at.”
“We find it very interesting to be able to take a new offering to consumers at that $29.99 price and learn from it and see what happens not only in terms of the uptick of the number of subscribers we got on the platform, but also the number of transactions we get on that PVOD offering,” Chapek continued.
Mulan was originally set to hit the big screen on March 27 but was delayed three more times before Disney unscheduled the pic.