News Bob Iger is back! Chapek is out!!

[Mmoore29]

I don't think Iger was appropriate. Wells seemed more comparable to the "old guard" of Disney's money people such as Roy Disney and Card Walker. As lazyboy97o said, Wells respected the company, its products and also its customers. Iger never did, regardless of whether Eisner actively attempted to groom him otherwise.

You sell Iger short. He'd easily be able to learn, especially with a board that wasn't yet full of Eisner's loyalists that would never question him. Iger always strikes me as a sponge, who can absorb a lot of things when he applies himself.

You can't honestly say that Iger would be a worse choice than Ovitz.

 

[Smiley/OCD]

Welcome to Whose Wall Street Is It Anyway? Where the rules are made up and (small) profits don't matter!

Yes, the question is, will Iger perform a hoedown with Jim Cramer, Wayne Brady and Drew?

 

[MisterPenguin]

Well reviewed but not any viewers per the creator of it:

'Andor' Showrunner Admits Show Is "Chasing The Audience" After Expecting To Have a "Gigantic Instantaneous Audience"

Tony Gilroy, the showrunner and creator for the most recent Star Wars series, Andor, recently admitted the show is "chasing the audience."

boundingintocomics.com

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The series, which debuted three episodes when it was released on September 21st, clocked in at 624 million minutes....In its second week the series only brought in 485 million minutes.​

624M minutes was for the first two episodes, so, about 312M minutes each.

The next week, for episode 3 was at 485M minutes.

The minutes watched per episode went up not down.

Someone can't do basic math.

After 6 episodes, Andor has 2.3B minutes watched.

Is it *the top*? No.

But when is consistently being in the top ten a sign that your franchise is dead?

Fandom Menace strikes again!

 

[Sir_Cliff]

Iger shut down Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures because he thought he didn’t need the content, and then when he did need content he spent billions on Fox instead of getting that production going again.

Was the logic behind buying Fox really to produce new content? I thought it was primarily about getting control of their back catalogue and possibly about eliminating a potential competitor.

 

[lazyboy97o]

You sell Iger short. He'd easily be able to learn, especially with a board that wasn't yet full of Eisner's loyalists that would never question him. Iger always strikes me as a sponge, who can absorb a lot of things when he applies himself.

You can't honestly say that Iger would be a worse choice than Ovitz.

You say this as thought Iger wasn’t with the company for decades.

 

[Mmoore29]

Was the logic behind buying Fox really to produce new content? I thought it was primarily about getting control of their back catalogue and possibly also about eliminating a potential competitor.

To be honest, I think Disney is a better owner than Comcast would've been, especially for the Alien IP, and the chance of us getting the proper sequel to Aliens that we deserve.

 

[Mmoore29]

You say this as thought Iger wasn’t with the company for decades.

He was, but the company he entered in our reality is a different one than he would've entered if he'd been chosen to be Eisner's number two in 1996. Very different company. And very different results if he'd been taking care of business then, instead of later, after Eisner's micromanagement had begun breaking things down. Here, Iger would've kept that from happening and Disney would've been doing far better, especially without the Ovitz headache.

 

[SteamboatJoe]

No need to assume financial condition they might just be cheap.....

Both in my case.

 

[EPCOT-O.G.]

If something HAS to be sold, it would be selling Disney+ to Netflix, but not before 2024, before they can exercise the option to buy out Comcast's stake in Hulu, integrate the Hulu content in Disney+, then sell it all to Netflix under a deal where Netflix gets the content and gives Disney licensing fees, but Disney remains in creative control of the originals, because they'd want to keep that.

I think you vastly underestimate how much the company has leveraged to simply walk away from streaming. Home media sales are virtually nonexistent and box office returns are less and less of a sure thing.

And no one would ever let Disney be acquired by another company, not even Iger. No one would ever stand for that, especially after Comcast's hostile bid back in 2004. If Disney could survive that moment, it can survive anything.

You do realize Iger became a Disney employee only because the company he worked for was taken over by Disney

 

[Disney Analyst]

I think there was ample concern that he was trying to do exactly that. He had already facilitated the creation of Dreamworks, which for a time became a viable competitor in the field of animation (the biggest one they had ever faced thus far). He also burned bridges with Pixar, which was in the process of splitting off from Disney to become another independent studio before Iger bought them out. Disney animation would not have survived this. Eisner had no viable strategy to handle this creative loss and seemed uninterested in wanting to fix it (perhaps even unwilling to admit there was a problem).

The parks were also decaying under Eisner's watch. EPCOT was ruined beyond any hope of recovery in only a few short years starting in 1994. Disneyland had a string of safety related scandals that led to multiple guest deaths, and the dilapidated state of the park as a whole was quite well documented. California Adventure and Studios Paris were mostly considered massive disappointments, and Hong Kong DL was also for having nothing to do.

And on the executive level, remember that Eisner was the originator of the strategic planning group. We would never have gotten Bob Iger or any of the others in that circle without Eisner.

Part of me wonders what the company would be like today had he stayed on longer. If would learn ANY lessons from the fear of having his power stripped, but narrowly avoiding it. But I have to be realistic here, he did unfathomable damage before he left. I think "lighting the place on fire" isn't too far from the truth.

Given that the timing of everything going to hell with Frank Wells' death are so precisely coordinated, I have to assume he really was the glue that held everything together. He was seen as the "financial" guy (who you'd more often be against in the creative business world today), but he seems to deserve a lot more credit than that. Just as I believe Roy Disney deserves more credit than he often gets as well (not that Walt didn't deserve his share).

I agree with your post fully. Eisner was trouble. The parks were decaying, and safety was genuinely compromised.

The Save Disney campaign started for a reason.

Things only really turned around at Disneyland when Matt Ouimet stepped in as President and got the place into top form for the 50th anniversary, which I believe was already when Eisner was stripped of his Chairman title, and the transition to Iger was beginning.

 

[imagineer boy]

Wells respected Disney as a brand and as an institution. Iger does not, it is a nondescript media holding company themed to a mouse or whatever.

AMEN!

 

[Mmoore29]

I think you vastly underestimate how much the company has leveraged to simply walk away from streaming. Home media sales are virtually nonexistent and box office returns are less and less of a sure thing.

You do realize Iger became a Disney employee only because the company he worked for was taken over by Disney

Yes, hence why I said, if they must sell something, it would be that, and only if all else fails. There's plenty of time to avoid that. And it would be stupid and self-destructive to sell off any one of these complementary assets. This isn't any iteration of WB from 2000 onwards, be it AOL Time Warner, WarnerMedia or WBD. Disney isn't anything close to that.

Let's also keep in mind that for a while, after acquiring ABC, he was in that same spot, when he would've been better served as being named Eisner's number two as a condition of the ABC purchase. Would that mean ABC would do better? Hard to say, and likely not, but Disney as a whole would do better.

 

[MrPromey]

Fanboi dreams.

Oh come on! You know Apple wants to run a cruise line!

 

[lazyboy97o]

I agree with your post fully. Eisner was trouble. The parks were decaying, and safety was genuinely compromised.

The Save Disney campaign started for a reason.

Things only really turned around at Disneyland when Matt Ouimet stepped in as President and got the place into top form for the 50th anniversary, which I believe was already when Eisner was stripped of his Chairman title, and the transition to Iger was beginning.

Matt Ouimet was made President of the Disneyland Resort in October of 2003, the month before Roy and Stanley resigned to start Save Disney. Eisner was starting to make corrections.

Frankly, Roy E. Disney was probably one the biggest destructive forces within Disney.

 

[Mmoore29]

AMEN!

Would Wells have been farsighted enough to acquire these complementary assets like ABC, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel and Fox? If anything, he would've been far too conservative and played things too safe. You gotta swing for the fences.

I agree that in temperament, Wells was a phenomenal man. But you gotta play the cards you're dealt. And the cards being dealt are that Iger would've been a far better choice than Michael Ovitz. Can you honestly say that isn't true?

 

[Sir_Cliff]

Matt Ouimet was made President of the Disneyland Resort in October of 2003, the month before Roy and Stanley resigned to start Save Disney. Eisner was starting to make corrections.

Frankly, Roy E. Disney was probably one the biggest destructive forces within Disney.

I'm sorry, but Eisner had run out of time to make corrections. And, honestly, when he did at the time it was things like tacking on A Bug's Land and a lesser clone of ToT on to DCA. If there was a come to Jesus moment for him, we never saw evidence of it publicly.

Even if he would have started to run the parks better than he had been, he didn't seem very good at running the rest of the company, particularly adapting to changing trends and technology or managing relationships.

 

[MrPromey]

My shopDisney app hasn't worked on Android in months, possibly last year.

The Disney+ app is starting to be unreliable on my Chromecast as well.

The website sucks. Shipping may reflect cost but makes it weird in this day and age as a consumer when you want to buy something that's $10 (worth about $4 of it didn't have a Disney IP on it) and they want to charge you another $8 to ship it... and then it takes a week and a half for it to even leave their warehouse.

They run that business like a mail-order catalog from the 80's.

 

[lazyboy97o]

I'm sorry, but Eisner had run out of time to make corrections. And, honestly, when he did at the time it was things like tacking on A Bug's Land and a lesser clone of ToT on to DCA. If there was a come to Jesus moment for him, we never saw evidence of it publicly.

Even if he would have started to run the parks better than he had been, he didn't seem very good at running the rest of the company. Particularly adapting to changing trends and technology nor managing relationships.

How are things like appointing Ouimet not public evidence? Huge new attractions like Mission: SPACE and Expedition Everest? Even Tower of Terror was the system the Japanese were getting.

Iger doubled down on his strategy. He promoted the Strategic Planners that originated so many of Eisner’s bad decisions.

 

[MrPromey]

It’s not the Disney store that was the problem…it was the mall model that is close to dead already

They build medical clinics and hipster apartments in ours now.

In my area, they tear them down and then rebuild as something they call "outdoor" malls with anchor stores like Target and Lowes and mostly missing the specialty stores that made malls, malls.

When I was a youngster, we called 'em shopping centers and they were nothing special but now they're outdoor malls you have to get in your car to go from one store to another in.

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

I think there was ample concern that he was trying to do exactly that. He had already facilitated the creation of Dreamworks, which for a time became a viable competitor in the field of animation (the biggest one they had ever faced thus far). He also burned bridges with Pixar, which was in the process of splitting off from Disney to become another independent studio before Iger bought them out. Disney animation would not have survived this. Eisner had no viable strategy to handle this creative loss and seemed uninterested in wanting to fix it (perhaps even unwilling to admit there was a problem).

The parks were also decaying under Eisner's watch. EPCOT was ruined beyond any hope of recovery in only a few short years starting in 1994. Disneyland had a string of safety related scandals that led to multiple guest deaths, and the dilapidated state of the park as a whole was quite well documented. California Adventure and Studios Paris were mostly considered massive disappointments, and Hong Kong DL was also for having nothing to do.

And on the executive level, remember that Eisner was the originator of the strategic planning group. We would never have gotten Bob Iger or any of the others in that circle without Eisner.

Part of me wonders what the company would be like today had he stayed on longer. If would learn ANY lessons from the fear of having his power stripped, but narrowly avoiding it. But I have to be realistic here, he did unfathomable damage before he left. I think "lighting the place on fire" isn't too far from the truth.

Given that the timing of everything going to hell with Frank Wells' death are so precisely coordinated, I have to assume he really was the glue that held everything together. He was seen as the "financial" guy (who you'd more often be against in the creative business world today), but he seems to deserve a lot more credit than that. Just as I believe Roy Disney deserves more credit than he often gets as well (not that Walt didn't deserve his share).

I think…and we have been talking about this for going on 30 years…is that 95-05 period is symbolic to a lot of fans…

It was kinda the end of the “innocence”. Eisner is really the figurehead for the transformation of the “family” company into the corporate…

And that is what happened. It’s a psychological transition that many never wanted.

The problem is it was going to happen. The reason Disney is the behemoth it is now…and not bought up like Warner or universal…is because they did make the transition then.

Even if they had to step on some land mines to do it.

Iger didn’t really do anything that wasn’t set up before. He gets far less shade. You build a house from the ground up…but the ground is never the “pretty part”

I’m sure we can go back to Eisner critique another time…not that anybody really wants to.