Consumer Information

Disney+ is now dealing with a flood of cancelations over their mismanagement of the Kimmel affair.

Instead of consulting with the marketing teams at Disney and ABC, they suspended the Kimmel‘s Emmy winning late night program, arbitrarily, and clearly did not consider that the FCC threat and undue political influence were something their legal department should have handled.

They overestimated their customer’s brand loyalty, believing people would remain loyal to Disney when in actuality a large portion of their subscribers were local to the film franchises they distributed.

For example, I joined the Disney Movie Club not for films from the Disney library but for titles from Pixar, Lucasfilms, 20th Century Fox and Marvel. And they should have known I joined Disney+ for films from those franchises because they ended their movie club in May 2024, from their marketing research.

When conservatives started boycotting Disney their data on the motivation of their customers reassured them of minimal losses because the vast majority of the customers were either already uninterested in the very specific titles that resulted in that boycott or saw no real issue with the direction of this content.

Had they compiled their data on Kimmel‘s viewers and their film preferences, they should have predicted a domino effect because these are adults that mostly view PG-13 and R films from the franchises they distribute, not family friendly films.

Yes, a good portion of their customers are parents of young children but many of the parents that subscribe to their service have only older children, whose interests lean towards PG-13 titles and the occasional, nostalgic dabble in past Disney classics.

A significant part of the latter would predictably have an unfavourable reaction to the aforementioned suspension, which would cause considerable losses when combined with the exodus of Kimmel fans. And insiders have confirmed that neither the Colbert firing at CBS and Kimmel suspension at ABC were caused by ratings.

The late night comedy audience ratings have dropped across the board because of a transition from traditional television broadcasting to streaming in viewers and the ratings being referenced by outside parties is of the live audience, not the streaming audience.

Had Kimmel truly lost favour with his audience, negotiations would not be taking place at ABC at the moment to retain Kimmel and his writers. And we are talking about someone that won Emmy Awards in 2024 and 2025, one for hosting the 96th Academy Awards in 2024.

The suspension was clearly made in haste and without consideration for the fact that the FCC’s threats were made empty by their inaction on Brian Kilmeade, who claimed the mentally ill homeless population should be given “involuntary lethal injections” and killed during a Fox & Friends segment that aired on Fox News in mid-September.

There is no FCC policy on references to murder in jest, as made apparent by the lack of prosecution against Fox News Weekend host Rachel Campos-Duffy, who chuckled as she casually referenced to the weapon used in Paul Pelosi‘s attempted murder during a Jesse Watters Primetime segment that aired on May 3rd, 2024 on Fox News.

Disney should have considered that some of their subscribers would find their rather knee jerk capitulation more objectionable than the content of Kimmel‘s “set-up” and used their marketing data to weigh the risks.

They clearly don’t back their talent, aren’t listening to their own staff and are easily swayed by vindictive politicians via distributors, whose political opinions appear to be the priority, even over that of their customers.

They clearly did not consider that it was inappropriate to impose the will of obscure companies with whom both most of their domestic and international subscribers have no commercial relationship. And they clearly didn’t think their customers would be concerned about their susceptibilities because of the “lost media” issue.

Some consumers are fine with the resolution of the blu-rays they have of their content, which can be upscaled to 4k by certain players and televisions. And they can also purchase 4k downloads so why would they think these customers would be in any was inconvenienced by unsubscribing?

Their stock value had dropped considerably from the day Kimmel was suspended, from US$116.63 on September 17th to US$112.11 on September 19th according to Google Finance, so I guess their stockholders were also concerned. And I seriously doubt they’d get many Republican investors to shelf their concerns about the alleged “woke” content at Disney and to forget the company’s resistance to the current Governor’s policies in Florida to buy Disney stocks to make it go back up.

Kimmel‘s re-introduction to ABC would help but his fans would still easily stream his content for free so former subscribers would need to be persuaded to re-join Disney+ with more significant discounts than those offered prior to subscription cancelation. And they’d also need to make those discounts available to new customers this Christmas season make up for the stubborn, former subscribers that wont re-subscribe due to mistrust.

Yearly membership gift cards with deep discounts, some with co-branding at chains like Costco or Spirit Christmas, would offset some of the losses, along with some Disney Store promotions in the states and Europe. But that will probably need to happen relatively soon.

Personally, I decided to unsubscribe because this isn’t acceptable. But I’m still hopeful because of the negotiations that are currently occurring in-between the parties involved.

—

Update – Sarah McLachlan has canceled her promotional music appearances for the Disney distributed documentary on Lilith Fair. And multiple other artists that were to perform to promote this film have followed suit.

Update – Jimmy Kimmel Live! will be returning on CityTV on September 23rd, 2025 with Sarah McLachlan as a guest.