With Disney’s parks and resorts shuttered across the globe due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and movie theaters across the nation sharing a similar fate, the conglomerate’s revenue has been severely compromised, giving leeway for companies like Netflix, which are focused on “stay-at-home” products like video streaming, to gain a financial advantage. In fact, Netflix has officially passed Disney in terms of worth, with stocks for the company hitting an all-time high at market close today.
The current price of Netflix stock is $426.75 per share, giving Netflix a current market capitalization of $187.3 billion, putting it just over Disney’s $186.6 billion. Since the start of the pandemic, Disney has accrued $13 billion in debt and credit agreements in order to mitigate the financial effects of closing down its parks and film studios.
With more and more people under lockdown or otherwise choosing to stay home and social distance, millions of viewers are looking for the next new series to binge-watch, and despite an impressive 50 million subscriber count for Disney+ after just five months, analysts expect Netflix to gain 8.45 million new subscribers by the end of this quarter alone, with an estimated 200 million subscribers by the end of 2020. Many expect the parks to bounce back within a year or two upon reopening, but it will likely be an arduous process of reshaping the park experience to accommodate new health and safety guidelines, and until then, streaming platforms like Netflix will dominate the entertainment world.
Source: Variety
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