Report suggests Disney might fold U.S.-exclusive streaming service Hulu into Disney+

Disney might combine its Disney+ streaming service and Hulu, a platform only available in the U.S., into one offering.

Depending on how the two platform’s joining forces plays out, this could be great for Canadians as not all Hulu content is currently available here. Reports from Collider indicate that there are rumours of Hulu executives leaving or being let go from in anticipation of the move.

Hulu folding into Disney+ makes sense, especially from a business perspective. According to Collider, Hulu only has 36.3 million subscribers in the U.S., while Disney+ has 73.7 million worldwide. Combining the two services would result in Disney+ having more than 100 million subscribers.

However, Hulu doesn’t cater to the same audience as Disney+. While Disney+ aims to appeal to the entire family, there’s a lot more adult content on Hulu. Some users might not want to search through piles of Disney and Pixar films when looking for movies like Die Hard.

That said, similar to Netflix, Disney could add parental controls for mature content or password protection when watching R-rated movies. It was recently reported that Deadpool 3 would still be an R-rated movie, despite it also being released by Disney following the company acquiring Fox.

In Canada, Bell’s Crave streaming service offers a lot of the content available on Hulu in the U.S., including Handmaid’s Tale, Dollface, The Act, High Fidelity and more. Depending on how long Crave’s licensing agreements with Hulu are, this could create difficulties for Hulu content making its way to Canada via Disney+.

Disney is set to hold an investor’s call on December 10th, so we may learn more about the potential move on that date.

Warner Bros. recently announced that following the theatrical run of its upcoming films in Canada, all of its upcoming movies will stream on Crave.

Source: Collider