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Disney Plus: What to know about Shang-Chi, Eternals, Disney Plus Day and everything else

Disney Plus is turning its birthday into a marketing campaign, and Shang-Chi is finally showing up to stream. Here's everything to know.

08 Nov 2021, 18:59 by Joan E. Solsman · CNET

Disney Plus stood out as a breakaway success among a wave of new streaming services, thanks in part to its large library of shows and movies and a widening pipeline of originals and exclusives. This week, Disney Plus is rolling out a marketing campaign to renew some buzz about the service. On Friday, this so-called Disney Plus Day will coordinate some deals across Disney's empire, release some new programming on the service itself and drop trailers and other peeks of shows and movies to come.

As part of the campaign, both Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Jungle Cruise will be available to stream at no added cost Friday.

And in the case of Shang-Chi, it's the first time the movie will be available to stream at all. Marvel's Eternals hit theaters Friday without any streaming option either, but movies like Jungle Cruise and Black Widow were available on Disney Plus earlier in the pandemic (for a fee).

See at Disney Plus

Most programming on Disney Plus -- like Luca, Loki, The Mandalorian, WandaVision and almost everything else -- is available to watch at no added cost to subscribers. But a few theatrical movies, including Jungle Cruise, Black Widow and Cruella, were different. They debuted on the service through what Disney calls its Premier Access model, which made them available to stream the same day the films hit theaters but required a $30 payment on top of the regular price of a Disney Plus subscription.

Now, though, Disney's latest theatrical releases are hitting cinemas exclusively at first, casting doubt on whether Disney Plus will keep this Premier Access, same-day streaming option alive for any more movies in the future.

Something else to keep in mind: Disney Plus eliminated its seven-day free trial for new members last year.

Read on for all the details about Disney Plus' movies, shows, prices, deals and bundles.

What is Disney Plus Day?

Essentially, it's a marketing campaign. It's all centered on Friday, which marks the two-year anniversary of Disney Plus' launch. It's new this year. Last year, during the pandemic, Disney Plus didn't do much to mark its birthday.

But this year, all corners of Disney's empire are going to be taking part in this Disney Plus Day marketing campaign.

As far as Disney Plus itself, Friday's "event" will be marked by a number of new shows, movies and specials that are available to stream on the service. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will be available to stream there for the first time, and Jungle Cruise will be "free" to stream on the service for the first time (though, of course, you still have to pay for a subscription). Off the service, Disney is also expected to release a bunch of trailers and other sneak peeks of programming that will stream on Disney Plus down the road.

Elsewhere in Disney's universe, the company is coordinating some other perks for anyone who is a Disney Plus subscriber. These perks run the gamut, like letting Disney Plus subscribers enter Walt Disney World Resort and Disneyland Resort 30 minutes before the parks open on Friday, and offering Disney Plus members free shipping at the ShopDisney online store.

What is Shang-Chi's streaming release date on Disney Plus?

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will become available to stream on Disney Plus on Friday at no extra cost to subscribers, after it was released in theaters exclusively starting Sept. 3. (Jungle Cruise is also joining the regular Disney Plus catalog on Friday.)

Previously during the pandemic, Disney released all its new movies on Disney Plus in some way. A number of new flicks, like its latest Pixar movies Luca and Soul, skipped theaters entirely and were available to stream on Disney Plus at no extra cost. Others -- like the latest Marvel movie before Shang-Chi, Black Widow -- hit theaters and Disney Plus the same day, available to stream only by paying an extra $30 fee known as Premier Access.

But Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is getting back to the pre-pandemic norm of theatrical exclusives. It's the first Marvel movie released only in theaters since Sony's Spider-Man: Far from Home came out in July 2019.

Is Marvel's Eternals streaming on Disney Plus?

No, Eternals -- the latest star-packed Marvel movie in the superhero franchise -- hit theaters exclusively on Friday. It isn't available to stream, not on Disney Plus, HBO Max or anywhere else.

Eternals also doesn't have a confirmed streaming release date yet.

But here's what we know, and some educated guesses about what to expect:

Disney is planning for Eternals to be in theaters exclusively for at least 45 days after its debut Friday. For that reason, Disney is highly unlikely to drop Eternals on Disney Plus this week, even if it is trying to drum up attention to the service with its Disney Plus Day campaign.
Disney Plus will be the only service that will (eventually) stream Eternals when it does become available, but we have no real guidance as to when. It may come to Disney Plus immediately after the 45-day theatrical window, or it may take longer while Eternals is released as an online rental and in other formats.
It's unlikely (but possible) Eternals will be available to stream earlier than Shang-Chi was, which was after about 70 days in theaters.
Shang-Chi's streaming strategy may be an indicator of how Disney will approach Eternals' Disney Plus release timing. But because Shang-Chi's Disney Plus release is linked to a marketing campaign (see above), Shang-Chi may not be a reliable precedent for how Disney will approach the streaming timing for Eternals.
But if (a big "if") Eternals follows the playbook of Shang-Chi, then it would arrive on Disney Plus about 70 days after its theatrical release, which would time the Eternals' Disney Plus availability around Jan. 11.

Then again, it could take many months for Eternals to start streaming. Before the pandemic, new Disney movies would make their way to Disney Plus about five to eight months after they premiered in theaters. If Disney returns to that norm, it's possible subscribers could be waiting until summer 2022 to start streaming Eternals.

It's more likely Eternals will become available to stream on Disney Plus much earlier than the pre-pandemic norm. Unfortunately, we won't know for certain until Disney confirms its streaming plan for Eternals, and the company isn't likely to do that for a while.

See it at Disney Plus

Will Disney keep releasing its new movies in theaters and on Disney Plus at the same time?

We don't know, but for the time being, no future theatrical movies are planned to get same-day releases on Disney Plus.

During the pandemic, Disney Plus introduced this Premier Access model to sell streaming access to new, big-screen movies. It was a way to get the movie out to wider audiences while cinemas were shuttered or open at a fraction of their normal capacity. So far, Disney has released several movies this way: the live-action remake of Mulan, animated fantasy Raya and the Last Dragon, live-action prequel Cruella, Marvel's Black Widow and live-action adventure Jungle Cruise.

But as restrictions have eased, Disney reintroduced theatrical-only windows starting in August. Free Guy, a sci-fi comedy from Disney's 20th Century Studios, was released in theaters exclusively for 45 days in mid-August. Then Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was released Sept. 3 in theaters exclusively for at least 45 days as well. Though Free Guy isn't expected to stream anytime soon on Disney Plus, Shang-Chi is coming to Disney Plus on Friday -- that's about 70 days after its theatrical release, even though Disney reserved only 45 days as a theatrical exclusive.

Typically, before the pandemic, new Disney movies would make their way to Disney Plus about five to eight months after they premiered in theaters.

But for some of its upcoming smaller movies, Disney plans to simply switch films originally planned for theaters to be Disney Plus originals instead, skipping theaters entirely. This strategy mostly applies to midbudget movies, including Pinocchio, a live-action remake starring Tom Hanks; its Peter Pan reboot; Disenchanted, a sequel to Enchanted that'll have Amy Adams reprise her princess role; and Sister Act 3, reviving the comedy franchise about nuns.

What's the next Marvel show on Disney Plus?

The next live-action Marvel series -- that is, one similar to Loki, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and WandaVision -- is likely to be Hawkeye. Disney Plus has confirmed that Hawkeye will debut on Nov. 24. It's possible the service could release Ms. Marvel in advance of that by surprise. It hasn't given a release date for Ms. Marvel other than to say it'll be out sometime before the end of the year. But more likely than not, Ms. Marvel will arrive after Hawkeye and possibly be delayed until sometime next year.

The Hawkeye series stars Jeremy Renner, reprising his role from the movies. The show will add the character Kate Bishop, who in the comics becomes a second Hawkeye; Hailee Steinfeld is playing the role.

Ms. Marvel is also introducing a new character into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the comic books, the Ms. Marvel character was first incarnated by Carol Danvers, who later took up the identity of Captain Marvel. Then the name was most recently passed on to Kamala Khan, a teen protege of Danvers who is Marvel's first Muslim character to headline her own comic book.

Does Disney Plus have a free trial? Or other free offers?

Disney Plus no longer offers a standard free trial. It eliminated its one-week free trial program in June 2020, shortly before the premiere of Hamilton.

Right now until Sunday, Disney Plus is offering one month of the service for $2, essentially a $6 value.

But other deals may unlock Disney Plus free (or at no added cost).

For example, Disney and Verizon have a deal that gives a free year of Disney Plus starting on launch day to all the carrier's customers with a 4G LTE or 5G unlimited account, as well as new customers of Verizon's Fios and 5G home internet services. Those who prepurchased a Disney Plus plan such as the now-expired three-year discounted subscription deal can stack their one free year on top of it, according to a Verizon FAQ.

Amazon Music Unlimited is also offering a deal for new subscribers to its streaming music service to unlock up to six months of Disney Plus free.

How much does Disney Plus cost?

In the US, the Disney Plus service costs $8 a month, or $80 a year. The standalone Disney Plus service costs comparable amounts in other countries in their local currencies.

Disney Plus' US price deeply undercuts the $14 monthly fee for Netflix's most popular plan in the US, which lets you stream to two different devices simultaneously in high definition. But Disney Plus allows all subscribers to stream to four devices and access 4K content at no extra cost -- features Netflix charges $18 a month to unlock its premium tier.

Way back in 2017, Disney's then-CEO Bob Iger noted that Disney Plus pricing at launch would reflect the "fact that it will have substantially less volume" than prime competitor Netflix. As the months and years pass, Disney Plus is accumulating a bigger catalog of exclusives and originals. As that happens, it's widely expected the company will continue pushing its price higher.

How much is the bundle with Hulu and ESPN Plus?

The company also offers a bundle that combines Disney Plus with Hulu (with ads) and ESPN Plus, offering a discount if you subscribe to all three of those streaming services for $14 a month. Put another way, you can subscribe to all three of Disney's main streaming services for the same price as a standard Netflix subscription.

A higher tier of the bundle removes the ads from Hulu. The package with ad-free Hulu, Disney Plus and ESPN Plus will cost $6 more than the basic bundle -- equivalent to the same cost increase you'd pay to step up from ad-supported Hulu to ad-free Hulu as stand-alone services. The three-way bundle with ad-free-Hulu bundle is $20 a month.

Hulu's prices for its standalone on-demand streaming tiers went up $1 on Oct. 8, but the price of the Disney Plus/Hulu/ESPN Plus bundle didn't change.

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What other shows and movies are coming to Disney Plus?

Disney plans to flood Disney Plus and its other streaming services with shows and movies in the coming years, promising more than 100 new titles every year on Disney Plus and committing to spend $14 billion to $16 billion annually on streaming content across its services within the next four years. (That's about the same size as Netflix's budget now.) Disney Plus itself is going to get $8 billion to $9 billion of Disney's overall streaming budget.

That eye-popping budget meant Disney has announced a wave of new Star Wars originals, tons of Marvel projects and an exhausting lineup of new shows and movies. Disney laid out plans for as many as 20 new Marvel and Star Wars series. For details on them, CNET has deep dives into the announced Star Wars slate and Marvel slate, as well as coverage that generalizes the Disney Plus pipeline.

Disney Plus is also licensing some outside programming, like the popular kids animation franchise Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir. Disney Plus struck a deal for the streaming rights to Miraculous' existing three seasons, as well as two more seasons that are forthcoming.

As for big-screen movies, the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed how Disney releases its new movies on Disney Plus -- and the new normal isn't exactly clear yet. At first, Disney Plus simply started streaming already-released movies months earlier than planned, such as Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Frozen 2 and Pixar's Onward. Then Disney started ratcheting up the streaming releases of new movies, such as its film version of the award-winning musical Hamilton with most of the original Broadway cast. The Hamilton film arrived on Disney Plus more than a year before its originally planned theatrical date. Pixar's latest animated film, Soul, also went straight to Disney Plus on Christmas Day.

Then Disney introduced its Premier Access model, which sells streaming access to new, big-screen movies for an additional $30 on Disney Plus at the same time they're also available in theaters.

What shows and movies can I stream already?

Disney Plus is designed to be the exclusive home to stream theatrical films, shows and shorts from Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney's own studio and National Geographic. It also has exclusive series and films, some of which are based on those blockbuster franchises, and others that are original.

With the elimination of Disney Plus' free trial last year, potential subscribers can't sign up to check out the catalog without having to pay first. But an easy way to see what's available on Disney Plus without forking over any money is using a third-party catalog search service like Reelgood.

Disney Plus also integrates programming from Fox. All 30 seasons of The Simpsons are on Disney Plus, it's begun adding X-Men franchise films, and titles like The Sound of Music, The Princess Bride and Malcolm in the Middle live there too. (Disney has also said it'll mine the Fox catalog for reboots too, "reimagining" past Fox franchises "for a new generation" -- a reboot of Home Alone is in the works, for example.)

Generally, Disney Plus houses the entire film libraries of Pixar, Star Wars and its Signature Series and Disney Vault lines of classic hand-drawn animated movies. It has all the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies available to stream, with the exception of ones that were made by Universal or Sony. (So, that's why you won't find the Tom Holland Spider-Man films on Disney Plus, even though you can stream Holland portraying Spider-Man in Disney-made MCU movies like Avengers: Endgame.)

Because of previous licensing deals, it'll be a long time before Disney Plus is an exhaustive library of all Disney movies. CNET has a comprehensive list of the major shows and movies still coming to Disney Plus. But starting with 2019's releases, all of Disney's new theatrical films stream exclusively on Disney Plus.

Then there's the big slate of original, exclusive shows and movies for the service.

Its first major original was Star Wars spinoff The Mandalorian, a big-budget series starring Pedro Pascal that takes place five years after the events in The Return of the Jedi and focuses on a bounty-hunting gunfighter. It's the service's marquee original series and home to viral sensation Baby Yoda, who became a pop culture phenom. Disney is investing heavily in The Mandalorian. The show's budget reportedly approached $15 million per episode in the first season. By comparison, Game of Thrones didn't hit that kind of spending until its final season.

But Disney Plus originals run the gamut. The Mandalorian is a textbook example of a Disney Plus original that feeds off the company's existing franchises. But, for example, a Taylor Swift film that went behind the scenes of the recording of her Folklore album is one of the Disney Plus originals without any existing ties to Disney as a company. Disney has many shows, movies and specials like this.

Disney Plus has original documentaries, reality shows, competition series, behind-the-scenes features, nature and adventure titles, animated programming -- the list goes on. It's a place for Disney to show off short films from within the company, like via its Launchpad incubator program designed to elevate opportunities for filmmakers from underrepresented groups.

Disney Plus is even starting to stream two-dimensional versions of Disney's virtual-reality shorts.

What devices support Disney Plus?

Disney has wide device support, streaming to phones, tablets, computers, connected TVs and streaming media boxes. The company has global distribution agreements in place with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Roku, Sony, Amazon, Samsung and LG. That encompasses the makers of:

Roku's boxes, sticks and TVs.
Apple TV, iPhone and iPad.
Phones and TVs running on Android operating systems, as well as Chromecast streamers.
Xbox One.
PlayStation 4.
Amazon Fire TV devices.
Samsung smart TVs.
LG smart TVs.
Comcast X1 set-top boxes and Flex platforms.

What product features does the service include?

Disney Plus can stream 4K Ultra HD content in Dolby Vision, HDR10 and Dolby Atmos immersive audio. You can see a title's available formats in any of the Disney Plus apps by clicking to that show or movie's main page and then clicking on the "details" tab. The app for streaming boxes, like Roku and Apple TV, is also designed to briefly flash a symbol telling you the format that you're watching; it appears in the upper right corner of the screen for a few seconds when a video begins to play.

Every Disney Plus account can stream to four devices simultaneously and can create seven user profiles for different members of the household. Each account can pick an avatar of a Disney, Pixar, Marvel or Star Wars character, with more than 200 avatars available.

Disney Plus also offers unlimited mobile downloads for offline viewing. Subscribers can download to up to 10 mobile or tablet devices, with no constraints on the number of times a title can be downloaded. The number of titles stored at one time on a device depends on how much storage space is available on the device.

The service is supposed to support English, Spanish, French and Dutch at launch, including user interface as well as audio support and subtitles for library content, with additional languages available for Disney Plus originals.

The app also supports closed captioning, descriptive audio and navigation assistance to help subscribers with disabilities. (In July, the American Council of the Blind gave Disney Plus an achievement award for its descriptive audio, specialized tracks that describe the settings and the action taking place alongside a program's dialogue.)

Disney Plus offers parental controls in the form of kids profiles. You can designate any profile to be in a kids mode, which has a simplified interface designed for younger viewers. These kids profiles limit the library to programming that's rated TV-7FV and G in the US, or the equivalent ratings in other geographic markets.

And Disney has a group-watching feature, which lets you synchronize your stream of any title on Disney Plus with other accounts through the app, so you can watch a program at the same time as friends or family even if you're apart.

I was watching Disney Plus free through Verizon. What happens when that expires? How do I cancel?

For customers who signed up for Disney Plus through a Verizon promotion to unlock a free year (or another duration of time free), those subscriptions will automatically convert to the $7 monthly plan once the free period has expired.

If you keep the subscription, it will automatically start charging the $7-a-month rate through your Verizon bill. If you purchased an annual or multiyear subscription prior to redeeming the Verizon offer in 2019, then you go back to the original plan you had.

If you want to keep the subscription but are open to changing your wireless service, you could also upgrade your service to one of Verizon's so-called Play More or Get More Unlimited plans, which include Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus.

If you want to cancel, you should log into the My Verizon customer support portal and choose "Manage Disney Plus," where you should be able to cancel your service.

What about the Hulu bundle? How does Disney Plus fit in with Disney's other streaming services?

Disney Plus is a competitor to video streaming services such as Netflix, HBO Now and Apple TV Plus. It's a paid subscription without any advertising, and it gives customers access to a vast library of Disney's and Fox's legacy content as well as new, exclusive TV shows, movies, documentaries and shorts.

Disney's other US streaming services -- Hulu and sports-focused ESPN Plus -- run on the same tech platform. Disney plans for all three to be individual subscriptions, but it's offering the triple-service bundle to get discounts on all three.

Disney Plus includes all of Disney's family-friendly content and much of its mass-audience fare -- basically, anything made for audiences up to a PG-13 rating. It has content from Disney proper, Marvel, Lucasfilm (so, Star Wars), Pixar and National Geographic. And outside those traditional categories it also offers all 30 seasons of The Simpsons, a feather in its cap from the Fox takeover.

Hulu, on the other hand, is where Disney streams more-adult-oriented material. For example, two series originally planned for Disney Plus -- High Fidelity and Love, Victor -- were moved over to Hulu instead because of their more mature themes. Hulu is also the official streaming home for FX networks. (FX became part of Disney after Disney bought Fox for $71.3 billion.)

For now Hulu will continue to stream content from three of the broadcast networks, as well as its own original series.

And Disney now has full control over Hulu's direction. Hulu was jointly owned by four parent companies for years, but in 2019 Disney bought all the shares of Hulu it didn't already own. That gave Disney the flexibility to offer its bundle discount.