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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
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.
Not to defend Chapek, but seems to me most of Disney’s problems were Iger problems.
Iger did the disastrous Fox deal.
Iger pushed into the disastrous streaming business.
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.
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.
VeggieTales seems to have been the one that cracked the conundrum, 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.
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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.
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