Is It Worth It To Subscribe to Disney+?

While you’re stuck at home and looking for something to do, you might be eyeing some of the many, many streaming services and wondering which ones are worth it. I mean, Quibi obviously isn’t, but so many services want you to come to them instead of Netflix that it can be a bit overwhelming.

Disney+ is a few months old and you probably have an affinity for something Disney has done or bought, so you might be asking yourself if it’s worth it to subscribe now that we have a clear idea about what’s on the service and what it’s about.

My first impression is that it depends on if you want to pay $7 a month to watch The Simpsons. It’s really the only show on the service anyone is going to watch the way they watch a show like The Office or 30 Rock or Seinfeld on another service. I cannot stress the extent to which Disney+ couldn’t exist without The Simpsons. Did you think Disney paid $52 million to have Wolverine in The Avengers? Hugh Jackman isn’t even playing him anymore.

There is, of course, Disney’s other big acquisitions, Star Wars and Marvel. The Mandalorian lives up to the hype generated by all the Baby Yoda memes, but you’ll watch that entire series in an afternoon. The entire first season is barely as long as Avengers: Endgame. You can also watch Star Wars: The Clone Wars, including a new season that’s currently running and you can of course watch the Star Wars movies, though I would suggest only watching the original trilogy and pretending the other eight films don’t exist.

Marvel is a whole different story. It is such a big, profitable brand that Disney shot parts of it all over the Internet. You can’t even see all the movies on Disney+, much less the somewhat related TV shows. Runaways is on Hulu, Cloak and Dagger is on Freeform, The Defenders and its related shows are on Netflix.

There are a lot of Marvel cartoons to watch (except The Spectacular Spider-Man, the best of the bunch) but if you want to get nostalgic with the 90s X-Men or Spider-Man you will quickly see the lack of detail and attention Disney has given their streaming effort. The shows have episodes out of order and are listed as a single season, making the, hard to navigate.

You’ll notice some of this in other shows, as well; Ducktales has been out of order since the service launched despite the repeated complaints producer Francisco Angones.

There are a few gems buried in the Disney originals section of the Disney+ app. Boy Meets World was a favorite show of mine when I was younger and there’s a sequel series called Girl Meets World. Even Stevens, notable for being the show that introduced the world to Shia LaBeouf, is also something that holds up as a decent family sitcom.

The biggest problem, though, is other than The Mandalorian, Disney+ Has basically failed entirely to make compelling original programming. Can you name a Disney+ original that isn’t Star Wars related? High School Musical The Musical The Series? I don’t even want to type that, much less watch it.

Unless you have a kid who loves Disney and wants to watch Frozen 20 times a day, I can’t recommend Disney+. There’s barely enough content to fill a free seven day trial, much less enough to make you want to maintain a monthly subscription. Disney’s baffling decision to maintain multiple streaming services with different content aimed at different audiences means that Disney+ got virtually no content from the movie aside from nearly 700 episodes of The Simpsons, about 200 of which are worth watching.