Disney Reassembled: Lessons Learned from Netflix, Marvel, and Pixar Branding (in progress)

This book analyzes the industry logic behind the strategies employed by Disney , offering an account of why the Walt Disney Company incrementally changed its approach to streaming between 2016 and the present. Today, Disney not only continues the longstanding Walt Disney strategy of dividing its content into branded hubs, but it also utilizes Netflix’s taste cluster approach to maintaining viewers through content hubs of seemingly unrelated sitcoms, films, and originals. Although Disney only recently began to offer some thematic content hubs, the site’s library is ripe for taste cluster curation whether one watches all the content associated with a single figure (e.g., Lin-Manuel Miranda or Pete Docter) or clusters content based on theme such content inflected with what I call “high-key melancholy.” I use the term to signal the juxtaposition of the surface brightness and foundational melancholy of characters and/or themes in much of the recent Pixar and Marvel output. The book begins withan analysis of Walt Disney’s deal with Netflix, its original streaming provider, delineating the taste cluster approach and its difference from WDC’s brandcentric approach of the 2010s. It examines why sitcoms have been particularly valuable library assets for each company and its streaming platform.