Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon has a runtime of just 117 minutes. As the month began, it was reported that the relative amount of time people have spent watching Raya is right around the humble 1 billion minutes mark. A billion minutes ago, the Temple of Venus began construction, about 1900 years ago. Raya and the Last Dragon on Disney+ is the 2nd most streamed title, second only to Lucifer. What that means for streaming and Disney titles remains to be seen, but it’s definitely exciting.
Who Watched Raya and the Last Dragon on Disney+?
Raya debuted in theaters and on Disney+ in early March. It was a box office success with roughly half of theaters open at the time, and it was still released on Disney+. At first, only premium users could watch this newest entry into the Disney canon, but on June 4th, all users could watch it, and they proceeded to do that a lot, then not so much, then a lot more.
Image via Disney
While it was locked behind a premium wall, Raya didn’t pull in extraordinary numbers. It cost $30 to watch, and after that whole business with the live-action Mulan, viewers may have still been building their trust back. Cruella must have earned Disney+ a bit of goodwill because the movie was still watched for around 355 million minutes in its first 3 days online. That’s only a third of what it would eventually amount to, but in the first 3 days of a release during the shivering end stages of a pandemic, that’s not bad. Nielsen reports that, after opening to all Disney+ users, there was a significant rise in viewership that represented roughly the same demographics who had watched it on premium accounts. From June 4th to early July, that would all amount to nearly 2,000 years worth of watch time.
Does this Mean Anything for Other Disney+ Titles
Following the success of Raya and the Last Dragon on Disney+ as the 2nd most streamed title online, we may hopefully see similar treatment to less anticipated titles, both in terms of box office success and film availability. As the landscape of film shifts to account for digital releases, it will be interesting to see if it’s not opening weekend that matters as much as affordable weekend that happens months later after building further anticipation.
Image via Disney
Will this mean we’ll get more full-length movies coming out of Disney even as it continues to focus on more short-form content? If Cruella gets the same bump in viewership once it doesn’t cost $30, then maybe we can expect more established-universe experimentation. How cool would it be to get some kind of Pulp Fiction Mushu movie that follows him waking up in different time periods and having confusing adventures? Imagine a big-budget Ursula villain origin story! There’s a lot of room for Disney to expand, and there always is, but this time it might actually expand in a new direction instead. We’ll see how things look now as the numbers for the 4th of July box office settle.