News Chapek FIRED, Iger New CEO

mikejs78

Premium Member
I agree.... Lets think forward 15 years (theoretically) when Chapek retires and names his replacement. What will be the transformational decisions he has made and successfully executed like Iger? Iger knew he was going to have to figure out how to acquire Pixar, and the relationship with Jobs was key... He pulled off Marvel, and Lucas and Fox..... I can see Chapek opening another park somewhere, but other than keeping the lights on and counting the beans as they come in, I don't see him as the big strategic thinker and risk taker.... Meyer would have been a different story, as he has been managing strategy for Iger for ever.....

Maybe Chapek can acquire the strategic thinker and or the people who will convince him to take risk.... Its just not going to come naturally, and the likelihood that he will run the company the way Universal is run by Comcast (follower maximizing yield) is high....

I don't think Chapek is going to last 15 years. He's 60. His contract is only for 3 years. I wonder if they are looking at him as a more transitional CEO as they groom someone else who maybe isn't ready yet. Chapek executes on the vision already set in motion with streaming, content, etc, and that will be further refined by Iger in the next year or so, and then steps down with a huge payday.
 

bartholomr4

Well-Known Member
I don't think Chapek is going to last 15 years. He's 60. His contract is only for 3 years. I wonder if they are looking at him as a more transitional CEO as they groom someone else who maybe isn't ready yet. Chapek executes on the vision already set in motion with streaming, content, etc, and that will be further refined by Iger in the next year or so, and then steps down with a huge payday.

From your lips to God's ears, I hope you are right.... The transitional visionary better show-up soon!
 

SteamboatJoe

Well-Known Member
I don't think Chapek is going to last 15 years. He's 60. His contract is only for 3 years. I wonder if they are looking at him as a more transitional CEO as they groom someone else who maybe isn't ready yet. Chapek executes on the vision already set in motion with streaming, content, etc, and that will be further refined by Iger in the next year or so, and then steps down with a huge payday.
Agreed. His sole directive should be to just keep flying straight on the trajectory already set by Iger.
 

UNCgolf

Well-Known Member
Don't forget that the movie reviews were utterly filled with rage comments by angry men who didn't have the capacity to handle the character being a woman.

That doesn't affect Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes (unless you're looking at the user reviews, which is pointless). I don't think any legitimate movie critic cared about that (and anyone that did would have almost certainly hated Black Panther as well).
 

UNCgolf

Well-Known Member
Everest is a tricky one though because there were several decisions that led to Everest. At the outset it was Dinosaurs vs Mythical Animals, then it was an IP tie in to Dinosaurs. Then it was Chester and Hester's vs. the Excavator and then ultimately Everest was added. A few alternate decisions and Everest doesn't happen regardless of who's in charge.

True. But we've all heard how dismissive Iger was over Expedition Everest as a concept because it didn't have a Disney movie attached.
 

Brer Oswald

Well-Known Member
I do think it’s too soon for D’Amaro to become Parks and Resorts head. Had Iger stepped down when he was scheduled to and Chapek replace him then, I’d think D’Amaro would be a shoe in for P&R. Here’s hoping he sticks around and he is the next one to lead P&R, or even better, a contender for the next CEO. He has a quality that few have had after Walt passed, and you can see it in the stuff he posts.
 

devoy1701

Well-Known Member
Corona as of now. What happens to Disney's stock after this news, who knows??? We knew Iger was going sometime. I don't follow the CEO news much so, was Chapek always in line and when did the insiders think it was going to happen??? This seems very sudden to me!
announcing now while Corona is affecting the market is a great PR play to bury the affect.
 

mightynine

Well-Known Member
Maybe Chapek, with his love of merchandising, will separate Consumer Products from Parks & Resorts.

That would be wonderful, because grouping them all together makes no sense at all.

Makes perfect sense if you see it all as one big Disney Store, not different experiences that should be treated differently.
 

rreading

Well-Known Member
I mean . . . Pixar, Lucasful, and to a lesser extent Marvel were all pretty obvious acquisitions, no one would have considered them risky. Fox has yet to be seen in the long-term, but the board doesn't seem to be pleased with the short-term.

The work at DCA demonstrates an inability to function consistently over his tenure - how in the world did he let DCA falter after doing all that work to pull it back from the edge of oblivion? Jury is still out on Paris - the renovation was useful but the expansion has yet to be seen. Shanghai SHOULD be great, COULD be great . . . we'll have to see. There's some nice work in an otherwise flawed park. Overall it is artistically stilted. And as has been said, the investment in WDW comes in the wake of the $2 Billion failure of MDE to spare them having to actually invest in the parks . . . only to learn they have to anyway, on TOP of that loss.

All this is to say that, while I cannot deny he's been good for the dollar, Bob Iger's tenure hardly screams innovation the way that someone like Steve Jobs' did. While Cook doesn't seem to have shepherded in an era of financial strength quite like Iger, he's definitely more that type.

Agree - especially in retrospect - about them being obvious...but still there's the thing: no one else did them. He drew Jobs back in to allow the Pixar sale and he was able to get Lucas to let go. The company allowed Marvel to blossom but didn't get in the way. My impression is that the Fox deal was a bad one but apparently it had benefits which aren't obvious to the lay public (or to me, for that matter).

As we know, the MDE experience was $$$ but there were a LOT if infrastructure costs involved that would have been needed irrespective of FP+. As a pediatrician in TX, my families really like/love FP+ to have their biggest rides booked. The fact that the parks are so crowded that there is a line for Small World is frustrating as someone who rememberers it as a walk-on, but that's the way things are for now. And talking about innovation - love it or hate it, FP+ is pretty innovative.

But you're right - he didn't change the world. But he did make big plays for the business with huge effect. That's - to me - as good as someone in his role could have done. Sure Journey into Imagination still sucks. And I don't like the concept art for the Egypt scene in Epcot.

Clearly WED was more like Steve Jobs, with his innovation; but my guess is that TWDC needs someone to settle in and get their house in order for now. Maybe Chapek can do that.
 

PJBuckeye

Well-Known Member
In the Parks
Yes
I still am going to go in with positive thinking that Chapek made cuts to appeal to his boss (it worked!) but secretly will be going crazy spending once Iger leaves.

That's the one thing that we don't know with certainty, which Bob was the true driver of US budget cuts. There is a chance that the cutting could loosen a bit (not factoring in Coronavirus).
 

Brer Oswald

Well-Known Member
Iger’s biggest proven accomplishment was undoubtedly the acquisition of Pixar. Marvel would be a close second.

Star Wars was practically handed to them by Lucas, and the groundwork was already laid with Star Tours. The changes to the parks were all at points where they had to happen: DCA, Animal Kingdom, DHS, And Epcot were floundering pretty hard.

I’m not trying to undercut him, and the Fox buy out might end up being his definitive accomplishment. But when you compare it to Walt/Roy and even Eisner, Iger doesn’t really surpass them. Walt creates the Disney animated movie, and then it crashed. Eisner revived the Disney Animated Movie, And then it crashed. Exact same thing happened with Iger. From a parks perspective, Walt era > Cars Walker > Eisner/Wells era > Iger Era > Late Eisner era.

It’s a Parks Board. Iger was not strong for the Parks. He was great for pre established film franchises and appeasing fans of those franchises.
 

yensidtlaw1969

Well-Known Member
Agree - especially in retrospect - about them being obvious...but still there's the thing: no one else did them. He drew Jobs back in to allow the Pixar sale and he was able to get Lucas to let go. The company allowed Marvel to blossom but didn't get in the way. My impression is that the Fox deal was a bad one but apparently it had benefits which aren't obvious to the lay public (or to me, for that matter).

As we know, the MDE experience was $$$ but there were a LOT if infrastructure costs involved that would have been needed irrespective of FP+. As a pediatrician in TX, my families really like/love FP+ to have their biggest rides booked. The fact that the parks are so crowded that there is a line for Small World is frustrating as someone who rememberers it as a walk-on, but that's the way things are for now. And talking about innovation - love it or hate it, FP+ is pretty innovative.

But you're right - he didn't change the world. But he did make big plays for the business with huge effect. That's - to me - as good as someone in his role could have done. Sure Journey into Imagination still sucks. And I don't like the concept art for the Egypt scene in Epcot.

Clearly WED was more like Steve Jobs, with his innovation; but my guess is that TWDC needs someone to settle in and get their house in order for now. Maybe Chapek can do that.
My response was directed to a post positing that Iger was more like Jobs than the prior poster was suggesting - so, like, sure he did some good stuff, but I was making a direct reply to whether or not he was creative and innovative like Jobs. And he wasn't.

True that no one else acquired the IP he acquired, but those aren't creative achievements. And really, is Fastpass+ really innovative? We've been pre-booking restaurants forever, how different is it to do that for attractions? Yes, now it's mostly app-based, but everything is app-based these days, it's not like Disney made that jump. Let's also not forget that this system is the very reason Small World has such a long wait - AND it didn't even do the thing they actually wanted to get out of it. So they didn't get the upside they paid for and the guests are stuck with the downside anyway. We didn't even get solid resort-wide Wifi out of the deal.

I didn't love the guy, but Michael Eisner made big plays for the business AND made creative strides that strengthened the heart of the company and its product rather than weakened it. He fell off the horse by the end, and he didn't bring in *quite* as much cash as Iger, but clearly what Iger did is not "as good as someone can do". Not as the leader of a creative company. Being good for Wall Street was only ONE of his responsibilities, and he didn't do great balancing the others alongside it.
 

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