Tuesday, 20 February 2024 12:35

Exclusive: Disney & Sony Ink Deal for Sony to Take Over Disney’s Physical Media Production, Disney Movie Club to Shut Down as a Result

There are some significant developments happening within the home video industry of late, developments that I’ve been spending a lot of time investigating and really digging into these past few weeks here at The Digital Bits.

Disney and Sony have just inked a major deal for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment to take over all of Disney’s physical media production going forward. This means that Sony will handle and oversee the actual authoring and compression of discs, work with the replicators and packaging vendors, and oversee the titles as they go out to the distributors and on to retailers.

The deal makes sense for Disney for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that Sony is far more efficient and cost-effective at producing their discs, whereas Disney’s physical media operation has been subject to no small amount of internal/organizational turmoil recently. First, they were trimmed down in late 2019 and early 2020, after Disney’s infamous and year-long 4K Ultra HD catalog title blow-out, then they were subject to many of the cost-cutting pressures and personnel losses that all the majors suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It hasn’t helped that the studio’s physical media operation—which is now almost an afterthought in the shadow of its Disney+ business and activities—has been organizationally tied to Disney’s digital and streaming operation ever since. Based on reporting from multiple sources, what this has meant in recent months is that virtually every decision about which catalog titles to release on disc, and which features to include on them, not to mention every technical decision that naturally arises during the course of the production of those titles, requires scores of people to be involved at Disney. And the people who are actually working on the discs don’t have decision-making power about anything—they have to kick decisions upstairs to their bosses, who have to kick it upstairs to their bosses, and so on. Multiple levels of management are involved, which means that decisions that should take two people five minutes instead take thirty people a week or more.

What’s more, with Disney’s constant cost-cutting, the studio’s physical media operation has been struggling. This deal with Sony is seen as a strategic move to streamline and improve the efficiency of Disney’s physical media production.

As a result of this deal, the Disney Movie Club is set to shut down. Members of the club will no longer be able to purchase Disney movies through the club. This marks a significant shift in Disney’s distribution strategy, as the company continues to focus on its digital and streaming business.

Overall, this deal signifies a major shift in the home video industry and will likely have a significant impact on the production and distribution of physical media for Disney movies in the future.