Josh D’Amaro’s Disney+ super app strategy is moving from boardroom ambition to concrete planning, with the newly installed chief executive telling employees in a post-earnings memo that the streaming service would evolve to bring together games, merchandise, and other experiences, while offering what he called increased personalisation, exclusivity, and subscriber benefits. The updates, D’Amaro said, could begin rolling out starting next spring.
D’Amaro took over as Disney’s chief executive from Bob Iger in March, as The Next Web has reported. He has moved quickly to set out his vision for Disney+, framing a more expansive app as the mechanism by which the company would “deepen engagement, improve the value proposition, lower churn, and (most importantly) increase lifetime fan value,” according to the memo first reported by Business Insider.
The commercial logic behind the Disney+ super app strategy
The commercial rationale is not hard to follow. Hernan Lopez, founder of media consulting firm Owl & Co., argued that upselling experiences through Disney+ would help the company extract more value from its most committed fans. “The potential revenue of a single day of a theme park visit can be higher than a year’s worth of a Disney+ subscription,” Lopez said. For a business in which the Experiences division drives the bulk of profits, the idea of selling park tickets and cruise bookings directly through a streaming interface carries obvious appeal.
Paolo Pescatore, a media analyst at PP Foresight, made the case most expansively. “Disney+ should be the masterpiece and showcase for the entire Disney universe,” he said, arguing the app should extend well beyond movies, TV, and sports to encompass games, creator content, merchandise, and event tickets. Adding e-commerce features would also give Disney richer data on what its fans actually buy and interact with, Pescatore noted. “Services need to give people more reasons to open them regularly, rather than simply turning up when a major film or series lands,” he added.
Disney is already taking incremental steps in that direction. Disney+ is absorbing Hulu’s content and features, added a short-form video feed, and will soon incorporate a curated feed of Disney-themed TikToks. D’Amaro also said Disney is “exploring a free product for consumers.” Disney’s streamers held a 4.9% viewership share on US televisions in May, up from 4.7% at the end of 2025, according to Nielsen. YouTube, by contrast, grew its share from 12.7% to 13.8% in the same period, as consumers continue to gravitate toward free services.
Analysts see incremental gains rather than a transformation
Not everyone shares D’Amaro’s enthusiasm. Alan Wolk, a media industry analyst at TVREV, delivered a blunt verdict on the super-app model. “When you have a ‘super app,’ you wind up with a whole lot of mediocrity,” he said, warning that folding games and shopping into Disney+ risks creating a confusing and annoying experience for subscribers who simply want to watch something.
John Conca, a media analyst at research firm Third Bridge, was similarly measured. A “meaningful uptick” in park ticket or merchandise sales through the app sounds “aspirational,” he said. “Any benefits from having a ‘super app’ are incremental rather than transformational,” Conca said. That distinction matters for a company whose shares are down 8% over the past 12 months and up only 10% over the past decade, a period in which the S&P 500 has more than tripled. D’Amaro needs streaming to be transformative, not merely additive.
Mike Proulx, an analyst at Forrester, identified a subtler risk: brand dilution. Disney must avoid turning Disney+ into “a digital shopping mall,” he warned. “Disney is chasing engagement, frequency, and ad inventory, but there’s a risk to its customer experience if Disney+ becomes too cluttered,” Proulx said. The challenge is real: movies and television are expensive to produce, and Disney+ needs cheaper mechanisms to keep subscribers engaged between seasons and after hit series conclude. “Disney is hoping to lower churn by filling those gaps with more reasons to engage,” Proulx said.
The Netflix precedent offers a cautionary note. Games have not moved the needle meaningfully for Netflix despite years of investment, and Conca argued that “it will take significant time before that becomes any sort of engagement driver” for any streaming platform pursuing the same path. Whether Disney’s version of the Disney+ super app strategy proves more than a well-intentioned memo will become clearer when D’Amaro’s spring timeline arrives.