Disney’s $24 billion in planned content spend for fiscal 2026 will likely end up being a 50-50 split between sports and entertainment, chief financial officer Hugh Johnston said on Wednesday.
“I think that split will hold,” Johnston told Wells Fargo’s Technology, Media, and Telecom Summit, though he noted entertainment spend “may grow a little faster than sports.” He also said that the company would look to invest more in local content in certain markets.
“We have rights to succeed with respect to Disney content, but we need to supplement that with local content. So the strategy is very much to do that,” Johnston added.
While Disney’s total content budget will continue to grow over time, Johnston emphasized it wouldn’t hit levels when the media giant and others were “overproducing” original content. In fiscal 2022, Disney’s content budget was $33 billion. He also said it wouldn’t grow faster than Disney’s direct-to-consumer revenue, which he hopes will see double-digit growth in the years to come.
During its fourth quarter of 2025, Disney+ and Hulu saw their combined profit grow 39% to $352 million, while streaming revenue grew 8% to $6.25 billion. Disney+ and Hulu added a combined 12.4 million subscribers for a total of 195.7 million. Disney+ added 3.8 million subscribers for a total of 131.6 million. Hulu added 8.6 million for a total of 64.1 million, largely driven by the company’s expanded distribution deal with Charter Communications.
“The goal first was to achieve scale, and we did do that,” Johnston said Wednesday. “That said, there’s still opportunity to expand on that sub base.”
More to come…
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.thewrap.com ’
