The 50 Best TV Shows and Movies to Watch on Disney+ Right Now
The Disney streaming platform has hundreds of movie and TV titles, drawing from its own deep reservoir of classics and from Star Wars, Marvel, National Geographic and more. These are our favorites.
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Of all the companies to enter the streaming wars, Disney has significant advantages with Disney+. It can draw from a deep vault of its own animated and live-action movies and from popular shows on its own cable networks — as well as from company properties like Marvel, Pixar, National Geographic and Star Wars. And that’s not counting the platform’s slate of original TV shows and movies.
That’s a lot of material: Nearly 500 films and 7,500 TV episodes at the time of its debut. Below is our guide to the 50 best titles on Disney+, arranged in reverse chronological order with an eye toward variety. As the service continues to build its catalog, this list will change, too. (Note: Streaming services sometimes change their libraries without notice; we’ll do our best to keep up.)
Here are our lists of the best movies and TV shows on Netflix, the best of both on Hulu and the best movies on Max and Amazon Prime Video.
‘Jim Henson Idea Man’ (2024)
The master puppeteer Jim Henson created Kermit the Frog out of fabric from his mother’s coat, with eyes made of a halved pingpong ball. Rowlf the Dog’s perfectly round head is a felt-covered basketball. That personal, tactile, D.I.Y. touch is a big part of what made the Muppets so beloved, and Ron Howard’s admiring documentary, “Jim Henson Idea Man,” does its best to access the introspective man behind this boisterous pop culture phenomenon. Howard unearths a trove of little-seen commercials and behind-the-scenes footage, along with new and archived interviews, but the most touching presence here is Henson’s longtime collaborator Frank Oz, whose abundant affection for Henson hasn’t dimmed.
Watch it on Disney+
‘The Rescuers’ (1977)
Between the end of Walt Disney’s Golden Age in the early 1960s and the renaissance that began in 1989 with “The Little Mermaid,” the company’s animated division dropped precipitously in creative quality and commercial success. Yet in the middle of this fallow period, “The Rescuers” stands out as a modest, joyful, handcrafted winner, imagining an international society of heroic mice who meet in the United Nations. Here, the sheepish Bernard (Bob Newhart) teams up with the brash Hungarian Miss Bianca (Eva Gabor) to rescue an orphaned 6-year-old girl, who has been kidnapped in a plot to find the world’s largest diamond. Vincent Canby called it “the perfect show for the very, very young who take their cartoons seriously.”