Down Big After Earnings, Is Disney Stock a Buy?

After reporting disappointing growth in its streaming business, Disney (DIS -0.55%) plunged after its third quarter earnings release. The entertainment giant is now down about 15% over the past month alone, and in this Fool Live video clip, recorded on Nov. 18, Fool.com contributors Matt Frankel, Jason Hall, and Dan Caplinger discuss why the stock is down and whether it's a buying opportunity right now.

Matt Frankel: We are going to move on to Disney, which is one of my favorite stocks in the market right now. Why did Disney fall? Pretty simple answers. It missed both earnings and revenue. It added fewer Disney Plus subscribers than the market thought it would, by a lot. The expectation was calling for about 9.4 million additions in Disney Plus. They added 2.1 million, so big miss there. They reiterated that they're growing the streaming business for the long term but the market didn't seem to care that much.

The parks really aren't where they need to be yet. They're not back to pre-pandemic levels. The Delta surge really definitely hurt their reopening especially because at one point, Florida was essentially a giant COVID infection in August. We have a rental condo in Florida. We literally had zero rentals in August and September because of the Delta surge. I know firsthand how that affected the parks. But Disney is rebounding nicely. They started the streaming business from scratch in late 2019. They already have 179 million members between their three streaming platforms, Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus. Just for context, Netflix (NFLX -0.08%) has 214 million and started a whole lot longer before 2019. 

Really impressive progress. They're really leveraging their intellectual property. I think Disney has the best pricing power of any company in the market and that's why I'm so bullish on Disney. I really don't care what they did this quarter. It's really about the long game and what the streaming business could mean long-term, and just the pricing power and it's parks because they could double their ticket prices tomorrow and still be full. But I'm curious as to what you guys think about this if you are as excited about it as I am.

Jason Hall: Go ahead, Dan.

Dan Caplinger: Well, I've been a long-term shareholder at Disney. Disney is one of my favorite companies just because it's so easy to understand and has such a dominant role in people's lives. It's a favorite for, when I get asked, what stocks would you recommend for kids? Trying to learn about the stock market, it's always an obvious pick because kids are exposed to Disney products and services all the time and so, it's easy for them to connect with the company and to understand, what's happening when they are watching a show or going to a park or whatever it is.

How that translates into business success for the company, how that translates into stock price gains long term for shareholders and so, yeah, Disney, it's exactly what you said. Disney has name recognition, it has brand strength, it has content production capacity that a whole lot of these rival streaming services have had to jump on the gun so quick to try to match and the value of that legacy library and the ability to iterate and evolve and cross-pollinate across all of its properties, all of its franchises. You see it at the movie theaters. You see it at home. You see it at the parks. It just feeds on itself.

It's just a master course in how to take intellectual property and squeeze as much value as you possibly can out of it and I don't see it slowing down. I think that as new avenues for content dissemination come out, we move into the metaverse. Huge potential for Disney to take its share of that and stake its claim and yet another ecosystem that it can dominate. So yeah, I have nothing but long-term bullishness for Disney. Sure. You're going to run into short-term situations where it takes some thinking and some evolution. The move from cable TV toward streaming took some thought and had some short-term impact. But they seemed to figured it out and I love the way that they're growing at this point on that course as well.

Hall: I think the Disney Plus streaming story -- the story got a little bit ahead of the business. You look at this chart here and I don't remember the exact number, but I think Disney Plus is, I don't know, like it's a few percentage points of revenue. Its entire streaming business is barely more than 10% of the company's revenue. I think that should put it into context yet. It's hugely important to the company's future. But right now, I think a lot of realization that, a lot of those other operations, those in-person operations still have some catching up to do. Might have caught up to the market here. But I wanted to show this. 

Guys, the value of that intellectual property that you guys were talking about is immense and the market still represents that. I really think that what we have is for long-term investors that are looking for years and years down the road, thinking about a business that will continue. People will continue to give Disney money. However, people pay for things to consume its content. However, people consume content in the future, 100 years from now. I truly believe that about Disney more so than any other company that I own. I think it's an opportunity to buy or add or start a position. Anytime the stock gets ahead of itself, investors get ahead of themselves and the price falls and they continue to execute. It's time to add to Disney.