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