If you think the rising stock is gonna benefit Iger and his nominees then you need to brace for the possibility that it collapses should Peltz lose because it doesn't explain why ISS is backing Peltz in spite of the rising stock price. And I doubt investors - for better or worse - are going to give a damn about his comments on Black Panther considering Wakanda Forever grossed nowhere near a billion.
They care only about the money, and their investments in Disnsy from 10 years ago are flat. Are they really gonna want to stick with the status quo for a few more years as linear TV continues to fall and theatrical likely never returns to pre-Covid levels? (Especially if AMC ends up going bankrupt?) I doubt it.
If Iger believes investors are gonna ignore this and the Chapek fiasco and buy into his vision for the company, I wouldn't be surprised if he quits when investors tell him "No. It's not enough."
The problem is that investors have been aching for incremental change and for Iger to go for many, many years and that has been Peltz's central argument in this fight. If that WSJ vote leak yesterday is accurate, that might be enough for him to get through the finish line, consequences and risks be damned.
I don't want Peltz and Rasulo to win but people need to be mentally ready in the event that either one of them does.
Investors are giving up on the idea of Disney growing under Iger and may decide a wholesale change of the board and company might be the path forward. We're seeing this happen in all of Hollywood: WBD and Paramount might not make it next year, Fox has already de facto left Hollywood, and don't be surprised if Roberts decides to cut NBCU loose from Comcast to get that stock to $60. Sony will probably say goodbye to movies and TV once all those content buyers disappear.
Wakanda Forever made $859 million, which is somewhere near a billion.
Putting that aside, I don’t disagree with your assessment of Wall Street greed, faddish thinking, and self-satisfied if baseless certainty of its own cleverness. Because - what IS there vision for the future? I haven’t seen that offered.
It seems to me what we’re seeing is one of the periodic shifts in the entertainment industry that occurs when new media forms are introduced - TV or cable or home video, etc. Unfortunately, this shift coincides with a moment in which Wall Street, spurred in large part by a credulous obsession with the self-mythologizing nonsense of Silicon Valley tech bros, have bought into an ahistorical “industry disruptor,” “everything-must-change” mindset that can’t recognize precedent or incremental change but looks instead for complete, the-past-is-totally-irrelevant revolution.
This mentality is largely responsible for the deeply unwise way the studios’ dove into streaming, but of course there has been no self-reflection by Wall Street. Also prompting no self-reflection, Cinemas have been “dying” for nearly a decade, a decade during which they have survived a once-in-a-century pandemic and the studios abandoning them to release the most desirable content through other outlets. Yet the audience is returning. Intelligent observers might see this as proof of the resilience of cinemas.
What are the alternative futures we’re being offered? Blackwell wants to pivot Disney to being a tech company, a proposal that is beneath parody. Trian just wants to stop all spending and enact an octogenarian’s revenge. Where we actually seem to be headed is towards a system that looks very much like cable - bundled channels with ads - via streaming. Exactly the kind of moderate, incremental change any observer familiar with Hollywood would expect in the face of a new type of media.
Again, I don’t necessarily doubt your assessment of Wall Street. I just ask - what is the vision of the future Iger is supposedly missing?
