Disney Plus sheds 1.3 million subscribers after price hike — but expects more than 7 million Americans to sign up soon

Disney's streaming service dropped over a million subscribers in the first quarter of 2024, but executives were able to provide investors with enough good news that shares in the company jumped by around 10%.

During an earnings call for the first quarter of the fiscal year, chief financial officer Hugh Johnston dropped the bomb on investors that 1.3 million Disney+ core subscribers had left the platform since Q4 2023. However, the CFO said that it was an "expected temporary uptick in churn, given the recent domestic price increases, as well as the end of the global summer promotion."

Disney reportedly offered new and returning users a three-month subscription for just $1.99 in 2023, Bounding into Comics reported.

Disney brass stated not only that ad revenue cut into those losses but also that the newly acquired platform Hulu gained 1.2 million subscribers in the same time frame. The mouse brand picked up the remaining 33% of shares in Hulu owned by Comcast in November 2023 for around $8.6 billion.

The price increases weren't all bad for Disney+ either. The 27% hike garnered an average revenue per user increase of $0.14 since the last quarter and $1.07 compared to the prior year.

The company also expects a strong bounce back in the second quarter of 2024, netting between 5.5 and 6 million subscribers. While expecting to add 7.5 million domestic users, Disney thinks it will lose international subscribers based on "certain wholesale deals and slightly elevated churn impacts from price increases."

All this news translated to a big jump in the Walt Disney Company stock price.

After closing out February 7, 2024 (the day of the call), at around $99.28 per share, investors woke up to a price of about $107.10 per share. This marked one of the biggest stock price jumps in the last year for the company.

Of course, the $108 stock price (as of this writing) is nowhere near the $189 five-year peak the company saw in February 2021, presumably when citizens were still being forced by their governments to sit at home.

A pending lawsuit by former Disney+ star Gina Carano hasn't seemed to affect the brand at all, either. Carano spent two seasons on the Disney+ hit "Star Wars" series "The Mandalorian." Despite the success of the show and Carano's obvious popularity with fans, Disney executives fired her, claiming that some of her social media posts were not in keeping with the company's "values."

She has alleged wrongful termination and discrimination. Interestingly enough, her firing also occurred in February 2021.

According to a recent study Democrats use Disney+ at a higher rate than Republicans; 39% of Democrats subscribe to the platform versus 31% of Republicans.

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