Don’t want to wait until 2027 for Frozen 3? Soon, you may be able to make your own.
On the company’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings conference call, Disney CEO Bob Iger said Disney+ is “in the midst of rolling out the biggest and the most significant changes — from a product perspective, from a technology perspective — since we launched the service in 2019.”
Changes will include games — or at least “a number of game-like features” — on Disney+ through its agreement with Epic Games, he said. (The Epic Games deal is actually more about Disney IP being used on Epic’s platform.) And there will also be gen-AI short-form user-generated content (UGC) on Disney+ in the future.
“The other thing that we’re really excited about, that AI is going to give us the ability to do, is to provide users of Disney+ with a much more engaged experience, including the ability for them to create user-generated content and to consume user generated content — mostly short-form — from others,” Iger continued.
Not that I love brands as a concept, but I’m pretty sure part of the Disney appeal is that they theoretically hold themselves to a higher standard. It’s wild to see them willing to degrade their brand identity like this. Don’t people just sit their kids in front of D+ feeling confident that they only get Disney approved content? This seems like a huge misstep.
Yeah, I don’t get the long-term business case here. I assume that the short term thinking is, “People are gonna generate slop of our characters anyway, so we might as well get a cut of the action” (as well as just general AI hype among credulous executives). But it’s one thing for that slop to exist in the world unauthorized, and it’s another thing for the brand owner to be like, “Hell yes, please devalue our brand! This is a good thing, actually!”
What good is a high quality brand if not to plunder and pillage?
A little bit of this, but just keep in mind that if the kids are not on a (extremely restrictive) “kids” account, the they also have access to things like, ya know, all the Deadpool movies (found that one out the rad way).