News Bob Iger is back! Chapek is out!!

[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.

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

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.

Those were built in the 90’s next to the malls already

We got a wave of luxury strip malls 10-15 years back…that’s where it stands

 

[Leo!]

Great!. Now cancel splash mountain re-theme

 

[Sir_Cliff]

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.

I struggle to be convinced these two attractions and Ouimet represented a complete 180 by Eisner. Walt Disney Studios Paris, by far the most embarrassing park Disney has ever built, opened just a year before Mission: Space. Hong Kong Disneyland, a Magic Kingdom without any major attractions other than Space Mountain that flopped royally, opened between M:S and Expedition Everest. So, it's very hard to know whether he suddenly "got it" or just greenlit two ambitious attractions during that period when there were still skilled Imagineers around to design them. I still think the responses to DCA's lacklustre opening that also opened around the same time as those two attractions were underwhelming and didn't really address the park's issues.

That, again, still leaves the rest of the company, which was in rough shape. In part because of Eisner was a little Chapek-like in his ability to alienate key people by the end. Even in animation, Disney was very lacklustre by that point. Whatever his faults - and there were many-, it's hard to say that Disney wasn't a far stronger company by the time Iger left than it had been when he took over from Eisner.

 

[Animaniac93-98]

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.

This was probably the biggest mistake of his time as CEO, but few ever noticed or cared because none of it was "Disney" branded.

 

[Sir_Cliff]

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…

Disney was already a big, evil corporation in 1994. That era is symbolic because Disney went from riding high on a wave of theme park and resort expansion which cemented their position as the leaders of the field and a new renaissance in animation with an instant classic releasing every year and that suddenly ground to a halt around 1995. That's when you suddenly never knew if a new addition to the parks would be an improvement or if the latest animated film would hit with audiences. As that decade wore on, the films almost never hit and Disney seemed to be increasingly chasing cheap money more than trying to produce quality entertainment, including by letting Disneyland literally decay. They also seemed to suddenly be left catching up to competitors and failing with stuff like Chicken Little meant to be an answer to Dreamworks.

 

[Animaniac93-98]

I think Wells could be said to be the last "money guy" running the company who actually respected and liked the products they created himself.

At one point Wells went to every Disney restaurant to assess its food quality, because he had heard Disney served terrible food and wanted to know if that was true and how to fix it.

There's many more Disney restaurants today, but could you imagine either Bob even trying to do something like that?

 

[Sir_Cliff]

This was probably the biggest mistake of his time as CEO, but few ever noticed or cared because none of it was "Disney" branded.

I'm quite possibly missing something here, but why were Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures a big loss to the company? They didn't seem to struggle to produce content or have box office hits without them.

 

[MisterPenguin]

Why Bob Iger's Ultimate Power Move May Be Selling Disney to Apple

"This is the pinnacle deal for the ultimate dealmaker," one studio insider says

www.thewrap.com

I promise i didnt write this article lol

 

[Animaniac93-98]

I'm quite possibly missing something here, but why were Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures a big loss to the company? They didn't seem to struggle to produce content or have box office hits without them.

Disney ditching the strategy of smaller budget, adult films and going all franchise/tent pole is what led to a series of expensive box office bombs like John Carter, Lone Ranger, Nutcracker and the Four Realms, and more. Marvel has been propping up the studio division more than anything else since.

The Proposal (2009) was a Touchstone release and a box office smash, grossing over $300 million worldwide on a $40 million budget.

Iger looked at that and felt franchises were better because of sequel and merchandise potential...forgetting the need for movies to make back their money in ticket sales first.

 

[mysto]

I nominate any of you to run Disney. I'm serious, I think any one of you would bring something to the table that no showman accountant ever could. Sure there would be minor disasters, but it would be totally worth it! Think of the colors!

It'll never happen because you folks don't have the right pedigree. A sad state of affairs.