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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26575 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Inside Disney and internal corporate boardroom drama. Iger appointed Chapek as his successor but ended up decided coming back. It touches on the fight with Desantis, the prior generation deciding not to retire, internal power struggles, managing a business where no one has the skillset for all of the businesses (creative, running parks, international, finance, sports, launching a streaming business). About a 15-20 min. Iger seems more interested in the Desantis fight than Chapek who just wanted to play nice.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/09/06/disney-succession-mess-iger-chapek.html

Disney's 2023 releases have been duds

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2023/08/04/the-four-flops-of-2023-that-cost-disney-1-billion/?sh=4e9e00b13bed

Losses on some, profits on others. I don't see how a $100 million loss on a movie can cause a decline of market value in the tens of billion. mediocre movies cannot explain why the stock has fallen so much. Disney has always produced a lot of mediocre but expensive movies throughout its recent history [1], yet the stock has done so well , until 2022. The value is in the IP and other services, not so much box office. A movie that loses money at box office will still generate $ decades down the line through IP.

[1] https://screenrant.com/disney-biggest-box-office-bombs-disasters/#a-wrinkle-in-time-2018

Disney's stock is losing value quickly because D+ isn't working and they have a big payment to buy out their Hulu partners rapidly approaching (and Hulu isn't doing hot either).

mediocre movies cannot explain why the stock has fallen so much.

To the extent this is correct, it is because you’re looking at the stock price through the wrong frame. The big rally into 2022 was due to Star Wars and Marvel climaxing at the same time in 2018-2019, followed by the pandemic fed-tech bubble. The 2019-2022 price level isn’t the baseline, it’s the outlier.

Disney has outperformed or tracked the S&P 500 as far back as it began trading. 2022-2023 is a huge outlier in terms of bad relative performance . from $200 to $80 in just a year vs spx almost having recovered its losses. i think you could be right that the stock may have simply gotten ahead of itself due to Star Wars and Marvel hype wearing off, combined with some costly unforced errors, changing sentiment, woke backlash, etc. .

As someone who was in the machine for a few years, you're correct in that the value is in the IP.

And they've trashed their IP.

The missing thing everyone tends to overlook is merchandising. Consumer Products was an extreme overperformer in Disney's catalog during the Marvel golden years and the first of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Add to the ocean of Frozen merchandise... Disney makes significant gains on both product and selling the license to produce product for their brands, backed by a minimum guarantee sales agreement. Their IP did so well that they basically bullied toy and product companies into accepting whatever terms they wanted in order for access to their properties.

This is why The Last Jedi was so significant for Disney. It was a movie where the demand for product basically imploded. Hasbro lost their ass on it, and due to the poor performance of that movie's products as well as the chaos of getting anything approved by Disney for that movie (and the increasingly short turnarounds for Marvel ones in time for movie releases), it basically heavily damaged Disney's relationship with a lot of the toy and product guys.

Bear in mind Consumer Products did so well that they merged it with Parks to try and hide the black hole of Parks spending, mostly driven by overspending on development of new attractions, construction and cost overruns in upkeep.

If your company's value is the value of your IP, the price going through the floor is indicative of how the company is doing at IP management. Faith in Disney's ability to effectively monetize the IPs they own is critically low.

That has been a problem with parks too. They build these (occasionally amazing) rides but they are so expensive, take so long to build, and actually don’t move many people.

Disney had an amazing ability to create truly interesting fun unique rides that moved a lot of people. Sure the ride was expensive but not that expensive.

Outside of some weird cases like airlines, the value of a stock is a function of expected future earnings. Shareholders may have been convinced in the past that there was potential in owning DIS. They are no longer so confident.

Disney may always have had duds, it's the cost of doing business in that industry. But I believe what the market has realized is that they have lost the ability to make the popular entertainment that makes the duds worth it. It's not a stroke of bad luck, it's skills shortage.

Marvel is winding down massively, Star Wars has been blown up for nothing, Pixar is way past it's prime, the parks aren't making much money and the political spats have tarnished the image of family friendliness that has always been a core part of Disney's strategy.

They bought so much they own all of classic pop culture and yet I'm left asking: who is going to care about Disney IP in ten years? Versus, say, Nintendo.

Wait, how do airline stocks work?

Long video

Airlines are banks. You read that right. Flying is both such a necessary service and so unprofitable that it slowly has become a subsidized activity of companies whose main business is actually controlling a currency in frequent flier miles which other, actual, banks will buy and integrate into the rest of the financial system.

Banks behave differently than other businesses because they're a peculiar kind of business that's allowed to print money and is so important to the economy there is an expectation that the State will bail them out of a crisis. And so it is with Airlines.

As Taleb point out in Black Swan such enterprises are in the business of hiding risk. The stock price then isn't properly understood as a bet on earnings (at least not for the most part), but as a bet on the solvency of the State and its willingness to enact a bailout in the next crisis. A bet on the solidity of the financial system and how much that particular part of it can act as a safe haven.

The key similarity is that neither industry has much in the way of moats. They tend to be too competitive as there is nothing to prevent new entrants from boosting supply.

I'm not following why airlines are like banks. When I think of a bank I think of a company that makes money either by lending money or by investing and providing other financial services. Airlines sell frequent flier miles to credit card companies who use them as an incentive to get customers to sign up which doesn't seem like the same thing. For example if a bank offers a free toaster to anyone who opens a savings account that doesn't make KitchenAid a bank. That seems analogous to how credit card companies use the airline miles they buy. I assume I'm missing something here.

I also don't get how their shareholders are betting on a bailout instead of their financials. For example, American Airlines got a bailout during Covid but their stock is still down to a third of what it was before the pandemic so it's not like the investors made out like bandits.

When I think of a bank I think of a company that makes money either by lending money or by investing and providing other financial services.

And this is indeed what Airlines do. They sell credit services and benefits directly and administer their own mini-financial system as a main activity.

Transportation is not just a secondary activity, it's actually a loss leader. They consistentlyt lose money on operating plane trips to the tune of a few cents per seat and the disclosures we got during covid's loan season show the loyalty programs are worth more than the total market capitalization of the airlines which implies the transportation sides of the business have negative value.

For example if a bank offers a free toaster to anyone who opens a savings account that doesn't make KitchenAid a bank.

But what if KitchenAid started selling free toaster vouchers to banks for more than their market price? What if financial instruments started getting valued in those vouchers? What if there was an exchange rate for different voucher types? What if this was the main way they make any money?

The real magic here is in the fact they sell miles from their loyalty programs to other companies (like AA to Hertz) so they get the incentive benefits. These are sold at a markup, and the customer pays back the balance by flying. Given these miles are printed from nothing, they look very much like loans. Actually it's not quite from nothing, it's from the future expectation of the ability to fly, which is not really that different from the future expectation to redeem your money from a fractional reserve bank.

This makes the airline a sort of central bank of their own service backed currency that can, and does, adjust the value by controlling the supply and redeem rate. And importantly, this currency isn't taxed so it's possible to create weird tax free financial instruments using these, in a way that's really not dissimilar to how cryptocurrencies work today.

The real magic here is in the fact they sell miles from their loyalty programs to other companies (like AA to Hertz) so they get the incentive benefits. These are sold at a markup

I think that's a smart evolution of the business, although I wouldn't say there's any particular magic in this step either. This still falls under the universal logic of IOU issuance: anyone can issue their own IOUs (printed from nothing) and decide both what it takes to get one and what the redemption value will be.

I guess what moves it to feel more 'bank-like' is that the airlines take tracking accounts in their database very seriously, compared to less serious bearer punch-cards for free Subway sandwiches or whatever. And flights are more universally desirable, compared to more subjective businesses. Maybe I will use Hertz instead of Avis if it's giving me $X towards my next flight on my usual airline, but for some reason if they were partnered with Mcdonalds reward points, it would take a lot more than $X to move the needle.

They don't.

They bought so much they own all of classic pop culture and yet I'm left asking: who is going to care about Disney IP in ten years? Versus, say, Nintendo.

Basically this.

They burned a bunch of bridges and are now acting surprised at the lack of foot traffic, much like Anheuser Busch, one gets the impression that they didn't understand who their core market were.

I think it's a little different than AB. AB knew their market but they wanted a different one because their current market didn't comport with their political goals, and besides they didn't expect it to be around much longer with the fulfillment of those political goals. Disney thought they owned their market and it didn't matter what they put out, their market would accept it.

Can you really blame them? The Starwars/Marvel "consooom" crowd were pretty hardcore in their merch consoooming ways. I honestly didn't expect them to have a spine either, certainly didn't expect them to have enough spine to reject the new Trilogy and its merch.

There's an idea for a "so blackpilled you come out through the other side as whitepilled" effort post that's been bouncng around my head for a while, where these would be used as prominent supporting examples.

Lead by their theory of Cultural Hegemony progressives moved to capture the commanding heights of our culture, only to discover that power doesn't literally let you bend the world to your will. Provisional title: "Congratulations, you've won the crown! Now you have to wear it..."

Dramatization

I'd genuinely like to read that.

"Not understanding core market" is a long way from "small pr stunt goes wrong". I don't think management could have imagined it would have such a long and lasting impact as what it has become. In the past, a bad PR stunt would probably be forgotten as the news cycle changes and the old product line is discontinued (the Dylan Mulvaney cans were a one-off thing, not a product line), but social media keeps it alive in perpetuity. In 1996, McDonald's Arch Deluxe burger is a notable example of a major brand misreading a market, but it did not have a lasting impact like this has. Congrats, i guess, to Kid Rock for having more of an impact on a stock price than famous billionaire short sellers like Bill Ackman, Jim Chanos, Michael Burry etc. He should get a job at a hedge fund.

I don’t think it’s quite the same as the Arch Deluxe. There’s no real insult with the arch deluxe, it was a sandwich, and it didn’t taste good, but it didn’t cross any major lines. It didn’t offend your values, it didn’t call into question your masculinity, it didn’t celebrate things you hate. It was just a bad sandwich.

The Budlight thing was basically tying the brand to something that the main audience of Bud Light was opposed to — which is woke in general and gay/trans in particular. There’s also the issue of the perception that Bud Light is now not a man’s drink. I think especially in bars this was part of the deal. No man wanted to be seen drinking the tranny beer, and likely that will continue for quite some time.

"Not understanding core market" is a long way from "small pr stunt goes wrong".

Hard disagree. This isn't hyberole or an uncharitable strawman, Heinerscheid straight up said that "we don't want bud light to be the beer of frat-boys and rednecks anymore", and she succeeded.

In short @ArjinFerman is more intelligent than you.

In short @ArjinFerman is more intelligent than you.

how is that even relevant. yet again HlynkaCG is able to break rules with impunity here and get endless warnings

In short @ArjinFerman is more intelligent than you.

Okay, really, what was the point of this comment?

The rest of your post was fine. "The other person is right and you're wrong." You can say that.

But you have a pattern, which you've been repeating for a long time now, of adding gratuitous little elbow shots that add absolutely nothing except antagonism. You're clearly doing it on purpose, and I don't exactly understand why. It does not fit at all with all your Grizzled Old NCO schtick in which you act like you're just trying to keep out the riff-raff (despite this no longer being your job) and point out the truths that us jannies won't acknowledge. No, this is purely you being a dick to people you don't like. Sometimes it feels like you're testing us, sometimes it just looks like you can't control yourself. Maybe it's a disgust reflex. Whatever. But you need to stop.

You still get more leeway than most people here because you have such a long history as a positive contributor, including AAQCs which you continue to generate. A lot of people who really hate you have been angry about this for a long time and keep demanding we ban you. I don't know when or if you will force us to do that, but giving people who have earned more community "credit" a longer leash is intentional and has always been our policy. That said, you have not earned infinite goodwill and do-overs, and if you keep testing us, eventually we'll have to say good-bye.

In light of multiple previous infractions of a very similar nature, I'm giving you a one-week ban this time.

Do you think they wanted their whole entire core market to stop drinking their beers?

Do you think they wanted their whole entire core market to stop drinking their beers?

If one takes Alissa Heinerscheid's statements at face value, yes that is exactly what the management of InBev wanted.

If you actually believe that then I don't know what to tell you

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It wasn't "a small PR stunt going wrong" it was "deliberately insulting the core demographic buying your product".

In 1996, McDonald's Arch Deluxe burger is a notable example of a major brand misreading a market, but it did not have a lasting impact like this has

Because they were bad products, not attacks on their core market.

yeah with the benefit of hindsight we can say it was an attack on a core market

Disagree - almost anyone with vague ideas about american culture would have been able to tell that it is a bad idea. Only single white college educated woman deep in the blue bubble that has drank the DEI cool aid wouldn't have known. Guess what type they had recently promoted as vice marketing director.

If you were in the marketing department at AB and someone said “hey, why not send a one-time promotional can to this influencer that she’ll only market to her (highly woke) progressive following and that our core audience will never even hear about?” what would you say to convince them of how badly things would go?

It’s not really predictable, tons of red-tribe-friendly corporations have done much more woke things than what AB did and still retain that entire audience. Red tribers still subscribe to Netflix, still watch Disney movies, beloved right-adjacent brands like Chick-fil-A went full DEI and other than some Twitter users nobody cared, the core oo-rah red tribe demographic sports league, the NFL, went full woke, even NASCAR went woke. None of them saw a major backlash that convinced them to backtrack (yes, there was Kaepernick, but the NFL is still ultra-woke).

Predicting that a promotional can of Bud Lite would set this off wasn’t obvious.

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I guess. but companies are always do weight/wacky promotions to generate 'buzz'. Think of Burger King's various weird promotions . The assumption is, a misfire will be forgotten and society will move on. But not this time. If I were a hedge fund manger, and then Kid Rock video just came out and I had to make a call if society would move on or it would have a lasting impact, I would be in the former camp. yeah I was wrong.

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You don't need the benefit of hindsight, the recording of the marketing exec will do just fine.

That's too much “Great Man of History” analysis. I think Disney was boned no matter what.

  • Huge amounts of Disney’s revenue came from linear commercial TV, which is dying, and big tentpole franchises like Marvel, which—no matter how brilliant of a creative team you hire—are going to get tired at some point.
  • They get plenty of cruise line and theme park revenue, but if you jack up the prices and/or degrade the service quality too much with nickel-and-diming with Fast Passes, demand shrinks.
  • It's incredibly hard to change the institutional culture of a company that is that big and that old.

I doubt the DeSantis thing or the board room drama doesn't really mean a damn thing, versus the economic and cultural flow that's adjusting to a giant surplus of entertainment that's available everywhere all the time whenever you want it. Post-scarcity entertainment killed the music industry long ago, and now it's time that everything else gets shanked too.

That article seems to be trying to retrospectively put the blame for Disney's current woes on Chapek. Well, Iger is back so tough luck, he gets to carry the can (the same way the president in office, whoever he may be, gets the blame for the economy going wrong/the credit for the economy going right even if that is down to what his predecessor did).

And it doesn't seem like Iger was that hands-off even during his 'retirement', so the current slump in the stock prices (and unhappy shareholders) is on his plate and he has to deal with it. Whatever the truth is, part of the problem seems to be a struggle with Kathleen Kennedy over Star Wars and how that entire franchise is flailing around. Parks are losing money due to lack of visitors, for whatever reason (probably because when money is tight, expensive holidays to theme parks that will cost $$$$ is something that gets cut out of family budgets). Movies are tanking, and I'd say part of that is simply down to audience fatigue - they just milked the MCU cow until it dried up. Same with streaming, which is another household expense that is likely to be cut in budget pinches. And they shot themselves in the foot pulling ESPN from the cable network who are putting the blame squarely on Disney for wanting too high a price. As several Youtube channels have pointed out, over the holiday weekend a lot of people sat down to watch the game or the tennis on their cable subscription, couldn't get it, and when they rang up to complain, were told Disney wanted to charge too much.

CNBC is owned, ultimately, by Comcast which has a two-thirds stake in Hulu with Disney holding the remaining third. They agreed that Disney would buy all the stakes in Hulu, so right now there's a lot of horse trading going on about getting Disney to pay what Comcast evaluates their stake is worth. I imagine this news story is part of all that - sure, Disney may be in trouble right now but that's not Iger's fault, so could you please not tank the stock price so we can get our money out of them before they go belly-up?

I don't think Disney is going to go belly-up, but I think there's going to be a lot of retrenchment before the books get balanced, and a lot of shows and movies given the green light or in consideration may be pulled.

I also think getting into the fight with DeSantis was just plain stupid; all the crowing online over how Disney was so big and so rich with such great lawyers that they'd force DeathSantis to crumble, because they were fighting on the right side of history for LGBTQ+ rights, was nonsense. Disney is in financial stormy waters right now, and posting photos online of guys in drag selling princess dresses to little girls is going to help convince a lot of people "Maybe we'll go to Universal Studios and Mario Land instead".

Post-scarcity entertainment killed the music industry long ago

Record labels have 10x’d their valuations from the nadir over a decade ago thanks to Spotify, and Taylor Swift’s next tour will gross $3.5bn in North America alone. The music industry is probably more profitable than ever, but the money shifted in part to touring and live stuff.

That actually has similarities to Disney. Disney owns the parks, which are the entertainment equivalent of a Taylor Swift tour (expensive and an experience participants save for and look forward to), and which are fantastically profitable.

The problem was (as others have said) that Iger spent tens of billions on TV and movie content at the exact time that was becoming less profitable and the ESPN cash cow was drying up.

How do record labels make money when every song I can think of is available from youtube for free? I don't understand why Spotify has revenue. Just download songs and put them on your phone? How hard is that?

I pay for spotify and when I find tracks I like I buy the flacs from the artists. I'm mostly paying Spotify for convenience (playing music I don't listen to for other people/events) and for access to the algorithm, which has found a lot of incredibly nice artists that fit my incredibly niche tastes.

Nearly all of those songs are on YouTube channels that send their ad revenue to the record companies.

Just download songs and put them on your phone? How hard is that?

I used to do this, and then I got a trial Spotify subscription and never went back - what they really sell is convenience. The value to me of my time and attention is greater than their fee.

Isn’t YouTube lower quality? Also for $10 a month the library that follows you everywhere, can be streamed or downloaded anywhere and has pretty much every song in the standard version directly available is pretty convenient.

Maybe so, especially if it's one of those youtube videos that was uploaded 13 years ago by the Peruvian fans of a Finnish band with some random anime stitched onto it... but that's part of the charm IMO! https://youtube.com/watch?v=_HAuXWVLyW4

  1. for many people "download songs and put them on your phone" is a hard challenge to overcome.

  2. many people prefer to listed to some prepared playlist rather than hand-curate and build music library

  3. for many people Spotify is cheap enough to round it to "free" - or at least considered cheaper than investing time into (1) and (2)

"when every song I can think of is available from youtube for free" - well, not every (the same goes for Spotify)

(Spotify is doomed to have no real profits, but that is a separate problem)

Shockingly most people browse without an adblocker. They couldn't figure out how to download a video if you put a gun to their head. Spotify, sells convenience and a clean conscience that you're not stealing from your favorite artist.

Convenience is an interesting factor here. People my (our?) generation had a vague sense of anxiety, that our kids are going to run circles around us with regards to technology the same way we did around our parents, only for it to turn out that growing up with "streamlined" software made them effectively technologically illiterate.

The parks are an important way to generate revenue, but they only work if new generations get the same buzz from high giving Mickey or walking through Radiator Springs. There are far less expensive alternatives and far better thrill rides at other parks.

I think Disney was boned no matter what.

I think Iger knew this and resigned at a strategically optimal time to avoid it being on his record. Most of Disney's problems start with decisions made in Iger's tenure. Lots of people dont understand how amazing,yet bonkers, the ESPN/Disney cable model was (still is). They made most of their money from non-customers. ESPN was $10-15 a month in carriage fees, and was included in most standard packages (Disney would through its weight around to ensure it was, and made it so cable companies that didn't play ball got squished). Now, ESPN is a hugely popular channel, for cable, but even so, most cable subscribers dont watch ESPN, or if they do, only do for a few games a year. Those people were paying $12/month to ESPN for years! They tried to double down on that by buying RSNs, which they thought they could do the same with, but Comcast, et al, had caught on and didn't let Disney force them to include $10 a month channels like NESN and YES be bought by every subscriber in Boston/NY respectively. And thus that move blew up in their face (while Rupert Murdoch laughed while swimming in his money pit).

Going to Disney world is still a very different experience compared to pretty much any entertainment platform.

They are better positioned compared to most entertainment platforms.

Which would be fine if that were all they did, but they have an entire media empire to feed. The theme parks make money, but not enough to subsidize the rest of the business.

Not only that, but the theme parks are tied to IP. And they’re screwing up the IPs appeal to the kinds of people who would choose Disney themed vacations. Soccer moms are the ones who want to take the kids to Disney or book a Disney cruise. But, this is no longer a guaranteed family friendly brand. They might not let their kids watch Disney, they’d be turned off by gay days at the park (which are pretty well known), and are not family friendly especially if you’re from a conservative part of the country or are religious,

  1. They should spin out sports. Not a core business.

  2. They should be content creators; not distributors. Hulu was a mistake. Disney+ was a big mistake.

  3. Focus on what makes you different. For them, it is classic IP entangled with some of the most unique family fun vacation spots. Focus on that (distributing the IP in movies and toys; use that IP to get people to vastly overpriced theme parks).

Disney+ was a big mistake.

Disney had to make an app. The nightmare scenario was Netflix eating the world, and using their audience control as leverage to take all the profits on any given production after it left theaters. Every studio needed an app as a backup play, so they all made them.

The big mistake was the streaming wars. For a decade, every media exec lost their minds and decided the only way to win was to bury their enemies in piles of content. But, as it turns out, there's just not that many competent people in Hollywood. No amount of money will call forth a writer into existence. If in a given year there's 10 good movies and 10 mediocre ones, then an executive mandate to produce 100 movies will... produce 10 good movies and 90 mediocre ones. Disney+ was full to the top with shitty exclusives and interminable Marvel miniseries that went nowhere and meant nothing.

That's fine, they said. We'll just keep going. Eventually our enemies will run out of money and give up. The stock market will always give us infinite amounts of money and interest rates will always be zero. (The Uber/Lyft playbook, or the explosion in scooter rental apps)

But what if the winner of the streaming wars is... nobody? Disney and Netflix are in trouble. Paramount physically cannot stop making Star Trek junk. Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video are side plays run by notoriously ruthless CEOs who will cut anchor the minute they stop being profitable. The studios have picked a moronic fight with both the unions and started a strike that has dragged on for more than a hundred days. What if they all go bankrupt, and Hollywood has to reboot from nothing?

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is actually pretty good. Picard Season 3 wasn’t awful.

I do wonder if Disney would’ve been better off doing Disney+ and just opening up the vault. They already had a lot of great content. They didn’t need to produce new content.

It has been their corest business aside from maybe parks since ESPN/ABC was acquired. Cable and broadcast is still the company's largest operating profit segment, today. It's financing their streaming losses.

They need to replace that profit as it declines or shrink dramatically. It also boosts returns on their content development, and provides a ton of marketing for their parks and resorts.

One can still make money on content by licensing it to streamers.

Spending $64 billion to buy a whole lot of additional linear commercial TV in 2019 can be attributed pretty directly to Iger.

Interesting article, but I'm surprised they didn't mention the large payment Disney is contractually obligated to make for Hulu. Even at the floor valuation $9 billion is a mountain of cash for a company saddled with an enormous debt load from the Fox acquisition and whose net cash flow hasn't been great over the last 7 quarters and has had all the cash they've generated going into debt repayments.

Iger did the disastrous Fox deal.

trying to diagnose Disney's fall from grace is beyond my paygrade. goes to show why index funds and diversification is so beneficial . true, Disney took on a lot of debt, but so did tesla and look how well tesla did in 2020-2021

Taking on debt per se isn’t bad. Question is whether taking on debt for NPV positive or negative assets.

Not to defend Chapek, but seems to me most of Disney’s problems were Iger problems.

  1. Iger did the disastrous Fox deal.

  2. Iger pushed into the disastrous streaming business.

  3. Iger forced a fight with DeSantis over culture war issues that have soiled the Disney brand.

I don’t know why an activist investors hasn’t put two and two together that Iger is the one who needs the boot.

Is there evidence that Disney suffered O($10B) from the DeSantis fight? I don't think it's really penetrated among the biggest Disney consumers (children and women obsessed with princess fantasies). Even the fact that it's in a rut putting out boring, derivative content is probably a bigger factor.

children and women obsessed with princess fantasies

If that's the core market, or an important part, then the decisions they've made recently have not helped. Look at the controversy over the recent Snow White live-action remake, which hasn't even been released yet. The leads giving interviews about scrapping the love story, dumping the prince, and the struggle between Snow White and the Evil Queen being over who is the "fairest" (read: most just) ruler is going to fundamentally change the story beyond just updating it for 2023. They're also getting rid of the Seven Dwarfs and bringing in seven 'magical creatures' instead, a move that has been roundly mocked due to the set photos that got released. Disney at first denied these were real, but were eventually forced to admit that yes, they were real, they just weren't official.

Revamp the princesses too much, and you lose the audience.

The rut is related to woke programming. Without DeSantis the programming still would’ve been woke and bad, but it fit the narrative that DeSantis helped create.

Disney was family; not necessarily women and kids obsessed with princesses (though of course they offered that). They need to try to rebuild that family brand.

I’m not sure how easy it is to rebuild a family reputation. It’s a matter of the broken trust. Disney is not longer the “it’s okay to let my kids see this movie or TV show without worrying about it” company. And without that level of trust, that parents can really be sure that content they’re putting out won’t be full of woke propaganda, sexual content, rude and obnoxious behavior, parents are not going to feel safe letting their kids watch Disney. Basically, especially as it concerns kids, watching the content is the same as trusting an adult with those values around your kid. Everyone knows that kids pick that stuff up.

The only reason that it’s a slow loss is that most of the rest of Hollywood TV and movies are equally bad in content. Even though I’m not Christian, about the only content I’d feel safe plopping a 5 year old in front of made after the 1969s is evangelical stuff. At least that way I can know that they won’t be subjected to propaganda, sexual content, or rude and obnoxious behavior in their TV and movie choices.

This leaves the question of how Christian entertainment goes mainstream for kids stuff. It’s kids stuff, it doesn’t have to be good, and lots of people are trying to pick the twenty dollar bill up off the sidewalk.

I think it would be much better if it didn’t feel like it has to preach at you or overtly quote the Bible. The biggest problem they have, for me is that they come off preaching at the audience all the time. You can show faith by actions and make good moral characters and show them doing good moral things without having to tell the audience. The best examples I can give off the top of my head are 7th Heaven and Little House on the Prarrie. In both, it was pretty obvious that the families were Christians, but the producers and writers didn’t feel the need to have everything boil down to “the message” and related Bible citations.

VeggieTales seems to have been the one that cracked the conundrum, but nobody managed to replicate it since.

but nobody managed to replicate it since

The recipe is one part captive audience (this was always 'Churches looking for Sunday school material' or other Christian parents looking for something that was, well, Christian), one part strangely competent 3D animation team (cartoons don't need to be complex re: industry dominated by low-cost CalArts style for the last 10 years, they just need to not look outright bad- simple objects that bend, thus "veggies", were arguably the ideal way to do this in the late '90s), one part sane storyboarders who can keep the message in their pants for more than 5 minutes, and one part parents that won't get a bug up their ass about it being a chocolate bunny instead of a golden idol even though the message works better (especially with that age group) if you use the former.

It is my opinion that you need all 4 of those things to make that kind of media work, and to a point it's why that group persisted. The other medias of this type were just... boring, like so fucking boring- they might have meant well but you can only do so much with kid's choir, puppet shows, and a host that's totally not going to be dealing with rape allegations in 20 years.

Prince of Egypt was also pretty mainstream wasn't it? Granted 1997 is a long time ago. And there were the Narnia movies, but they flubbed the sequel and stopped making them.

Agreed. But that’s why you need a public reputation. Sure LGBT aligned NGOs will bellyache but they aren’t really Disney’s core audience.

Chapek was right to want to stay out of politics and it seems like the biggest problem was his board support was a lesbian.

The Fox price seems like the worst decision, by a significant gap. I suspect Nelson Peltz is biding his time to do just that. Better to strike when the executives and board are weaker, when the target is this big.

Think peltz is on deaths door last I heard.

This sounds interesting, could you explain more? I'm very unaware.

Nelson Peltz is a fairly famous activist investor. The article mentions him, and he bought about a billion dollars of the stock last year, and currently owns about 6.4 million shares both amounts are less than 1% of the company. However it is enough to show a credible interest and to threaten proxy fights which he did earlier this year.

He definitely wanted a board seat and with the stock down as much as it is, he's in a better position for a proxy fight next year should be wish to try again. He was open about thinking Iger was not doing well with Disney.

Streaming and that as a platform turned out to be a tough business. WBD who I think has some awesome content trades at 50 billion in debt plus 30 billion in equity value which is really cheap compared to the valuations Netflix has achieved in the past.

You're forgetting the most important aspect for an entertainment company. Disney under Iger produced good content. Disney under Chapek didn't.

Except Iger was responsible for some horrible content like Star Wars, which he rushed into production - which caused a cascade of production issues and failures. Which then basically killed the movie side

I’m kinda wondering why Disney didn’t look at the cash cow they acquired and turn the actually good parts of the EU(which are after all known quantities) into GoT like series- HBO’s success was about the same time. It seems like an obstinate refusal to do the boring, safe thing made Disney blow what should have been a sure bet.

I think it's a combination of arrogance and general "Prequels PTSD"'.

The arrogance is not just in Iger rushing it to have it out in his time. It's also in the fact that the people on the A-side - the movies - just didn't give a shit about any of this. Joss Whedon admitted as much about the original MCU shows like Agents of Shield. They're lower budget fanfiction that just interfere with their canon (which is the real canon) and may confuse fans but they have to pretend to indulge because some nerds buy the tie-ins. In that way, they treat it much like Lucas did. They just didn't care. Especially since there's just so much you can point to to shit on the EU.

The second thing is that basically everyone old enough to work on these films either hates the Prequels or remembers the absolute, wall-to-wall hate the Prequels got. Simon Pegg is a friend of Abrams and look how he talks about them in an otherwise diplomatic industry.

But people disagree on what exactly was bad about the Prequels. As someone who grew up with them I hated the dialogue and characterization. I was not only fine with but loved the Republic era - plenty of us found some quality in the games, books or The Clone Wars show even if we agreed with the criticisms of the mainline films.

The message Disney apparently took was that they were bad in their essence: people didn't just hate the prequels cause of bad execution, they hated the idea. What everyone wanted more OT-like stuff, fewer Jedi, less of a Republic, more Empire v. Rebels, less shiny CGI Coruscant so give them a ton of that, at least at the start. Well, that led to the derivative mess we got and the insistence on movies like Rogue One and Solo which all stayed in the very safe "post-Revenge of the Sith, pre-A New Hope" space.

Which would have perhaps been survivable (The Force Awakens made too much money) but the rush meant no ability to plan for a coherent trilogy and each movie not only pissed off fans of anything original, it even pissed off fans of the previous movie.

The prequels were bloated movies with a decent concept and terrible execution. A strong editor and better action would’ve led to a great set of movies.

The sequels lacked even the decent concept.

A better editor would have helped, yes, but IMO the critical flaw in the Prequels was that George Lucas originally intended for the Big Bad Guy to be Darth Jar Jar Binks. The theory is that he chickened out when he saw the overwhelmingly bad fan reaction to the character in The Phantom Menace. But ironically the only thing that would have redeemed the character and the whole trilogy is if this bumbling idiot was just a Kaiser Soze-esque mask for Palpatine's master. Cowardly scrapping that left Episode II without a memorable villain.

For those who haven't seen it already: https://old.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/3qvj6w/theory_jar_jar_binks_was_a_trained_force_user/

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The stupid part is that for all intents and purposes, the EU draft for star wars sequels in the Zahn trilogy is very much "more of the OT" (not least because that's how Lucas told Zahn to write it). Unlike the chaos they got with total improvisation, the structure would have guaranteed some story coherence. And when I reread the books recently I was struck at how naturally they flow with the OT and how well they maintain the characterization. Luke doesn't feel like a completely different person, which is apparently not something to be taken for granted.

And as much as you can tax the EU of being bad or at least not good enough to fit on the silver screen (a debatable proposition given what we got instead), the Zahn trilogy is pretty universally beloved. I haven't met a prequel hater that doesn't at least recognize Thrawn as a memorable character. And I've actually met many who prefer the more mystic, weird and scruffy continuity of the Zahn sequels to the cleaner, sanitized and mighty setting the prequels had to depict.

They could even have had their cake and eaten it too, by just cribbing the narrative structure and characters and done a free adaptation of the EU, which is what they ended up having to do as a crutch anyways. TLJ being a midwit version of Kotor 2 and ROS being bargain bin Dark Empire.

The stupid part is that for all intents and purposes, the EU draft for star wars sequels in the Zahn trilogy is very much "more of the OT"

It's different in many ways. "More OT"' in the case of the Sequel Trilogy is literally "no, everything we can possibly roll back to then we will", in some sort of childlike desire to relive things exactly as they were, regardless of how it distorts the story. Republic? Gone despite what it does to the heroes' sacrifices. Han's character development? Gone. Leia's Jedi nature? Meh. The Jedi..come on.

This is silly because people want growth, but if it was rational I wouldn't call it PTSD.

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Kotor was such an amazing game. I for one would love to see a Revan series.

Early Iger or late? Disney don't have much good content since the great wokisation began in the mid 2010-s

It is clear from the article that Iger is very much a social creature. So when the environment went woke so did Iger.

Is that really true? Sure the stuff Disney has put out is garbage. But it’s because of the people Iger put in charge.

Also Disney is unique. They make a lot from parks. Chapek didn’t do a great job there though.

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