Disney, in other words, is constructing what looks to be a worthy rival to Netflix. Will this be enough to inaugurate another century of dominance? Based on its public statements and on private conversations I’ve had with Disney executives, the company’s most likely path forward is to nurture Disneyflix gradually, in an effort to ease the decline of pay-TV and film—the equivalent of saving its flooding fortress by plugging each new leak as it springs. That may be a prudent way to maintain the status quo for a few more years. To save the kingdom, however, Disney may have to blow up the castle.

Black Panther, Disney’s latest box-office megahit, offers a perfect lens through which to see both the benefits of Disney’s traditional model and the virtues of a new path. The acclaimed film grossed more than $575 million at the domestic box office in its first month, showcasing Disney’s unique ability to create broadly appealing entertainment in a culture that often feels like an agglomeration of cult interests and niche tastes. But in film, as in television, Disney relies on middlemen to deliver its content—and middlemen always take a cut. To buy a ticket to see a Disney film in theaters, you pay an exhibitor that keeps about 40 percent of the ticket price.

What if Disney bypassed the middlemen and put a highly anticipated film like Black Panther on its streaming service the same day it opened in theaters—or made the film exclusive to subscribers? In the short term, sacrificing all those onetime ticket buyers might seem financially ruinous. But the lifetime value of subscriptions—which renew automatically until actively canceled—quickly becomes profound. If the film’s debut encouraged just over 4 million people to sign up for an annual subscription to a $10-a-month Disneyflix product—about the same number of subscribers that Netflix added the quarter it debuted its original series House of Cards—Disney would earn a net revenue of nearly $500 million in just the first year. Black Panther was a massive hit as a theatrical release; it could have been even bigger had it been used to transform onetime moviegoers into multiyear Disneyflix subscribers.

“If I were sitting in [Disney CEO] Bob Iger’s shoes, I would realize that the most important thing I can do is create original exclusive content for my streaming product that is unencumbered by any other platform,” Rich Greenfield, a media and technology analyst at the investment bank BTIG, told me recently. (One week later, he made the case explicit in a research report, one section of which was titled “Why Releasing All Disney Movies on Streaming Is Not Crazy.”) Among other benefits, he said, Disney would get valuable personal data on its biggest fans, which it could use to customize its video service and offer special discounts for merchandise and theme-park tickets.