Disney expects to spend $24 billion on content in its 2025 fiscal year, a slight increase from the $23.4 billion spent in 2024. The company revealed its content spending forecast in its annual report.
However, don’t expect a wave of new movies or TV series, as sports programming spending is set to rise in the coming year thanks to contract rate increases for the NFL, the start of the new NBA contract — which nearly doubles the previous fare — and the launch of ESPN’s new flagship streaming service.
In other words, content spending may increase slightly, but it’s entirely possible that Disney’s overall entertainment spending will decline, as pointed out by The Hollywood Reporter earlier this summer. Last November, Disney’s Interim CFO Kevin Lansberry said that about 40% of Disney’s content spending was on sports and sports content.
In 2024, Disney expected to spend $25 billion on content, up from $27 billion in 2023. Content spending was initially expected to be in the $30 billion range for 2024, but the budget was impacted by writers’ strikes and actors, as well as from the new content strategy of Bob Iger, who last November declared that he wanted to focus on big films, “which allows us to reduce expenses and investments in series a little. And this mix of spending between films and series, we believe, gives us the opportunity to increase margins and grow the business.”
In 2023, after his return to the company, Iger spearheaded a plan to reduce content costs by billions. While the strikes have clearly had an impact, the new forecast suggests that the company has managed to reduce content costs, despite increasing some fixed costs (such as sports rights).
2025 will be a year full of major launches for Disney, including Marvel films Captain America: Brave New World e Thunderboltsas well as live-action remakes of Lilo & Stitch e Snow White.
On Tuesday, Casey Bloys, CEO of HBO and Max Content, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, said the company expects to keep content spending “flat” in 2025, with one caveat. “We’re flat,” Bloys said. “Flat, given inflation, actually means a decrease.”
Netflix spends about $17 billion a year on content, and executives have said they see that number as essentially unchanged, more or less, in the short term.
Disney, it seems, is also in a similar situation, if its annual report is a reliable indicator.
