News Bob Iger is back! Chapek is out!!

[MickeyLuv'r]

Hey I'm glad you enjoyed it. To me it really bothered me seeing my childhood favorites act this way. But at the end its up to everyone whether they like something or not.

I wish I enjoyed it and of course everyones opinion is different and there is no right or wrong.

Luke and Leia were supposed to be true heroes in the sense of the great hero epics, like the Odyssey.



If Iger is going to repair Disney, he needs to focus on great storytelling, and skilled storytellers.

 

[Laketravis]

Maybe taking people hostage at the airport, transporting them directly to their resort, letting them choose in an unencumbered manner which park or parks they will be going to each day while pulling paper tickets in joyful anticipation of which attraction they can walk on later, all while packing the parks with more people but maintaining the same "crowded" feeling as having less visitors in the parks with even less park staff wasn't such a bad business model after all.......................

Because many of the "solutions" over the past decade have failed miserably.

 

[flynnibus]

The cat might be out of the bag though. Reedy Creek Improvement District was set up for Disney to build an "Experimental Community of Tomorrow". A real city. Disney never did that. As soon as they built Celebration, they de-annexed it so no one outside the company can live in the district. Same with Golden Oaks. I can see where Universal says we are investing heavily in Orlando and we don't get any special district?

No, RCID was not predicated on EPCOT alone - it was also because they knew the existing municipalities didn't have the infrastructure or capacity to do everything that even the resort concept was setting up for. So the fact the future city didn't happen really isn't a reason to dissolve RCID or no longer support the concept.

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

Maybe taking people hostage at the airport, transporting them directly to their resort, letting them choose in an unencumbered manner which park or parks they will be going to each day while pulling paper tickets in joyful anticipation of which attraction they can walk on later, all while packing the parks with more people but maintaining the same "crowded" feeling as having less visitors in the parks with even less park staff wasn't such a bad business model after all.......................

Because many of the "solutions" over the past decade have failed miserably.

You mad, bro?

 

[jpeden]

I’ve been very impressed at the changes I’ve seen so far. He became CEO and just 4 days later, Thanksgiving came. That would not have happened under Chapek.

Just saying - Center Street was closed under Chapek and within two days of Iger returning, it was reopened. Magic happens!

 

[Sir_Cliff]

The only thing that matters is what Iger does to correct course. And based on what he said about the parks at least (or rather, wasted a lot of words NOT saying), my guess is nothing. So all the pretty nothing comments in the world are only going to accomplish two things for the parks. Jack and **** (and Jack left O-town).

To be fair, he hasn't really be in long enough to implement any significant changes to anything. Even if he wanted to abolish Genie+ (which I don't imagine he does), they have to figure out what is going to replace it. His priority seems to be unpicking DMED, and they still haven't said exactly what is going to replace that structure either.

At least it seems that the truth about Iger's return may be starting to sink in. When this news first broke, there was a lot of celebratory "yay, Iger is back to fix the parks, scrap Genie, remove reservations, and cut prices" comments. It took a bit more than a week, but I think people are coming to terms with the fact that such hopes are a fantasy (the kind even Disney won't make come true). Now the goalposts have been moved to praising the "graceful" way Iger dodges questions.

By the end of the year, perhaps most people will have fully looped back around to 2018 again and realize Iger is bad for the parks and wasn't a trade-up from Chapek. Maybe the reactions to the Genie+ prices for Christmas and New Years weeks will be what does it.

Don't take it personally though, once again I still want NOTHING more than for Iger to prove me wrong and fix the parks. But that would take far more than a miracle.

I completely get this perspective, more so than imagining he's going to charge in and unpick all of Chapek's recent changes. If I'm honest, though, I find the relentless negativity about Iger's return a little premature. For a while now we've been talking about how Chapek was a disaster, but now it turns out it was Iger all along who was the disaster and Chapek was just the frontman for a while. There is some connection between Iger being able to talk to other people like a rational, intelligent human being and a possibility that he might realise the company has pushed things too far with the parks in terms of upcharges and reservations for everything.

 

[SteamboatJoe]

I think a lot of people wouldn't mind Genie+ nearly as much if they felt like it wasn't necessary to actually ride all the attractions you paid for with your ticket. I get the sense, however, that is not the case.

 

[MrPromey]

When everything went down (and I was one of the ones staunchly defending the purchase and thought that Disney was the perfect place for Star Wars to end up for a whole bunch of reasons) we were told that the "Story Group" would oversee continuity and the overall storylines for everything - so every bit of media, tie-in, video game, etc. would flow from one source and would be planned out.

Turns out, they did that with everything BUT the most important part - the theatrical films/sequel trilogy. There was absolutely no plan for the trilogy itself. Presumably, they did this so they could bring in hot-to-trot directors who otherwise would have not wanted to do them without the creative control they ended up being afforded. And we all know how that went down - like them or not, we know for a fact now that each film was basically from scratch, there was no story arc, and we ended up with the disjointed films we ended up with.

... and they got directors who hilariously (unless you're a serious Star Wars fan) had clearly conflicting ideas about what direction things that will become cannon should go which is how we ended up with the "your parents were nobody" and "your parents were nobody because they chose to be nobody because really they were somebody important" crap, among other things.

Meanwhile, Marvel was on the other side of the company hitting them out of the park, one after the other having interconnected everything - even movies that weren't sequels to each other.

The ineptetuide with how these three movies were handled with no clear vision, given the parent company and the experience they already had with this kind of thing, is just mind-boggling.

 

[Disney Analyst]

Oh hey Michael.

 

[alphac2005]

Oh hey Michael.

Lol. Michael wants this thing back on track with his 14+ million shares of stock vested in that share price.

 

[Cliff]

Oh hey Michael.

Agreed....Disney falling down is a great "teaching" moment for the company. Disney needs to look very hard in the mirror and identify all the reasons why they fell...then work hard to REVERSE the mistakes that knocked them down.

In the future, Disney has a lot to do....and a lot to undo!

 

[_caleb]

He couldn't help himself.

[Unpopular decision gets posed] = "That's [prospective replacement/successor's] issue, I'll talk to him about it. It's up to him." It's in his DNA. He tosses off responsibility like many of us reflexively breathe.

So you'd prefer a micro-manager who makes weighs in on every issue publicly and makes decisions that should be made by (or at least in concert with) department heads?

 

[MrPromey]

This is an absolutely insane, conspiratorial view and the number of folks who buy into it show just how many SW fans have completely detached themselves from reality. Disney did not intentionally “sabotage” the characters Iger spent billions on, one of the key acquisitions of his legacy.

How's that saying go, again?

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."

 

[VJ]

Oh hey Michael.

i don't mean to be that guy but if walt did say that... i cannot find a solid source for it that isn't one of those "inspirational quotes" sites

 

[Cliff]

So you'd prefer a micro-manager who makes weighs in on every issue publicly and makes decisions that should be made by (or at least in concert with) department heads?

"Sometimes"...in some companies, when the CULTURE of a company gets toxic, then too many managers begin to make bad decisions and do them for the wrong reasons.

The culture of a company can drive people to not think clearly...because everybody else around them is "doing it to". Bad decisions for bad reasons by too many people...just breeds more of the same bad thinking.

Disney?....uggg...yes, I do believe now that it is learning and teaching very bad habbits in upper management. That problem will breed its way into lower management if ot hasnt already happened.

 

[MrPromey]

.... The counties would inherit the bond debt but would also inherit all the assets, Fire stations, etc. Including the parking garages at Disney Springs...

Wonder if that would give them the freedom to do what most municipalities do with parking structures like that.

Or if Disney would have to pay through the nose to keep them free for their retail space.

 

[AEfx]

The ineptetuide with how these three movies were handled with no clear vision, given the parent company and the experience they already had with this kind of thing is just mind-boggling.

That's why I'm doubly ashamed of what a cheerleader I was when Disney bought Star Wars. It was the perfect marriage in so many ways - Lucasfilm was always battling infrastructure, and Disney had everything in-house to take Star Wars to a new level. I never imagined they would drop the biggest ball their was, the actual sequel movies that everyone was excited about to begin with.

In retrospect, we really should have known this just with TFA - the fact that they had Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford in the same Star Wars picture - yet didn't even give us a single scene with the three of them together was the first red flag. Because, even if FIsher had not passed, they still missed the most major opportunity given that it was known Ford's character wouldn't survive the film.

 

[JD80]

What did Napoleon have to say on this sort of thing, again?

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."

I'm totally on board with the incompetence explanation.

 

[MrPromey]

Then why wouldn't Disney be dancing in the streets about this?

(I'm not talking about some automatic trigger, I'm talking about new legislation that would make the counties whole.)

Because in a lot of cases, they are paying taxes to have stuff done on public land that is for all practical intents and purposes, their own - land they are not paying taxes on because it is public but which is being maintained like private "resort" land.

It's been a great way to get the local "government" to pay for things that only favor Disney, giving them huge benefits in other ways and allowing them to pay for things with government bonds that they'd have had to cough up their own money up front for to get done, otherwise.

It also allows them to get services at a quality and level they never would have gotten as a part of a larger municipality where those services have to be spread a lot further or where officials would lose their jobs for showing the kind of favoritism needed to support the Disney "neighborhood" at the level Disney has become accustomed to.

 

[MrPromey]

No, RCID was not predicated on EPCOT alone - it was also because they knew the existing municipalities didn't have the infrastructure or capacity to do everything that even the resort concept was setting up for. So the fact the future city didn't happen really isn't a reason to dissolve RCID or no longer support the concept.

Yeah, people seem to think Florida government was excited about the EPCOT project.

They really weren't.

Walt agreed to top pigs with pigs (Disneyland east) so that he could get what he wanted for EPCOT.

They were happy to give him Reedy Creek to get the only other Disney theme park in the world, located in sunny Florida.