Netflix Was Briefly More Valuable Than Disney Earlier Today
THR- Netflix, despite being more valuable than Disney earlier on Thursday, ended up closing out just behind the company. Netflix finished the day with a market cap of $151.8 billion, while Disney ended with $152.18 billion. The streaming giant’s stock was trading at an all-time high on Thursday morning, boosting its valuation above $152 billion. Disney stock, meanwhile, was trading down more than 1 percent, giving it a valuation of just under $152 billion.
Netflix, which has been publicly traded since 2002, has become a fierce competitor for Disney and other media conglomerates over the years as streaming has become more popular with consumers. Despite the fact that Netflix continues to burn through cash, the company has become a stock market darling as it adds more subscribers around the world. In April, Netflix announced that it had reached 125 million total subscribers and generated $3.6 billion in revenue during the first quarter of the year. On Wednesday, the streamer became more valuable than cable giant Comcast. Its shares closed the day at $344.72. Today, its share price is up more than 1 percent to over $350 during midday trading.
I’ll admit that this is a weird blog and how valuable a company actually is can mean a lot of things, especially to people with limited brain power like myself. Hearing that Barstool was valued at $150 million still doesn’t make sense to me. But that’s because we were (are?) mostly idiots. However Netflix being worth more than Disney completely blew my mind. I remember when Netflix was the little website that used to send you one, two or if you were a Big Baller™, THREE DVDs in the mail once they were available in your queue. Remember the queue? Netflix put that stupid word in our lexicons.
Anyway, once Netflix murdered Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and all the mom and pops video stores, they continued their conquest by turning the little offering of streaming movies they had into a goddamn catalog of films to go along with their originals that are either 1A or 1B to HBO for original programming. Now they have millions of subscribers, billions of dollars in revenue, and I’m pretty sure Feits would jump out of HQ’s window if Netflix disappeared tomorrow. He would probably only break some bones since we are on the third floor. But once his bones healed, he would probably jump off the closest bridge to the hospital. Can you imagine how much Netflix would be worth if everyone didn’t share their logins? I’ve been using my parents account since I lived in their house and still do despite being a grown ass man with a job, wife, 2 kids, and a mortgage.
Maybe that’s why I never held Netflix in as high of a regard as Disney. Disney is one of those names that I put alongside monsters like Microsoft and McDonald’s. I don’t pay for it and just a couple of years ago it was a jokey code for fucking. Meanwhile people save for years and fly halfway around the world just to take their shitty kids to the Disney’s and live in misery for a week. And every time I turn around, another Disney movie is breaking the opening weekend box office record.
Most of those movies aren’t even “traditional” Disney franchises. But it doesn’t matter because The Mouse got his hand on all those studs to go along with the dynasty he built with movies that print money like Toy Story, Lion King, etc. I honestly don’t even know what Disney’s Achilles heel could be.
Although Disney has continued to find success at the box office with such blockbusters as Black Panther and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the company’s media networks division has struggled under mounting subscriber losses at ESPN.
Ohhhh, that makes sense I guess.
Comcast being worth that much surprised me as well partially because our resident Nate Dogg literally blogs about them every time they epically fuck up and I can’t even fit all of those blogs in my screen for the screenshot.
The lesson there is cable companies can make all the money in the world even if they are likely the worst company in the world.
Anyway, I don’t know what the real point of this blog was other than it blew my mind how big Netflix has become. I guess part of that is because 90% of the time I use it is to watch the same 5 seasons of The Office. It’s like Amazon going from a little bookstore to the company most likely to take over the world with a supervillain CEO.
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P.S. Once this happens, parents are so fucked.
Disney is working on its own Netflix competitor. The company plans to launch a family-friendly streaming service next year that will include film and TV titles from Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm. It also recently introduced a new sports-centric subscription service: ESPN+.
Good luck getting your kid to shut up by turning on Moana when the company that literally puts their best selling movies in a vault to drive up demand is able to to charge whatever they want for streaming access to their films.