Disney TV Studios Head Eric Schrier on Fearlessness, Failure and Showing the World “There’s Content for Adults on Disney+”
Walt Disney top executive Eric Schrier was a keynote speaker at Content London on Wednesday and detailed all of the strings added to the Disney+ bow as the streaming platform enters phase two.
The Disney Television Studios president also serves as head of global original television strategy at Disney Entertainment and took to the stage at Kings Place to talk fearlessness and failure with producer Roma Khanna.
Schrier, who was boss at FX Entertainment for over two decades, deftly swerved a question on rumors that Disney will be upping their content spend “significantly” in the international market.
He later raised eyebrows when mentioning that Disney is still passionate about greenlighting limited series. “But so many services are looking for returnable series,” Khanna put to him. Schrier responded: “When we started limited series FX, people didn’t believe in that model, and that became a trend. I think that returnable series are always great. We believe very strongly in the long-running series, whether it’s Grey’s Anatomy, The Simpsons, Family Guy… But we also know that there are limited series that are out there and that will entertain audiences, and there are stories that just don’t tend to lend themselves to multiple seasons, right?”
At another point in the session, he was asked about balancing the global brand of Disney — much of it geared toward kids and animation — with the adult content they’re investing in. Schrier sang Hulu’s praises here: “We’re only a five-year-old service,” he explained. “So in phase one, we were just trying to get a service up and running, have all of our brands and IP there, our global IP coming out of the U.S. And then [we] started doing local content.”
The company’s first instinct was to change the “perception” of Disney+, but that proved too difficult, Schrier admitted. “Disney is one of the most well-known brands in the world, and so changing and going full on FX-HBO was the instinct. And we made some very good shows I’m very proud of. But as we got more mature and we looked at, ‘Okay, what’s our next phase? We said, ‘Let’s be a little bit more complimentary. Let’s be entertaining. We’ll still do edgy things.’”
“We’ve now been able to integrate the Hulu brand as the brand for all of our original content globally. We’re not really developing shows for kids and family — that’s really done by global brands and IP,” he added. “So we’re really looking to do Hulu Originals across the world and showing people that there’s content for adults on Disney+.”
Schrier emphasized the importance of diversifying their portfolio to keep audiences coming back, and discussed building partnerships with free-to-air broadcasters in various markets to leverage their local content and distribution.
On what’s been doing particularly well in the U.K., the exec immediately lauded Happy Prince’s adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, which just won an International Emmy for best drama. “Rivals has been a huge hit for us, and has really helped us establish a place here in the U.K. beyond our global content. We’re very excited about season two,” he said, commending Disney’s scripted EMEA boss Lee Mason.
He went on to drum up excitement for a host of British programs performing well on the platform, including Steven Knight’s A Thousand Blows with Stephen Graham and Malachi Kirby and the Caroline Flack docu-series that aired in November.
Coming up, the team confirmed on Tuesday that Nicholas Hoult and Daisy Edgar-Jones are set to lead a new original relationship comedy, Mosquito, from The Great and Poor Things writer Tony McNamara. Schrier also unveiled a never-before-seen clip from the Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement-starring Alice and Steve, created by Sophie Goodhart.
Schrier, a self-professed “film nerd” (he was a film school student prior to his career in television), said risk-taking is “built in” to the Disney+ system. “I really try to give my creative leaders room to experiment and take risks, and failure is okay,” he said about allowing artists freedom. “That’s going to happen in the creative business, and you need to be able to take risk, and you need to be able to build risk in the system. That model and that philosophy has worked really well and has shown that, actually, from a business standpoint, our return on investment and our failure rate is actually smaller because we’re willing to take risks.”
Content London runs through Thursday.
