7Park Data consultancy claims Disney would have raised about 261 million dollars in the US alone with its PVOD premiere.
Last Tuesday, August 4, Disney surprised everyone by announcing that its live-action version of Mulan would be released in PVOD format through its Disney+ platform and with a price of 29 dollars in the US (and around 26 dollars internationally) .
The premiere of Mulan in theaters was originally scheduled for March 27 and was one of Disney’s big bets for this year.
However, the closure of movie theaters around the world due to the coronavirus pandemic led the company to first delay its premiere and, given the difficulty of taking it to the cinema before the end of the year, to premiere it under a PVOD model.
The decision was undoubtedly risky considering the frontal opposition of theaters to digital premieres and the short self-imposed window of the film: three months (as of December 4 it will be free for Disney+ subscribers).
And what was the result? At the moment, the company has not revealed official figures. However, consulting firm 7Park Data published a report in which it ensures that 29% of US households subscribing to Disney+ bought the film between September 4 and September 12.
According to the latest official update of numbers, Disney+ has 60 million subscribers worldwide. The problem is that Disney does not publicly distinguish between subscribers by country.
So, starting from the premise that of those 60 million, at least half should be in the US, 7Park Data concludes that Mulan would have generated 261 million dollars of revenue for Disney in the US alone.
The result would thus be an unprecedented success for Disney and an unparalleled accolade for the PVOD model: in April Jeff Shell, CEO of NBCUniversal, revealed that the digital premiere of Trolls World raised US $ 100 million, a figure that had already been considered historical.
