'Mulan' skips theatrical release, to open on OTT

Los Angeles

The much-delayed live action remake of Mulan will be skipping traditional theatrical window to release on a streaming platform, but for a price.

"Mulan" will go straight to Disney Plus, which has over 60.5 million paying subscribers, reports variety.com.

After several delays to its theatrical release date, Disney CEO Bob Chapek said that "Mulan" will premiere on the service on a "premiere access" basis in the US and other select markets at a premium price of $29.99 (Rs 2,244.67), beginning September 4.

The film will be released theatrically in markets where the streaming platform is not available.

New Zealand filmmaker Niki Caro's "Mulan" is about a fearless young Chinese woman who disguises as a male warrior in order to save her father.

"Mulan" features Crystal Liu as Mulan, Donnie Yen as Commander Tung; Tzi Ma as Zhou, Jason Scott Lee as Bori Khan; Yoson An as Honghui; Ron Yuan as Sergeant Qiang; with Gong Li as Xianniang and Jet Li as the Emperor.

Disney CEO Chapek also shared that the "Mulan" release on the streaming platform is a one-time event.

"We're very pleased to be able to bring ‘Mulan' to our consumer base that has been waiting for it for a long, long time as we've had to unfortunately move our theatrical date several times," Chapek said, adding: "We are looking at Mulan as one-off as opposed to saying there is some new business windowing model that we are looking at."

"That said, we find it very interesting to be able to take a new offering to consumers at that $29.99 price and learn from it and see what happens not only in terms of the uptick of the number of subscribers we got on the platform, but also the number of transactions we get on that PVOD offering," Chapek added.