It seems as if Walt Disney Animation Studios is getting off the Disney+ train for the foreseeable future after years of supporting the streaming service. After the entertainment giant launched Disney+ in 2019, the storied animation house began putting content on the platform in 2020. This is seemingly no longer going to be the case going forward.
The House of Mouse will clearly keep pumping money into Disney+ as it continues its lofty ambitions of taking over Netflix as the leader in streaming entertainment. The production arm that started it all back in the 1920s—before hitting the big time in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs—has been putting original content on Disney+ for a few years now. Beginning with shorts collections like How to Stay At Home and Olaf Presents, Walt Disney Animation Studios put their money where their mouths were and released two full-fledged animated series on Disney+ in 2022 with Baymax! and Zootopia+.
Related
The 2025 Disney Plus Shows We’re Most Excited For
2025 looks to be a promising year for Disney Plus, with some very exciting television shows on the horizon.
However, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Walt Disney Animation Studios is not only shelving the Tiana series that was announced way back in 2020, but is stepping away from creating longform streaming content altogether. This echoes a similar news story from last year that said Pixar would also be stepping away from creating content for Disney+, following both Win or Lose and Dream Productions. It seems as if Disney as a whole is tired of leaving money on the table to gamble with the prospect of adding subscribers that can just as easily cancel their service if dissatisfied.
The writing has been on the wall about the Tiana series for some time now. Clearly, the higher ups at Disney wanted to capitalize on the Splash Mountain attractions at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland getting a complete revamp as Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. The timeframe to make the most of those changes has come and gone as Tiana’s Bayou Adventure opened at the Magic Kingdom in June 2024 while the Disneyland incarnation debuted in November of the same year.
The larger nail in the coffin came when the Moana Disney+ miniseries was reworked into a theatrical release that earned over a billion dollars at the worldwide box office despite mixed reviews. Couple that success with the outrageous haul Inside Out 2 pulled in earlier in the year, and it’s easy to see why this pivot was made. Why would Disney keep forcing their animation houses to shuttle content to a streaming service when piles of cash can be made at theatres instead?
Now, the Tiana series has been in some form of production for over four years. Perhaps Disney will pull a Moana 2 and turn whatever they have put together into a long-awaited sequel to 2009’s The Princess and the Frog. This seems somewhat more unlikely as Walt Disney Animation Studios hasn’t released a hand-drawn film since 2011’s box office flop Winnie the Pooh. Nothing is stopping the creative minds at Disney from creating a Tiana-based sequel in computer-animated 3D, but it seems like that might be a weird shift for fans to accept.
In any case, Disney+ will continue getting plenty of Marvel and Star Wars content for years to come, so it is doubtful the big-wigs at the House of Mouse are too worried.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter