Disney’s new CEO wants to turn Disney+ into a ‘super app’ to take on Netflix

Disney’s new chief executive wants to rebuild its streaming service into something bigger than a place to watch films.

Josh D’Amaro, who took over from Bob Iger in March, is exploring turning Disney+ into a “super app” that would fold streaming together with theme-park tickets, cruise bookings, games, and merchandise, Bloomberg reported.

The ambition is explicitly competitive. D’Amaro’s goal, according to the report, is to make Disney’s direct-to-consumer business a real match for Netflix, the streamer that has spent a decade turning a DVD-by-post company into the default of home viewing.

“Disney+ will evolve beyond a traditional streaming service to become the digital centerpiece of our company, connecting stories, experiences, games and films in new ways,” D’Amaro said, casting the app as the hub of everything Disney sells.

The pieces he wants to connect are scattered today. Disney runs separate apps for Disney+, the Disneyland resort, and its Cruise Line, and a super app would pull ticketing, merchandise, gaming, and streaming into a single place, a one-stop shop for a Disney fan’s money.

The logic is Amazon’s. Disney has long eyed a Prime-style membership that bundles content and perks into one loyalty engine, an idea Iger explored for years and tested in a limited form in the UK, without ever making it the centre of the company.

D’Amaro is picking that thread back up. The concept has appeared in internal presentations, Bloomberg said, though the work is early and no concrete build has begun, which means the super app is for now a direction rather than a product.

The near-term job is messier. Disney is still trying to merge Hulu fully into Disney+, a technical and licensing knot that has proved harder than a logo change, and any grander app has to wait for that plumbing to work.

Streaming is, at least, finally paying. Disney’s direct-to-consumer business turned a corner under D’Amaro, with subscriber and profit numbers that surprised Wall Street earlier this year, giving him the credibility to propose something ambitious.

The wider industry is shifting under him. Streaming has moved from a land grab for subscribers to a grind for profit, with ad tiers, price rises, and password crackdowns now standard, and Disney has adopted most of them.

Netflix remains the target and the benchmark. It sits at the top of viewers’ preferences in market after market, and its lead is built on scale and personalisation, though Disney has answered before with price bundles of ESPN+, Hulu, and Disney+.

The super-app instinct is not unique to Disney. Companies from Asia to Silicon Valley have chased the everything-app dream, and few outside China’s WeChat have made it work, because bundling unrelated services rarely makes any of them better.

Disney’s version has a genuine logic, though. Unlike a bank or a messaging app bolting on features, Disney sells experiences that already overlap in a customer’s life, the film, the toy, the park, the cruise, so gathering them in one place is less of a stretch.

The risk is doing too much at once. A single app that streams, sells tickets, runs games, and hawks merchandise is a large surface to build and maintain, and Disney’s past app efforts have stumbled on exactly that complexity.

Regulation adds another wrinkle. Streaming is increasingly treated like broadcasting in some markets, and a super app that ties viewing to spending will draw scrutiny over data and competition that a simple streamer might avoid.

For now, the plan is a signal of intent. D’Amaro has told his company where he wants streaming to go, borrowing Netflix’s playbook of squeezing more from each viewer, and betting that Disney’s advantage is the one thing Netflix cannot copy: the parks, the ships, and the characters people already pay to visit.