Disney plans to spend at least $5bn in the UK and continental Europe over the next five years to produce blockbuster movies and TV shows, its European boss said, with the success of the film Deadpool & Wolverine showing there is life in the superhero genre yet.
Last summer, analysts and media executives were declaring the end of superhero franchises after movies such as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania struggled to recover their costs, with critics savagely attacking a lack of original thought from Marvel’s many spin-offs.
A year on, the third instalment of Marvel’s satirical Deadpool franchise has proved a breakout box office hit for parent Disney, as it commits to further investment in Europe to generate future successes.
“[The genre] seems to have a lot of life left,” said Jan Koeppen, president of Disney across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, reflecting on the success of Deadpool & Wolverine. The movie, produced in the UK’s Pinewood Studios, attracted almost $900mn in box office revenues ahead of its third weekend, notching up the highest-grossing opening for an R-rated film ever.
Meanwhile, Inside Out 2 — launched earlier this year — has become the highest-grossing animated film of all time with more than $1.5bn in global revenues, boosting Disney’s earnings after a series of cinema misfires.
“We feel like we’re really on a roll again with movies, which is fantastic. I’ve been positive about people going to the movies again, and especially enjoying our movies,” Koeppen said.
Koeppen is responsible for movies, television, the streaming platform Disney+ and licensing in more than 130 markets. Sitting in offices in London’s Hammersmith that are populated by life-sized versions of Disney characters — including a model of the Millennium Falcon’s cockpit — he said the UK and continental Europe would be an important driver of future production for the US studio.
Disney uses Pinewood to make many of its biggest films and has spent about $3.5bn during the past five years on production in the UK. All nine Skywalker saga movies were filmed in Britain (Andor, last year’s Star Wars spin-off, used London’s Barbican as a backdrop for a planet in the distant future).
Now, the company will commit about $1bn a year in the UK and continental Europe over the next five years, according to Koeppen, across films, Disney+, National Geographic and other TV productions.
Four films are already either being finished or scheduled for production at Pinewood. Work has just been completed on Snow White, which will be followed by The Fantastic Four: First Steps, The Roses and The Amateur, starring Rami Malek. A new Star Wars film has also been planned.
“We are probably one of the fastest-growing media companies in [Europe, the Middle East and Africa],” said Koeppen. “We have been over the past few years, and . . . we have a lot more growth ahead of us.”
Crucial to Disney’s plan is the continued focus on driving subscriptions for Disney+, which launched four years ago in Europe. Media analysts see the platform as one of the more likely winners in an increasingly crowded market.
Disney+ is the third-largest subscription streaming service across the US, Australia, UK, Germany, Spain and France, according to Kantar, which ranks the Disney-owned Hulu and ESPN+ separately. Together, Disney’s three streaming services reported their first quarterly profit on Wednesday, earlier than the company had forecast.
“We are young. We’re constantly looking at how we’re going to evolve it and make it better,” said Koeppen.
More than half of subscribers globally were adults without children, he said. The Bear and Japanese historical drama Shogun have been recent standout TV hits, while older shows such as The Simpsons and medical drama Grey’s Anatomy have proved to be big draws for new customers.
The latter, he said, showed how high-quality older content remained important. A typical European viewer of Grey’s Anatomy watched more than 120 hours of the show, he said, indicating a loyal audience for a series that started airing 20 years ago. “It’s still very much alive and kicking.”
Disney faces intense competition from streaming rivals such as Warner Bros Discovery’s Max and Paramount+, alongside Netflix and Amazon Prime, but Koeppen said it had an advantage in producing its own content. “We’ve always had amazing content, and that is what really will make us win in the end,” he said.
Disney has in the past used its streaming service as a place to debut its films but Koeppen said “post pandemic, movies have gone to the cinema first”. He is hoping that films including the next Aliens instalment and Mufasa: The Lion King will be success stories this year.
Disney also commissions shows made by local production companies across Europe. Next for the UK will be a TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s novel Rivals, while Koeppen is confident about the success of another adaptation — The Lions of Sicily — in Italy. The German-born, Brussels-educated executive said Disney monitored how each of these shows tracked in various markets before deciding where to push them globally.
Disney brands are also used in other parts of the entertainment market, with theatres hosting on-stage versions of The Lion King in Europe and plans for a stage musical of Hercules being developed.
Koeppen said European markets such as Spain were centres of talent for TV and film production, due to tax advantages and investments in infrastructure. He compared this with countries that were imposing quotas on local production levels, such as France.
The French system, which stipulates how many domestic movies need to be made and when films can be shown, was “uniquely complicated and complex . . . it restricts competition and it restricts consumer choice”, he said. “We normally want to get our content to customers in the way that they can best enjoy it.”
Koeppen said Disney was working with authorities in France to see if the system could be “modernised . . . we’ll work with the different parties to see if that can be done”.
Disney is separately investing in other parts of its European business, spending €2bn to expand Disneyland Paris. The theme park will have roughly doubled in size when finished.
The US media group is also one of the largest cruise ship makers in Europe, with five vessels built in either Germany or Italy so far, and four to come. These themed ships head to destinations around the US, Caribbean and Asia. “People who go on their Disney cruises absolutely love them,” said Koeppen.
