Disney: The Metaverse, Digital Transformation, And The Future Of Storytelling
The Walt Disney Company is one of the world’s best-known entertainment brands and is responsible for some of the best-loved children’s stories of all time. For this reason, the much-hyped concept of the metaverse – immersive, experiential online environments ripe with potential for magic and storytelling – is a perfect fit for its business strategy.
Disney’s IP includes Marvel, Star Wars, its vast library of animated movies going back over 60 years, and beloved children’s brands such as Disney Princesses and Disney Villains. It stands to reason that any sort of shared, online digital universe focusing on these worlds and characters would most likely be a huge money earner for “the house of mouse”. Although specific details of this are currently few and far between, it would seem a fairly safe bet that it is cooking something up along these lines!
As well as movies, TV shows, and cartoons, the legendary entertainment brand is, of course, famous for its resorts and theme parks. This ability to bring fantasy to life in the real world also ties in neatly with the metaverse, which many believe will focus on blending the real with the virtual. For these reasons, Disney is probably one of the companies that are best placed to capitalize on the opportunities offered by connected, immersive, and persistent virtual worlds. So here’s an overview of some of the ways we know or expect that it will jump on this exciting new trend.
Getting the team together
To build metaverse opportunities, you need people in place. Disney has shown it is working on this with the appointment of its first “metaverse executive”, Mike White, to start building the metaverse strategy. Mike’s title is SVP of next-generation storytelling and consumer experiences, and it’s thought he will focus on understanding the potential of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and other metaverse-aligned technologies. What these technologies offer Disney and other entertainment and media conglomerates is a whole new range of tools for building new audience experiences. Disney has traditionally always been forward-looking and was quick to jump the arrival of previous game-changing breakthroughs such as the arrival of television, computer-generated animation, video games, and the internet, so there’s no reason it will treat the arrival of the age of VR and the metaverse any differently.
Other new hires at Disney that hint at the potential it sees in this technology include Erin Green, formerly head of communications for mixed reality (MR) research at Meta (Facebook). Hiring senior people at this level shows that Disney is serious about establishing itself as a key player in the metaverse industry – an industry that it is predicted could be worth up to $13 trillion by 2030. On top of this, Disney was also highlighted as the company with the greatest interest in hiring AR and VR staff during the first quarter of 2022.
Storytelling lies at the heart of everything that has made Disney great, and it makes sense that it will be the lynchpin that holds together its metaverse strategy. When people think of Disney stories, however, they are most likely to first think of the passive experiences of its movies and TV shows. However, CEO Bob Chapek has made it clear that he intends for this to change, having recently said during an earnings call: “We realize that it’s going to be less of a passive-type experience where you just have playback, whether it’s a sporting event or whether it’s an entertainment offering and more of an interactive, lean-forward, actively engaged type experience.”
A number of virtual reality experiences have already been created based on Disney properties, perhaps most notably the Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge Star Wars-themed experience. While not a true metaverse experience, being limited to one individual player, it shows that Disney is serious about the potential of VR.
