Iger's great financially but a creative failure. He's great at constantly finding new ways to leverage Disney's brands (a Wall Street guy through and through) but he's a complete failure at finding anything new to bring to the Disney name. All of his successes have been about reviving, rebooting, or capitalizing on brands and content that had already been created by the Disney company:
- Pirates of the Caribbean 4
- Alice in Wonderland live-action movie
- life-action movie based on Sleeping Beauty
- New Fantasyland (even with seven DMT, it's princess franchises galore)
- Disney Infinity (a videogame all about existing Disney characters)
- Once Upon A Time on ABC (TV show about "adult" versions of Disney characters)
- Sofia the First does the same for the toddler set
- turning Pixar from the world's most celebrated art house animation studio into a factory that churns out sequels to Disney's merchandising hits (after The Good Dinosaur, we're getting four sequels IN A ROW)
- 2 new Disney Cruise Line ships that are stuffed to the smokestacks with Pixar references, down to the signature dining restaurant based on Ratatouille
- makeovers to DCA and Disney Studio Paris that, although successful, are primarily based on Pixar, and make the until-then unprecedented moves of introducing entire lands centered around a single brand
- selling off huge chunks of the Seven Seas Lagoon coast, and those views of Cinderella Castle that 70s-era WED imagineers worked to establish almost 50 years ago, in the interest of selling DVC timeshares
- … And last but not least, acquiring several content-creating companies that had already established themselves, from comic book franchises to YouTube video companies to video game developers, instead of trying within the company to create successful content in those media
Frozen may be one of his few big accomplishments that wasn't 100% capitalizing on a prior success, and even that could be said to simply be an extension of the princess franchise. It also seems to largely have been an accident, seeing as Disney publicly showed little confidence in the film prior to the international craze in early 2014, and its success still doesn't seem to have given them any confidence in the next original animated feature from that same studio, Big Hero 6 (and even that is just a revival of an existing Marvel property).
All of that is fine and dandy, but at some point you have to wonder when Disney is going to turn out the next original creation. For what is supposed to be one of the top companies in the world for creativity, when are we going to see something, you know, creative? Leveraging characters created by animators back in the 1950s is great (Alice, Maleficent, and soon Cinderella) but what happens when you've plundered your entire 1950s film library and have nothing else to spin off? What do you do when the entire Seven Seas Lagoon is sold to DVC? When people finally get sick of Jack Sparrow and Pirates 5 or 6 plummets at the box office, what is the next big franchise to take its place?
Instead of finding so many ways to capitalize on his existing content or buying outside companies, Iger could've been creating the next Pirates 1, the next superhero cinematic universe, or the next masterpiece of Imagineering that people will want a view of from their DVC timeshare.
But he didn't. He's just a brand guy.
So really, it's not just a WDW problem. Iger has created a culture of creative bankruptcy and corporate complacency that has poisoned the entire Disney company.
