If Disney+ Is Going To Share 'Once Upon A Time' With Hulu, Hulu Should Share 'Galavant' Too

Come on now, why be together on one but not both?

With three days advanced notice, it was reported early Tuesday that beloved ABC series Once Upon A Time will be returning to Hulu with all seven seasons for the first time, with Disney+ sharing it starting September 1.

The move comes as exclusivity loses importance in this new streaming era, in favor of the media conglomerates’ push for additional revenue and profitability. While not everything has always been exclusive, the search for profitability has put HBO shows back outside the walls of (HBO) Max, as Insecure led the pack to Netflix on July 3, Ballers on August 15, The Pacific and Band of Brothers set for September 15, and Six Feet Under still to come. Cartoon Network titles Teen Titans and Ed, Edd n Eddy are currently being shared with Prime Video, while classic PowerPuff Girls, Ben 10, Justice League, Justice League Unlimited, The Batman and Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated are also being shared with Netflix.

As with all ABC shows of its time and still practiced today, Once Upon A Time did next day on Hulu in-season, but, as did not apply to all its peers the completed seasons would be on Netflix. As Grey’s Anatomy continues to run, every completed season continues to head to Netflix. It was the case for Agents of SHIELD, How to Get Away with Murder and Scandal too. The latter’s seven seasons moved to Hulu in May 2020.

To go back a bit, when Once Upon A Time started doing two storylines per season, they also included extended winter breaks to early March, for returns after the Academy Awards. For season 4, in winter 2015, the network installed a medieval half hour comedy with kingdoms and Alan Menken music to be its January show: Galavant. Eight episodes, two every week for the four weeks of January. It was created by This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman and starred Joshua Sasse, Timothy Omundson, Karen David, Mallory Janssen, and even Luke Youngblood, Lee Jordan from the first two Harry Potter movies. Defying every contemporary ABC comedy, its episodes also landed on Netflix. And when it miraculously got renewed for a ten-episode second season because there was an extra week of January to fill, that season too landed on Netflix when it was over.

So Once Upon A Time and Galavant had these ties of varying strength, and that continued when in September 2020, toward the end of year 1 of Disney+, both series left Netflix a day apart from one another. With Once Upon a Time’s premise being built upon Disney’s fairy tale adaptations, it was a no-brainer for Disney+, and indeed, it only took about ten days to arrive. But Galavant? With music from Menken, who composed The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, two of whom’s remakes already existed and did those scores, Pocahontas, Newsies, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Home on the Range, Enchanted, Tangled, and was even the writer of “Star-Spangled Man” from Captain America: The First Avenger? It never made it, when it should. It’s a perfect series for Disney+. In fact, it was apparently in streaming limbo until December 2021 when Hulu got all 18 episodes. I don’t have Hulu so I didn’t know it landed until last July.

While Once Upon A Time, created by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and starring Jennifer Morrison, Ginnifer Goodwin, Josh Dallas, Jared Gilmore, Robert Carlyle, Colin O’Donoghue, and Lana Parrilla, isn’t the first series to be shared between the two services, whether Hulu original or not, it’s the first instance where the strategy shift is in play rather than it be more about availability. Even still, Galavant should be able to hold that distinction as well. And this comes after Disney removed dozens of series, films, and specials earlier this year from both services to cut costs such as residuals payments and is preparing to roll out a single streaming app with programming from both services by the end of this year. A little bit of goodwill goes a long way, especially when so publicly not affording such for the talent.

Source: Deadline