• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, November 17, 2025

Considering where Walt Disney was just a few years ago -- posting initial $4 billion in losses for its nascent streaming businesses -- we might be wondering what the stock market was thinking when it slammed the company’s stock down 10% after its earnings release last week. 

The stock market does have a way of honing in on the key areas of a company. And for Disney, even with its broad media interests, market sensitivity and tension was all up in the grill of the company's parks and experiences business. And of course, its direct-to-consumer (D2C) streaming platforms.

While earnings for D2C were up 40% over a year ago to $352 million, it is still down from the nearly 50% estimates some analysts were expecting.

At the same time, Disney deserves credit for raising Hulu to new levels when it comes to streaming subscribers -- not an easy thing to accomplish in a maturing streaming industry.

Hulu’s video-on-demand streaming and live TV subscribers are now topping 64 million -- ahead of expectations.

Although it did not release any data for the new ESPN streaming service recently launched, company executives say what is now their own in-house bundling with Disney+ and Hulu is pulling in 80% of new subscribers for the sport streaming app. 

Parks/Experiences grew 9% to $920 million. But analysts were expecting 25% gain year-over-year.  This business in particular -- the bedrock, the mothership of Disney -- was key in that 10% initial stock market drop.

This comes with Disney pretty much sitting on the sidelines for the expected rush to make the deadline of a possible deal for major competitive Warner Bros. Discovery.

A three-pronged bid pushed by expected bids from Paramount Skydance, Comcast and Netflix will soon arrive for WBD’s board to ruminate over.

Disney has little to no interest, apparently. Perhaps that is because this company has been through the synergy issues before about making a similar deal for a major competitor -- half of 20th Century Fox -- for its film/TV studio, linear TV entertainment networks, and other business -- for $71.3 billion back in 2017. 

The big question is where to go forward with the linear TV networks they have -- in reference to its growing stalemate with YouTube TV.

For the near-term future, it is focusing on giving the Google-owned business pretty much the deals as it has with other TV networks bundlers and retailers.

For sure, there are crazy levels of macro uncertainty bouncing around all over the place. Maybe looking under the hood of this media engine one can also see some strong horsepower to come.