Latest in Disney

Disney is replacing Bob Iger, who will soon wrap up his decades-long tenure at the company, with Susan Arnold as chairman of the board. The move takes effect when Iger formally exits on December 31. Arnold has been a member of the board for 14 years. Iger, who passed the CEO baton to Bob Chapek in February 2020 and…

Kenneth Branagh’s upcoming feature Belfast star Máiréad Tyers is to play the lead in Disney+ superhero comedy Extraordinary alongside Poldark’s Sofia Oxenham and Derry Girls’  Siobhán McSweeney. Production commenced today on Killing Eve producer Sid Gentle Films’ eight-part irreverent comedy, which stars Tyers as Jen…

Comcast and the Walt Disney Co. have reached a multi-year agreement for carriage of Disney’s TV channels on Xfinity platforms, including the addition of the ACC Network. The renewal is a significant one for both media giants and comes at a time of rising tension in the distribution trenches. Cord-cutting has shrunken…

UK ratings body BARB has revealed a “once in a generation” upgrade that can show how many people are watching the biggest shows on SVoD platforms. A preview unveiled this morning showed that the seventh episode of Netflix’s Squid Game was watched by 5.8M people last month, ranking the South Korean mega hit 10th in the…

EXCLUSIVE: Ivanna Sakhno (Pacific Rim: Uprising) has been cast opposite Rosario Dawson and Natasha Liu Bordizzo in the Disney+ limited series Star Wars: Ahsoka, a spinoff from the streamer's hit series The Mandalorian, I have learned. In the limited series, Dawson stars as Ahsoka Tano after making the Star Wars: The Cl…

The first episode of Marvel’s Hawkeye on Disney+ drew 1.5M U.S. households over the Wednesday-Sunday holiday stretch, while 1.3M stuck around and watched the second episode. This is according to the latest streaming viewership stats from Samba TV which measures 3M U.S. households, and what they watch on streaming…

“I am Boba Fett, left for dead on the sands of Tatooine” says the bounty hunter in a voiceover in a new teaser trailer for Disney+s The Book of Boba Fett. “Jabba ruled with fear. I intend to rule with respect.” The clip teases that fateful moment in Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of The Jedi when Boba fell into the…

An episode of The Simpsons in which the family visits Tiananmen Square is missing from Disney+’s Hong Kong platform. Episode 12 of season 16 was found today to be absent from the streamer’s catalogue in the nation, which launched in Hong Kong earlier this month. The episode features the family going to China to try to…

“I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we’ve passed the audition,” says John Lennon near the end of The Beatles: Get Back, premiering on Disney+ today. Almost all fans of the Fab Four have seen the quip from Lennon in the 1970 Let It Be movie as the band finishes up their last ever…

ESPN, a longtime cornerstone of the Walt Disney Co., continues to lose lucrative pay-TV distribution, shrinking another 10% to end fiscal 2021 at 76 million U.S. households. Citing Nielsen, Disney provided the number as part of its annual report, filed with the SEC this afternoon. The company operates on a fiscal…

Disneyland said today that a second of its four categories of new Magic Key annual passes has sold out, leaving only the two most heavily restricted types of passes available. One of those remaining types is for Southern California residents only. That means out-of-state guests have only one option: the Enchant Key…

Significant funding and job cuts, multiple crises and “persistent attacks from the press” have left BBC staff feeling “beleaguered,” according to BBC Chair Richard Sharp. Delivering a keynote at today’s Voice of the Listener & Viewer conference, Sharp also warned “there will be consequences” for program budgets if the…