Disney has The Marvels coming up in November, featuring a nominal lead that no one likes, and two minor characters introduced on D-Minus: Ms. Marvel and, what is she called?, Spectrum or Binary or whoever she is supposed to be.
You don't know what I'm talking about? Exactly.
That's Disney's problem: They have a superHERo team up movie featuring one superhero no one likes and two superHERoes no one knows.
To remedy this, and to try to fill the gaps in its schedule opened by the strikes, Disney ran the formerly-D-Minus-exclusive show Ms. Marvel on the broadcast network ABC.
Ms. Marvel already had the distinction of being the lowest-rated D-Minus superHERo show ever.
But maybe it would catch fire on broadcast TV
In the below chart, "HH" means households, P+2 is, I think, the total audience both for the night the show aired plus anyone who watched it on replay in the next two days, and P18-49 means viewers aged 18 to 49.
Disney Minus hides its viewership figures so this is a proxy measure for Disney Minus' ratings. If their shows can't even pull 1,000,000 households when the show is offered for free to anyone who can receive a local ABC signal (which is to say, almost anyone in America who owns a TV), how many people could possibly be running it on the meh-sized streaming service D-Minus?
It gets worse. D-Minus and Kathleen Kennedy's Failure Factory LucasFilm were counting on Ahsoka to rescue the Star Wars brand and re-energize fan interest.
Who's Ahoska, you say? She's from a cartoon, and she's now a Diverse Stronk Empowered Woman.
Wow, a female lead in a Star Wars offering. I never thought I'd see the day.
As I mentioned, D-Minus hides its ratings figures. However, it's available through a service, called Samba, which does release the ratings figures for every show viewed through Samba.
Samba is estimated to service one third of D-Minus subscribers. So while it can't report Disney's total ratings, it sure can provide a very close estimate. Samba is reporting on millions and millions of viewers; even well-done political polls only sample 1,000 people.
And would you believe it? According to Samba, the next great Force is Female hope Ahsoka was only viewed by 1.2 million people. So, multiplying by three, the new Kathleen Kennedy bomb only got 3.6 million viewers.
Disney, however, is claiming -- without evidence -- the show got 14 million views. The trouble is, Samba's shows its work and Disney does not.
Andre from Midnight's Edge is guessing that Disney is rigging the numbers by 1, combining the viewership of two episodes (which no one does -- ratings are reported on a single-episode basis) and, using a trick that Amazon pulled to inflate its Rings of Power viewership, to 2, assume that any household tuned into the show must have four people watching it, quadrupling the number of viewers with a single assumption.
Here's a sad truth: People, families, even couples don't watch TV together very often. TV no longer aims at capturing a wide audience, so that a father can watch with a daughter. It narrowcasts to one specific niche (which is almost always White Leftwing Urban Woman, which just happens to also be the demographic of most TV executives).
So maybe in the 1970s you could multiply the number of households tuned into Happy Days by four and get a rough guess of your total viewership.
But not any longer. Men just don't watch TV anymore (except for sports and some reality-type stuff and documentaries, etc.) because virtually none of it is made for men. Younger people mostly watch reality TV... or TikTok. Older people tend to watch more news because, again, tv shows aren't made for them.
Multiplying by four is not an acceptable fudge factor any longer.
And comparing Ahsoka's ratings to Andor's (who?) does Ahsoka no good, Andre points out. Andor is about one character in an ensemble movie (Rogue One) who is already dead. And already-dead characters do not make for big ratings in subsequent flashback stories. Ask Black Widow.
Ahsoka, despite being obscure, is less obscure than Andor with Star Wars fans-- she was a major character on the Clone Wars (or whatever) cartoon and has been an established character for 20 years.
Also: It's generally agreed that no one bothered watching Andor, not even the YouTube geek culture critics who literally make money off watching bad Disney television, so saying it did slightly better than Andor is not a flex.
Midnight's Edge reports that Disney is using the cover of the strikes -- and the doctrine of force majeure that the strikes grant it -- to cancel contracts and even completed series to save money. Reportedly they've fired the Rick & Morty writes responsible for Quantumania and Multiverse of Madness, who were under contract to write the two upcoming Avengers movies.
(They're keeping the Rick and Morty writer, Jessica Guo, responsible for the series that killed the Marvel brand, She-Hulk.)
They've even cancelled two shows that were already completed: The Spiderwick Chronicles and Nautilus. They might be following the Warner Bros. plan of burying the projects and then claiming a tax write-off.
Is there anything that can save D-Minus, then?
Well, just the one thing we've all been waiting for.