Disney expects to spend $24 billion in content in its fiscal 2025, up slightly from 2024 when the company says it spent $23.4 billion.
The company disclosed its planned content spend in its annual report.
Don’t expect a flurry of additional movies or TV shows, however, as sports programming expenses are set to rise next year thanks to contractual rate increases at the NFL, the start of the new NBA contract — which nearly doubles the previous fee — and the launch of the new ESPN flagship streaming service.
In other words, content spend may rise slightly, but it is entirely possible that Disney’s entertainment spend decreases, as The Hollywood Reported noted earlier this summer. Last November, Disney Interim CFO Kevin Lansberry also said that about 40 percent of Disney’s content spend was on sports and sports content.
In fiscal 2024, Disney had expected to spend $25 billion on content, down from $27 billion in 2023.
The content spend was initially targeted to be in the low $30 billion range for 2024, but the budget was impacted by the writers and actors strikes, as well as Iger’s new content strategy, he noted last November involved focusing on big films, which “gives us the ability to dial back a bit on some of the spending and investment in series. And that blend of spending between films and series, we believe gives us an opportunity to increase our margins and grow the business.”
In 2023, after he returned to the company, Iger led a plan to reduce content costs by the billions. While the strikes clearly had an impact, the new projection suggests that the company has been successful in reducing content costs, even as some fixed costs (like sports rights) rise.
Fiscal 2025 will have a number of key launches for Disney, including the Marvel films Captain America: Brave New World and the Thunderbolts, as well as live action remakes of Lilo & Stitch and Snow White.
On Tuesday, Casey Bloys, CEO of HBO and Max Content, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, said the company planned to have “flat” content spend in 2025, with one caveat. “We’re flat,” Bloys said. “Flat, given inflation, is down.”
Netflix spend about $17 billion per year on content, and executives there have said that they see that number as remaining roughly flat, give or take, for the time being.
Disney, it seems, is in a similar situation, if its annual report is any indication.