Disney+ launches in Australia, with (almost) every Simpsons episode
After a shaky but undeniably massive launch day last week, the House of Mouse's streaming platform Disney+ has arrived in Australia, New Zealand and Puerto Rico.
With signup available from 9 a.m. AEDT, only time will tell whether the overload problems and long wait times that plagued the launch of the platform in North America and the Netherlands last Tuesday will reappear. With over 10 million accounts signing up in the first two days, it's unlikely that similar volume will emerge from this week's launch markets.
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Disney+ costs AUD $8.99 a month or $89 a year, and will be the exclusive home of all the Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilm content your heart could desire — including Avengers: Endgame, and the first live-action Star Wars show, The Mandalorian, for which spoilers and Easter egg reveals have been all over the internet all week.
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It's not immediately clear whether the first two episodes of the show will be available to Australian, NZ and Puerto Rican audiences upon launch, or if those markets will be a week behind, which would seem just unnecessarily dickish considering we're still getting over a decade of not being able to go on the internet 10 Mondays a year because of Game Of Thrones spoilers.
UPDATE, Tuesday 11:58am AEDT: The second episode is now available to stream. Phew.
It will also be the home of The Simpsons, which has never been fully available to stream on-demand in Australia before. Initially, the series wasn't going to be on Disney+ at all, in stark contrast to the US offering — it's not clear what changed, but it was announced last week that seasons 1 to 29 would be available to Aussie viewers after all.
However, the first episode of season 3, 'Stark Raving Dad,' won't be included. That's the episode where Homer is sent to a mental institution after wearing a pink shirt to work, and befriends a man who thinks he's Michael Jackson, voiced by Michael Jackson. The reckoning with the allegations against the real Jackson have seen the episode pulled from circulation, and it won't appear on Disney+ either.
There are a few other omissions from the full catalogue due to local licensing agreements, but for the most part the heaving catalogue of Disney Channel Original Movies, Pixar, and classic animation will be the same as the US.
There are also a few regional oddities — it appeared from an early preview that the ANZ version would have Zootopia under the UK and Irish title, Zootropolis, for example.
Speaking of the UK, Disney+ won't be arriving in Blighty until March 2020, rudely leaving Britons with nothing to watch until then except for Fleabag and the slow implosion of their government.
You can sign up for Disney+ here.
Topics Disney The Simpsons
Caitlin is Mashable's Australian Editor. She has written for The Guardian, Junkee, and any number of plucky little music and culture publications that were run on the smell of an oily rag and have since been flushed off the Internet like a dead goldfish by their new owners. She also worked at Choice, Australia's consumer advocacy non-profit and magazine, and as such has surprisingly strong opinions about whitegoods. She enjoys big dumb action movies, big clever action movies, cult Canadian comedies set in small towns, Carly Rae Jepsen, The Replacements, smoky mezcal, revenge bedtime procrastination, and being left the hell alone when she's reading.
