Disney has some beautiful dreams of letting Disney Plus devour Hulu at last

Hulu has always been the odd outlier among the big streaming services, operating in its early life as a genuine, multi-studio attempt to build a streaming platform shared by Fox, Disney, Warner Bros., and NBC. (There was even a private equity group, Providence Equity Partners, that owned about 10 percent, and was supposed to serve as a sort of “independent voice” for the service. Congratulations, reader: Revel in your knowledge of the secret Hulu trivia!) Of course, that changed over the years, as Disney—whose maw is all-consuming even on a scale like this, where everybody is a multi-tentacled leviathan of endless acquisition—steadily gobbled up everybody else’s shares, either directly, or by, say, buying the entirety of Fox in one big ol’ multi-billion-dollar gulp.

The upshot of all this is that Disney now finds itself in the odd, and not necessarily ideal, position of owning two streaming services in some measure of competition with each other: Its own flagship product, Disney+, and Hulu, which it owns, 66 percent to 33 percent, in partnership with NBCUniversal parent company Comcast, who serves as a silent partner on the project. (Which is to say that they cash the checks, occasionally license stuff they don’t want to feed to their own service Peacock, and let Disney get on with the business of running the thing.) As is, Hulu and Disney+ serve two pretty distinct slices of the market (TV shows where people say “Fuck,” and those where they don’t), but Disney CEO Bob Chapek seems to be hinting that he thinks that “Fuck!”-bridge might not be as impassible as it seems.

This is per Deadline, reporting on remarks Chapek made at the *pre-emptive capitalism overload shudder* Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Tech Conference this week, where he floated the idea of allowing Hulu and Disney+ to pull Disney’s favorite trick, i.e., merging together into a horrifying but powerful multi-headed beast capable of crushing the competition on the merits of sheer mass if nothing else. (You may also know this trick from how the newly merged Warner Bros. and Discovery are handling their own fusion-turgid streaming tubes, HBO Max and Discovery+.)

Some of this gets bogged down in money stuff—Chapek and Comcast are having some public disagreements about how much 33 percent of Hulu might be worth in 2024, when Disney will first be allowed to buy out Comcast’s share and shove the entirety of the service down its eternally hungering gullet at long last—but one thought stands out: Chapek’s apparently convinced that people won’t flinch away from a service that combines Hulu’s adult content with the family-friendly fare on Disney+, long a concern for image-conscious Disney.

Hey, Bob, you got a weird, biologically evocative metaphor to spell this out for us?

Speaking about the viability of such a hybrid service, Chapek stated his belief that it would “not be subject to organ rejection by the consumer,” and, yeah, there’s the weird feeling we were craving. More to the point, he thinks people might just give less of a shit about this sort of thing than might be expected, given Disney’s squeaky image, and the concerns raised when, say, the sex-and-violence-heavy Netflix Marvel shows came to Disney+: “I am amazed every day in this job how elastic the Disney brand is,” Chapek told the, uh, “Communacopia-teers” at the Goldman Sachs conference. “I would tell you that we have had no blowback whatsoever in terms of including that general entertainment content on a Disney-branded streaming proposition” in territories outside of the U.S. “I’m not saying it would be received exactly like that in the U.S., but it gives us some reason to believe that we have more degrees of freedom than anybody would have ever suspected.”

So, yeah: It sounds like we might just be a couple of years out from the all-consuming general grey goo of the streaming ecosystem getting a little bit more grey-er still. At least it’ll be one less password to keep track of.