With some cinemas still closed around the globe and fears over people not heading to cinemas, Disney decided to move the theatrical release of Mulan over to Disney+, as part of a new “Premier Access” program.  Mulan is priced at $29.99 and according to a report from Yahoo! Finance, citing data from 7Park Data, 9 million US Disney+ subscribers purchased the film between September 4th and the 12th, which is about 25% of the US Disney+ subscribers.

According to this data, this could have brought $261 million from the U.S. markets alone, in addition to sales in other regions such as the UK, Australia, Canada and other European countries.   Had Mulan done this number in US cinemas, it would be have been a massive box office success, on par with Avengers: Infinity War.

Mulan was also released in cinemas in countries without Disney+; however, it is considered a box office failure in China, pulling in just $23 million on its Chinese opening weekend.

Recently, Sensor Tower revealed that downloads of the Disney+ app skyrocketed 68% during the Labor Day weekend and that spending via the app also 193% due to the additional fee.

Disney’s CFO Christine McCarthy said that executives are “Very Pleased” with the results of Mulan, but they won’t be making any announcements about how it has done, until its next quarterly financial results in November.    Usually, Disney is very quick to tell shareholders when something is doing better than expected, so there are many who feel that with Disney not releasing any financial details on Mulan, it hasn’t done as well as they had hoped.

Warner Brothers recently released Tenet in cinemas, however, it was considered a failure, pulling in just over $20 million on its opening weekend.  This resulted in Warner Brothers moving Wonder Woman 1984 back until Christmas.

When all combined, it looks like Disney will have covered the costs of the $200 million film, which is something Tenet wasn’t able to do with its global cinema release.

Disney has a couple more big movies to release this year, including Pixar’s Soul and Marvel’s Black Widow, so if Mulan is a success, these movies could also shift to Disney+ as Premier Access.

I ran some polls on our Facebook Group and on social media during the Labor Day weekend, which saw about 20% of people voting, saying they had purchased Mulan.  Which isn’t far off the estimate by 7Park Data.

Did you purchase Mulan on Disney+?

Roger Palmer

Roger has been a Disney fan since he was a kid and this interest has grown over the years. He has visited Disney Parks around the globe and has a vast collection of Disney movies and collectibles. He is the owner of What's On Disney Plus & DisKingdom. Email: Roger@WhatsOnDisneyPlus.com Twitter: Twitter.com/RogPalmerUK Facebook: Facebook.com/rogpalmeruk

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