News Bob Iger is back! Chapek is out!!

[MisterPenguin]

In the end, this is all that matters:

View attachment 679870

Stock is soaring

Oh my...

 

[Laketravis]

Oh my..

The board suits are patting each other on the back.

 

[SpectreJordan]

I get why the Board chose Iger in a pinch but I do not understand why they're giving him another chance to identify a successor. He extended his stay for years for different reasons and most of was explained as overseeing acquisitions, but I don't know how one looks past that it took years and years to identify a successor and that Chapek was his selection.

Chapek was open about tightening the pursestrings and obviously that wasn't the direction the Board wanted to go, so I guess our best guess for the future is someone the opposite of Chapek? Early Eisner years?

Something like the early Eisner years would probably be the best-case scenario. The animation department is doing really well, but they really need to focus on the live action side. Lucasfilm & especially Walt Disney Pictures need a kick in the butt; Pictures needs to produce more stuff along the lines of Pirates & less like the remakes. Marvel is carrying that side of things almost singlehandedly.

 

[FigmentFan82]

Will they? Iger killed a lot of gossip and inside dirt being published. Why would he not do it again?

Don't need his permission to write about public events

 

[JIMINYCR]

Just saw the news and although I saw it coming I was surprised it happened now. Not a fan of Chapek but I thought his steps although not popular and caused fan fury, they were at some level responses to Igers steps before he left. I really question if Iger should have been tapped to replace Chapek since I he has to take some blame for what he set up. At this point Dis might have been served better by going outside of the company to find a new person in charge. Maybe they thought they didn’t have the time to do so but letting Iger in won’t help. I’m very surprised Iger took the bait and got hauled back into the boat.

 

[fotofx]

The board suits are patting each other on the back.

Still way below the 30 day.. Just stopped the bleeding for now..

 

[FigmentFan82]

Wrap your head around this - Chapek is the only sympathetic character in this whole mess.

lol, farthest thing from it

 

[Frank the Tank]

I don't think they'll scrap Genie+. They make money off of that. And as far as I can tell, it unfortunately doesn't seem like attendance has been negatively impacted by their swindling schemes.

I assume the leadership swap has more to do with the movie/tv/streaming financial situation than the parks. If anything, I expect them to continue the way the parks are being handled, and very likely push the limits even farther to help cover losses elsewhere in the company. That's how Iger covered costs of his acquisitions, FP+ and Shanghai's out of control budget.

Agreed - I follow the financial side closely and even in virtually every negative story about Disney's streaming issues over the past few months, it's noted that Genie+ specifically is delivering a high level of profits to the company. That ain't getting turned off and, if anything, it's getting turned *up* with more dynamic pricing in high demand periods. For better or worse, Genie+ and overall theme park revenue is one of the few things that Wall Street actually *likes* about Disney right now. Everyone needs to let that sink in to reign in whatever expectations they have built up in their minds here.

Bob Iger is being brought in for the entertainment side of the house. The single greatest challenge for Disney is how to (a) invest in streaming at a level that continues to grow subscribers but not be complete financial sinkhole and also (b) manage the decline of basic cable subscriber revenue at ESPN and ABC (which despite being over-the-air also generates a lot of cable subscriber re-transmission fees) that everyone knows is going to die at some point and needs to be transitioned to streaming... but can't be killed off too quickly because those linear TV networks are still *very* profitable at the exact same time that streaming is incurring massive losses. It's a vexing problem that's facing every single legacy media company with a large linear TV business.

The movie side of the house is also an issue, although as much as there have been a few high profile busts like Lightyear, I don't think it's as acute at Disney because they had already transitioned to focusing on purely large budget IP-driven blockbusters over the past decade, anyway, which are the types of movies that are still drawing audiences back to the theater. Sure, some people want to point out some exceptions like The Lost City or Ticket to Paradise as "smaller" movies that have done well at the box office in the pandemic era, but it used to be up until the early-2010s that there were 25 to 30 of those types of movies (smaller movies driven with a couple of big stars) that were being churned out every year with that level of success and now we can only count them on one hand annually. The pandemic era has really exacerbated what had already been occurring pre-pandemic: audiences will pay to go watch in the theater either (a) huge IP-driven blockbusters or (b) horror movies (where there's something different about watching a scary movie with a large audience), but very little else (with the successes outside of those two categories being the exceptions as opposed to the rule). Disney is actually in better shape for that universe than most with the IP that they own on paper, although as always, it's a matter of executing on it (e.g. Warner owns great IP with DC Comics, but their execution over the past decade has ranged from Oscar-worthy films like The Joker to complete and utter banal trash).

 

[Tha Realest]

Stock is soaring

This just tells us we should stop watching CNBC and start taking investment advice from Adam The Woo

 

[The Colonel]

Will he call off the lay-offs and hiring freeze and break up the task force? Will he roll back the price increases? Will maintenance be improved? It means nothing to anyone but investors.

 

[MisterPenguin]

Remember folks. We have simply gone from worse back to bad.

 

[Tha Realest]

For the people thinking this move will lead to Iger jettisoning Genie+ and ILL and other revenue-generating parks changes -- you are dreaming. There is no reason Disney would ditch those revenue streams at a time when other segments of the company were piling up scary enough results that the CEO got fired.

I certainly understand the Chapek hate, but have some perspective and do not equate Iger being back to "everything I wanted to happen in the parks will happen now!"

Notice these folks never explain how these new costs affected demand, or how they’d make up for the loss of hundreds of millions of revenue

 

[The Colonel]

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. Literally.

 

[plutofan15]

And just a week ago Bob was among us in NYC celebrating service anniversaries.

 

[MisterPenguin]

The board suits are patting each other on the back.

<whisper> Hello, HR?

 

[jpinkc]

Ok sorry I just woke up from my FAINT, OMG BBQ, I havent read much Disney lately because it was just depression and "drama", but I dont know if this is a good thing or bad. I dont see him walking anything back that Cheapek did. What do you think.

 

[ToTBellHop]

And just a week ago Bob was among us in NYC celebrating service anniversaries.

Soon he will be among us, ringing up our items at Target for Black Friday.

Who am I kidding? He will be monitoring the self-checkout, making recommendations on how to further cut costs. “What if we sold 1/2 ply toilet paper where every other sheet is your hand? Right?!”

 

[kingdead]

The pandemic era has really exacerbated what had already been occurring pre-pandemic: audiences will pay to go watch in the theater either (a) huge IP-driven blockbusters or (b) horror movies (where there's something different about watching a scary movie with a large audience), but very little else (with the successes outside of those two categories being the exceptions as opposed to the rule). Disney is actually in better shape for that universe than most with the IP that they own on paper, although as always, it's a matter of executing on it (e.g. Warner owns great IP with DC Comics, but their execution over the past decade has ranged from Oscar-worthy films like The Joker to complete and utter banal trash).

Marvel could use a tuneup. I wonder if Chapek's insistence on synergy was adding minutes to the movies--Black Panther 2 might be doing a bit better if there wasn't so much Disney+ content stuffed into the plot.

 

[Animaniac93-98]

I have to imagine Chapek himself decided to step down and the board decided to bring back Iger as quickly as they could. No chance that all this happened in just one weekend.

"The spirits did it all in one night!"

 

[Laketravis]

<whisper> Hello, HR?

LOL!

Then there's this:

"Yet evidence suggests that ‘boomerang CEOs’ might constrain a company’s growth. A study published in the MIT Sloan Management Review in 2020 found that companies that brought back a former CEO have "significantly lower" stock performance than firms that brought in someone new.

The study, led by researchers at the Univeristy of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Marquette University, found that these negative effects were magnified when the company brought back a former founder."

Bob Iger joins ranks of 'Boomerang CEOs' with return to Disney

Yet one study suggests companies that bring back old CEOs do worse than firms that hire someone new.

fortune.com