Greetings from Brooklyn, and welcome back to What I’m Hearing+, my weekly dispatch focused on the streaming industry and the analytics behind it all. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to subscribe.

Tonight, some thoughts on how the ’90s nostalgia-fueled success of Disney+’s Hocus Pocus 2, which bypassed a theatrical release, has reignited the high-stakes debate over how Hollywood writ large should approach the streaming vs. theatrical riddle.

But first…

1. Disney+ sub numbers grow, but at what cost? Disney smashed Wall Street expectations by reporting 12.1 million net new Disney+ customers last quarter, and the Street… couldn’t care less. In fact, the stock dropped 7 percent in after-hours trading. The bigger story, after all, is whether Disney is making money from those subscribers. With a decrease in direct-to-consumer revenue ($4.9 billion vs $5.1 billion in the quarter prior) and an increase in operational costs...

Streaming versus theatrical is, of course, the debate at the center of Hollywood’s ongoing identity crisis. On one side there is...