News Bob Iger is back! Chapek is out!!

[Vegas Disney Fan]

I am not saying that it actually represents kowtowing. I am saying that you would not see as strong a reaction from people if it were an original film or perhaps even a more unique interpretation of the same fairytale rather than a shot-for-shot, song-for-song re-dressing.

I think this is part of the problem also, they keep remaking classics, often with a diverse cast, that aren’t as good as the originals and diversity becomes associated with bad.

For example, New Aladin is vastly inferior to the old Aladin, that’s not Will Smiths fault (he didn’t write and direct it) but people associate the movie with him. It’s not fair but it’s reality.

If the Little Mermaid isn’t as good as the original (good luck reaching that bar) it’s going to be associated with Halle, fair or not she’s the face that will be remembered because she’s the high profile change.

Cinderella wasn’t amazing but it didn’t have “controversy”, it’s largely forgotten, Beauty and the Beast wasn’t amazing but it didn’t have “controversy”, it’s largely forgotten. Disney is setting these actors up to fail and in cases of gender or race swapping people associate the actors with the failure.

 

[el_super]

Agreed. Disney Parks are a strong consistant performer. Its very hard for Disney to mess that up. However, they are also enomously expensive to maintain and pay taxes on. It will be interesting to see if Universal's strong growth eats deeper in Disney's WDW profit.

I think if the complaints are really just focused on "they are too expensive" Disney will just ignore them and keep pushing forward. They are making the bet that they can make the same/more money with fewer people and less operating costs in the park and that would absolutely require pricing more people out. Pricing people out and the anger around it, would have been baked into the strategy from the start, so that they are complaining they can't get in for so cheap anymore isn't really much of a valid complaint.

Yes, D+ costs are insane. Disney spent 25 million "per episode" for She Hulk...and it looked terrible. Stuff like that is ridiculas. Looking at Marvel, Lucasfilm and Pixar...I think the studios are in deep trouble.

I don't think the studios are in trouble, but they are definitely spending too much, especially on the star wars content. Things like Obi-Wan and Andor might have driven subscribers, but they were costly to make. That was just part of their initial strategy to drive subscribers and pull people away from Netflix and other services. They've done that and now need to make money. Either they need to cut the spending on their content (promised at 33 billion this next year) or dramatically increase the prices on Disney+ subscriptions.

But again, this isn't really a commentary on the content itself. The content is finding an audience.

I also suspect that Disney is fudging its numbers very stratigically to make itself look better than it really is too.

Assuming you don't mean anything illegal here, it's probably not anything significant.

I think Wall Street sees this too....

Wall Street is all over the place right now. We are accustomed to seeing very measured and slow responses from Wall Street, but living with fears of a recession coming ANY MINUTE NOW has produced some rather scattered actions and opinions from people trying desperately to make enough money to jump ship when they need to. Generally speaking from things I've seen or heard in the last month:

• Streaming will never take over the theater space and Disney can't make it work.
• Theme parks are too costly to run
• Movie theaters are dead and big spenders are not coming back because streaming is too popular.
• Disney needs to ditch their cable/TV business because no one watches TV anymore.

They've literally painted this picture that Disney can't be profitable making entertainment in any form. If Theaters, streaming and traditional TV/Cable are all dead mediums... what's left?

And yeah, I understand a lot of these disparate opinions are coming from different people/analysts but the overall sentiment has been so doubtful for many months now.

 

[el_super]

Whereas if Disney puts out something substandard

I don't know.... the Disney Channel(s) still exist.

I do think there will be some shift on Disney+ content to something closer to what they are producing for TV (as a replacement for TV/Cable) rather than a replacement for Theatrical releases. More game shows and cheaper sit-com style shows.

 

[LittleBuford]

For example, New Aladin is vastly inferior to the old Aladin, that’s not Will Smiths fault (he didn’t write and direct it) but people associate the movie with him. It’s not fair but it’s reality.

I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here. Does that mean Disney should have cast a white man as the Genie in order to preempt this unfair reality?

 

[Br0ckford]

I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here. Does that mean Disney should have cast a white man as the Genie in order to preempt this unfair reality?

Man, I didn’t get that at all. that’s a stretch. Whoever took that role was gonna be associated with a mid movie, just happened to be Will Smith. I took that as the writing and directing were bad.

 

[TalkingHead]

Something that hasn’t been much discussed is what Chapek talked about in one of his last interviews. This was from the WSJ talk where he’s explaining a plan to join the parks experience with D+ by sharing user data between the two:

Bob Chapek: We're putting the arms and legs on it right now inside our own technical groups. What we're trying to do is build a toolbox of utilities that then can be used by our creators at Pixar, at Disney, at Marvel, at Lucas, that can then take those utilities and use them to tell stories in a different, more customized, more personalized way, given your affinities.

Matt Murray: Can you give me... I mean, it's hypothetical. Maybe can you give me an example of what you mean?

Bob Chapek: Okay. So let's start, say you were a Pirates of the Caribbean writer, when you go home, we know that you rode Pirates of the Caribbean, so maybe the first thing that pops up isn't other things that you've looked at in the past or people that look like you have seen in the past, but what you get is special programming tailored to Pirates of the Caribbean that would be unique to people like you, that is personalized towards your preferences.

Ignoring for a second that this doesn’t sound like it would meaningfully move needle on adding subscriptions or improving entertainment quality, is there any reason to believe this plan has been scrapped by Iger?

 

[James Alucobond]

I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here.

The context is missing because the discussion was deleted. I would expect the lagging comments to get scrapped soon too, but that was not what that poster intended.

 

[mightynine]

Ignoring for a second that this doesn’t sound like it would meaningfully move needle on adding subscriptions or improving entertainment quality, is there any reason to believe this plan has been scrapped by Iger?

It's a unique take of servicing recommendations on D+ based on more than your watch history. Not necessarily something that would move subscriptions but could be an interesting feature for a subscriber who is really in the Disney ecosystem. Not sure why something like that would be scrapped.

 

[Vegas Disney Fan]

I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here. Does that mean Disney should have cast a white man as the Genie in order to preempt this unfair reality?

No, I was saying they should make quality movies rather than just making lessor versions of old movies and meh new ones, all while the focus is diversity. They are setting up these movies (and casts) to fail, and since the casting choices are front and center it becomes an easy scapegoat for people to point to diversity as the reason they failed.

Had the Genie been white the movie would have still been inferior to the original, but because Will Smith was the focus he unfairly is the scapegoat.

Rather than people talking about the bad movie they simply associate it with will Smith, similar to how the 32 seconds of gay characters are now the scapegoats for Lightyear and Strange Universe.

Make good movies and the problems disappear.

 

[LittleBuford]

No, I was saying they should make quality movies rather than just making lessor versions of old movies and meh new ones, all while the focus is diversity. They are setting up these movies (and casts) to fail, and since the casting choices are front and center it becomes an easy scapegoat for people to point to diversity as the reason they failed.

Had the Genie been white the movie would have still been inferior to the original, but because Will Smith was the focus he unfairly is the scapegoat.

Rather than people talking about the bad movie they simply associate it with will Smith, similar to how the 32 seconds of gay characters are now the scapegoats for Lightyear and Strange Universe.

Make good movies and the “woke” problems disappear.

Thank you for explaining. I don’t recall the criticisms of the live-action Genie being framed in terms of “wokeness”. Rather, the focus was on how strange he looked and how he wasn’t as funny as Robbin Williams. But perhaps I missed the kinds of discussions you’re alluding to.

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

I don't know why you think there's some relevant difference. Just because it wasn't his original contract doesn't make the extension any less of a contract. In 2017, the Board extended his contract through 12/31/21. He stepped down in February 2020. Therefore, he stepped down with 22 months remaining on his contract. Calling it an extension doesn't make that fact any less true.

To be fair to my new BFF Caleb…
You could assume that anyone under multiple extensions has the potential to retire at anytime…so not really “abrupt”

However…iger’s couldn’t have been any more abrupt.

There are plenty of reasons why a person might retire. However, a CEO agreeing to stay on until the end of 2021 suddenly stepping down "effective immediately" with 22 months remaining on that contract (after stalling on previously announced plans to step down and chasing away the most likely successors) isn't typical unless there's a reason beyond "I think I'm ready to step away." Since no scandals or health issues have been reported that would have cause his to step down, we're left with very few options, and "I was just ready to be done," isn't the most likely one - especially since he remained Chairman of the Board and continued participating/meddling in Disney's affairs in ways that made his successor feel undermined. Hardly the behavior of a man who was ready to retire and relax on the beach.

Yep…that’s what smells like last week’s fish sticks in this whole thing

Pretty much.

Absolutely…pretty simple logic here

Sure, it's speculation, but it's speculation based on knowledge of how other large publicly traded corporations typically handle these types of transitions when the departing CEO wasn't fired. My company is on its 4th CEO since I started working here. Not one of the previous 3 just announced their retirement effective immediately - because that's not the standard behavior expected from a CEO. They announce their departure months in advance and simultaneously announce their replacement, who is then shown the ropes during that transition period - because nobody wants instability (or the perception of it) if it can be avoided.

Also, you can easily rule certain possibilities out by asking how the Board of Directors would think/act. Logically, it makes no sense to force Iger out and then beg him to come back to replace his replacement. We have a few possible options. Feel free to add your own to the list if you have any that I missed:

1. Iger was really ready to retire, so he stepped down effective immediately. Then he decided to stick around in a less visible role as Chairman of the Board and undermine Chapek by holding meetings with other executives without inviting Chapek and convincing the rest of the Board to see things his way when he disagreed with Chapek's ideas. A similar workload with less visibility to the public - because he was "ready to retire" and couldn't wait any longer.

2. The Board forced Iger out effective immediately in February 2020 because they were tired of him dragging his feet on grooming a successor - even though they were the ones who extended his contract by 4 years in 2017 when they could have easily extended it by a shorter amount of time in order to pressure him to identify potential successors - and then begged him to come back to replace Chapek so they could go through the whole situation again. Again, they did this in the face of a looming public health emergency that had already impacted their theme parks and movie ticket sales in Asia - because who cares if there's an emergency on the horizon, Iger just had to go immediately!

3. Iger didn't want his career as CEO to end with a whimper due to COVID-19 hurting the company's performance, so he took decided to step down early before things got ugly here in the US. He then stayed on as Chairman of the Board until his contract ended on 12/31/21 knowing that Chapek would be the public face of the company during the rough patch.

It’s 3…and that’s fairly evident.

 

[lazyboy97o]

Something that hasn’t been much discussed is what Chapek talked about in one of his last interviews. This was from the WSJ talk where he’s explaining a plan to join the parks experience with D+ by sharing user data between the two:

Ignoring for a second that this doesn’t sound like it would meaningfully move needle on adding subscriptions or improving entertainment quality, is there any reason to believe this plan has been scrapped by Iger?

Sounds like a second swing at Next Gen, so probably not.

 

[TalkingHead]

It's a unique take of servicing recommendations on D+ based on more than your watch history. Not necessarily something that would move subscriptions but could be an interesting feature for a subscriber who is really in the Disney ecosystem. Not sure why something like that would be scrapped.

My feeling is anybody who it would appeal to is already so enmeshed in the Disney brand ecosystem that they’re going to be a subscriber without that “perk.” I’m not even sure who it’s supposed to appeal to — locals with APs? People who visit every couple months?

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

Sounds like a second swing at Next Gen, so probably not.

They’ve been trying to get big brother to take over for thinking at parks since about 1990

 

[Chip Chipperson]

My feeling is anybody who it would appeal to is already so enmeshed in the Disney brand ecosystem that they’re going to be a subscriber without that “perk.” I’m not even sure who it’s supposed to appeal to — locals with APs? People who visit every couple months?

I think there's potential for it to improve the user experience enough to retain a higher % of subscribers, but that depends on Disney IT implementing it correctly (so not a great chance, unfortunately). It might be useless if it's just seeing that you made a Jungle Cruise LL selection and then recommending the movie, since it wasn't exactly some low-profile project that got very little promotion. But, if, for example, it can see a guest who makes a higher than average % of visits to Animal Kingdom and recommend some of the less visible National Geographic D+ content that might otherwise get missed, then that has some level of appeal. Maybe it could also work the other way and give you Genie suggestions that are actually useful based on content you watch rather than randomly telling you to ride the carousel.

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

D+ is a tv app…not an “immersive park experience”

Iger was grasping at straws when he talked potential…chapek was grasping when talking about somehow that meaning anything to someone in a 90 minute line for Peter Pan…

They are at least consistent here

 

[denyuntilcaught]

My frustration is with Wall Street in general. Major reform is needed in that space - not sure who or how, but it's obvious pushing margins to the extremes is not sustainable in any industry, for any company.

 

[mightynine]

My feeling is anybody who it would appeal to is already so enmeshed in the Disney brand ecosystem that they’re going to be a subscriber without that “perk.” I’m not even sure who it’s supposed to appeal to — locals with APs? People who visit every couple months?

I don't consider that a "perk" in any way shape or form, but moreso an attempt to try and marry all the data Disney has on someone. Which was most likely Chappie trying to get tech cred on an entertainment company, considering where the comment was made.

It could be an interesting QOL feature for the D+ user experience, IMO. Nothing earth-shattering.

 

[TalkingHead]

I don't consider that a "perk" in any way shape or form, but moreso an attempt to try and marry all the data Disney has on someone. Which was most likely Chappie trying to get tech cred on an entertainment company, considering where the comment was made.

What makes you think Chapek could dream that up on his own? If anything, the dream of monetizing guest data came with Iger’s MM+ infatuation.

 

[fgmnt]

They’ve been trying to get big brother to take over for thinking at parks since about 1990

The company constantly loves telling people how they think so little of their theme park guests.