Disney+ turns seven today. The streaming service launched on November 12, 2019, in the United States, Canada and the Netherlands, and The Mandalorian premiered the very same day as its headline original, the first live-action Star Wars series ever made.
Both birthdays land in a big week for the service, with Marvel’s Avengers Endgame: Encore arriving on Disney+ on Friday, November 13.
How Disney+ Started
Disney+ arrived as Disney’s answer to the streaming boom, bringing Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and National Geographic under one roof for the first time. On day one, subscribers got hundreds of films from the Disney vault, decades of Disney Channel shows and The Simpsons, along with a handful of originals. The Mandalorian led that lineup, with Lady and the Tramp, High School Musical: The Musical: The Series and The World According to Jeff Goldblum also debuting at launch.
Launch day was rocky. So many people signed up and logged in at once that plenty of viewers hit error messages and login trouble for the first several hours, a problem Disney acknowledged and fixed as the day went on.
The Mandalorian Turns Seven Too
Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian opened with “Chapter 1: The Mandalorian,” following Pedro Pascal’s bounty hunter Din Djarin as he tracked down a target on a remote planet. The twist at the end of that first episode turned out to be the reveal of the whole year: the target was a tiny green child of Yoda’s species. Fans called him Baby Yoda long before the show gave him the name Grogu, and he became the breakout character of 2019.
Seven years later, Din and Grogu have gone from a streaming series to the big screen. The Mandalorian and Grogu played in theaters this year and has been streaming on Disney+ since September 2.
What Disney+ Looks Like Now
Disney+ in 2026 is a very different service from the one that launched in 2019. Marvel’s VisionQuest just wrapped its run, and the service is now leaning into the road to Avengers: Doomsday with a Countdown to Doomsday collection and the extended Avengers Endgame: Encore, which comes to Disney+ on November 13, a day after the anniversary.
Star Wars has also become one of the service’s anchors, with Andor, Ahsoka and Skeleton Crew all following the path The Mandalorian opened, and the small green character who stole that first episode is still at the center of it.
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