Greetings, and welcome to another edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s culture news roundup. This week there’s been some bad news for fans of Margaret Atwood and Jeremy Renner. Also, some good news for Disney. Again. Let’s get started.
Jeremy Renner Shut Down His App. Because Trolls
First off, if you didn’t know, Jeremy Renner had an app. It was a place for fans of Hawkeye and Renner’s music to hang out and stuff. Recently, though, Jeremy Renner Official had been overrun by trolls impersonating the actor and harassing other fans. So, late yesterday, he shut it down. “What was supposed to be a place for fans to connect with each other has turned into a place that is everything I detest and can’t or won’t condone,” he wrote in a “Goodbye…” post on the app. “My sincere apologies for this to have not turned out the way it was intended.”
Amazon Accidentally Sent Out Margaret Atwood’s New Book Early
Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t hit book store shelves until September 10. However, some folks who ordered the book online from Amazon have already received their copies, upsetting many indie book sellers. “A very small number of copies of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments were distributed early due to a retailer error which has now been rectified,” publisher Doubleday’s head of publicity Todd Doughty said in a statement to Publishers Weekly. Doughty added that “in order to ensure our readers around the world receive their copies on the same day, our global publication date remains Tuesday.” So, we have to ask, did anyone out there get theirs yet? What do you think?
Disney+ Is Going to Be Pretty Popular
Are you already making room in your budget for Disney+? You might not be alone there. A new report from Digital TV Research indicates that the streaming service will have some 82 million subscribers worldwide by 2024. The report also noted that while “Netflix’s dominance of SVOD is falling” it will bring its total subscriber base up to 219 million by that same year. Amazon Prime, meanwhile, should have about 127 million subscribers by that time, and Apple will likely have secured about 13 million.
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