Bob Iger back as Disney CEO
deadline.com
deadline.com
So the question is, once your corporate mega machine has become this efficient what do you even do next?
I wish Mike Judge made a show about FTX and crypto. :) that would be hilarious.
Some characters were well written, others were pretty much a excuse for racism.
All the things we grew up loving were once original stories, and I would love to see more new original content rather than this machine that "efficiently" churns out smoothed over copies of the same hits from last year.
Gilfoyle being a grumpy sysadmin is probably an accurate depiction of a sysadmin. They're all grumpy.
Not defending him, but Gilfoyle was foreign as well? I've known plenty of people like that, and they are just pricks.
But the behavior is also just plainly sexist. The implication of racism is just extra bad.
Dinesh gets it the most because he has the most interactions. Of course it could just be racism, veiled as general cuntishness.
Imagine a second coming of Erlich Bachman as a crypto bro. Who would not wanna watch this? For the feminists out there, there's emancipated miss Ellison.
I disagree, I feel like its the same as all the rest but the writers in the board meetings are like.. We need to make Star Wars for 25-40 year old men to feel like adults watching it.
> slow burn
planned that way not because it is a slow burn high pay off scenario. But because it is planned to drag on so you just keep watching it consistently. Most of these garbage shows in the last 5 years or so have embraced this 'pseudo-slowburn' style to make baby men feel more sophisticated while hooking them into consistently watching.
I feel like the writers and decision makers saw all the funko pop marvel watching 30 year open mouth beard consumers and wanted to 'blow their minds' with 'slowburn' to remind them that consuming childrens movies are actually sophisticated and adult
No one said anything about blowing minds.
>But because it is planned to drag on
Unfortunately all shows are infected with this garbage. You end up grading this stuff relatively on a spectrum (“don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” etc) . This the “ads” of the streaming era. It is so ubiquitous people either build a tolerance, tune-out during the interval, or stop watching tv all together in protest.
>to make baby men feel more sophisticated while hooking them into consistently watching
A more sophisticated show with better writing and actors would indeed make people feel more sophisticated…yes. If, to take another example, somebody pitched me “Better Call Saul, but in space,” I’d probably watch that as well. Frankly, Dune is more a children’s movie than Andor, so you might as well say that 25-40 year olds have no business amusing themselves with science fantasy or sci-fi at all.
The litmus test for this seems to be: Make the exact same scifi show (space etc) but without the Star Wars branding. Will it be considered a children’s move? My answer in this case, no. Will it still be decent? Yes it would.
Mandalorian, Boba Fett, Obi-Wan are all magnitudes more juvenile than this attempt.
A quasi-spoiler perhaps, but I personally find it hilarious that a subplot involves a workers revolt in what could be a Tesla gigafactory 20 years from now…in a tv show produced by Disney.
The thing about Andor is that the Star Wars setting is entirely unnecessary. That series could be set anywhere; the setting is just a cash grab.
Except it would need to compete on a different field, and wouldn’t fare as well.
"A bunch of bothans died to bring us this intel" is literally a more compelling story than rogue one.
Does Andor break that formula? Does it paint the empire / the rebels in a less cartoonish light than other star wars?
Also, in the episode where she and Mando are (kidnapped/stowaway whatever, can't quite remember) on the Imperial shuttle. The Imperial pilot makes it clear that his hatred of the rebellion is deep, personal, and 'moral'. "Do you have any idea how many millions of people were on that battle station?" Not that he has exactly seized the moral high ground, working for the Empire, but I definitely saw that as a "rebellion ~ al Qaeda" moment.
Yes. One of the main themes of Andor is showing all the downright 'evil' stuff you have to do to successfully lead a 'good' rebellion.
Long term? Impossible to tell. If you'd asked anyone 20 years ago what Disney would look like today, nobody could've imagined Marvel or Star Wars being the way they are, both under the Disney umbrella. And with streaming to boot.
The good news for iger is that the bar is set low. He could bring back fast pass or the magical express and roll back some of the planned costs increases and the fans will love them for it.
Disney does also risk the Netflix too much crap not enough content problem as well. Marvel has lost its cultural relevance for some of its core audience with the end of the infinity war saga. Everything since it’s been a mess.
As a sidenote, Disney just bought the biggest cruise ship ever built for the Asian market. I suspect interesting things are afoot there.
It reminds me a bit of KFC, which for a variety of reasons has left it's North-American presence to flounder while focusing on the rest of the world and Asia in particular. This has been effective so far thanks to their existing scale and being one of the first fried chicken joint to enter the market, but has gone on other domestic and local brands have entered. I have to wonder if Disney is maybe 10 years earlier on this curve and is starting to cash out on NA to some extent.
Also as a point of pedantry the Global Dream was intended to be the largest ship by passenger count at 9000, but is being scaled back to 6000 by Disney. By tonnage it will 7th, close behind Royal Caribbean's Oasis class ships and MSC's new world class so while it is quite large, the industry in general seems to be moving that way also.
https://robbreport.com/motors/marine/disney-global-dream-sev...
Shanghai and Hong Kong Disney are also being held hostage to the Chinese communists and their covid and anti-western policies. The contract with the oriental land company is very limiting on Disney.
I suspect we would see expansion in Brazil before anything else at this point
https://www.disneytouristblog.com/walt-disney-studios-park-p...
Entertainment lost something when it just became “content.” Bragging that you are excellent at churning out “content” is not something I would be proud of. Are you good at churning out movies that are original, interesting, unique, and creative? Or are you good at producing a dozen Marvel spin-offs and various movie sequels?
Disney was quite early in MMPORG scene, with their online game Toontown (which was sunset a couple of years ago).
There was a more recent example with a scene in "Wreck-it Ralph 2" that showcased a Disney metaverse. Furthermore, Disney did collaborate with Skylanders. Perhaps expand on that?
I don't think that's true. They had their own toys-to-life game called Disney Infinity.
A friend of mine regularly compares Quentin Tarantino’s early movies to today’s mass produced boredom. Calling it MBA filmmaking. It reminds me of an industry running on Amazon’s recommendation engine, only making derivatives of existing successes.
Duh.. Duh.. Dih dih dir! Dir Di dih dih dir dir du du duh! - Star Trek - Next Gen
It does not have to be original. And I don't mean only the intro but the entire soundtrack. Often, the theme song is reused over and over during the film with many variations to set the tone of a scene.
Bad movies skimp on soundtracks.
You could argue the indie scene is similar to the startup scene in SV. You have investors/producers pretty much funding these films based on team/talent and a pitch alone, with the festival circuit (could be considered an analog to SV demo-days or investor powows) essentially serving as a way to get bought by big studios for potential wide release, limited-release runs (which can still make a lot of money for those involved), or teams hired/screenplays bought and adapted by other studios. You can even make it big right out of college (or in college) [1] with little-to-no connections, though of course even more-so than SV a name and pedigree gets you further faster.
There’s so much in LA (and NYC) that gets released in theaters only locally, and the city is better for it. It’s the wide-release that, almost by definition, must serve lowest common denominator in order to make its 8/9-figure budget back in a span of months (tech companies get years!!). It’s sad that SF and LA, so close geographically, have industries so socially polarized to each other in every way, since there’s really a lot of overlap when you get down to it (and each industry could definitely learn things from the other)
[1] https://variety.com/2022/film/news/apple-cha-cha-real-smooth...
There are arthouse movie theaters throughout that play the same movies that you think are only locally shown in LA/NYC. You just need the right context (near a university, for example).
Am I wrong about this? Anything I'm missing?
It’s just a sci fi show set in that universe, that’s the way I see it. Takes the universe seriously, sets down rules for how it could work and it operates within that space.
But it’s better written, acted and art directed than most TV I’ve ever seen.
Id rank it as high or higher than Chernobyl. I’d say it’s must see TV.
But I understand your point— mid-budget studio movies (romcoms especially) have been hit the hardest by the pivot to Marvel mania and cinematic universes. Unfortunately that’s as much because of audience preference as it is studios.
I think the big thing is the financial risk of committing to a series, but it seems like if you take the films one at a time, you get to see how the last one is doing before you get too far along making the next one. Can't be that much worse than making everything a one-off.
They spent probably less than $5M total on the 3 movies (and filmed all at once), and the first two have already brought in $25M at the box office. A pretty good indie success story.
But then theres also the insidious observation. My generation are now senior writers and also the majority of the audience and between us is as much creativity as a fart.
Even movies like Big Trouble in Little Chinatown or Predator, while not necessarily having plots worthy of the next Great American Novel, at least had interesting memorable ideas.
As a discovery mechanism, I'd recommend following Vyce Victus[3], who writes reasonably well about action movies.
[1] https://letterboxd.com/journal/direct-action-scott-adkins-dtv-film-evolution/
[2] https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-real-vulgar-auteurs-three-great-directors-of-direct-to-video-films
[3] https://letterboxd.com/vycevictus/I showed my 12 year old son Die Hard for the first time the other day.
He absolutely (...) loved it.
Unprompted, he talked about how good all the effects were - they didn't look like the bland CGI he is used to.
And he absolutely loved the movie. Zero political correctness. So incredibly liberating.
(A few scenes had me question the parenting choice of showing DH to a 12 year old, but it'd been at least a decade since I saw it last).
Plus DieHard is one of the best movies ever made!
(Have an 8th so not reached that stage myself yet)
All the best for the journey ahead!
Also "we'll travel to the FAR FUTURE" being when they were two years old has to be amusing (and sobering, to us olds).
Next watch Aliens (the second one) together and you are gold.
Aliens: My son suffered from night terrors in the not too distant past - I'd rather not reboot those just yet! :) (Would have to watch them in order, and the first is absolutely terrifying).
Will do them when he's 14.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots
That being said, I just saw Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I thought it dealt with personal issues very well. She Hulk as much as it was derided, was also a different type of MCU show and it was self aware enough to know that Marvel had gotten too formulaic.
Which is great, for those who like his particular films. But there are literally thousands of other filmmakers making films every year who don't attract the kind of attention Tarantino does. His films aren't better than theirs -- he's just famous enough that we've all heard of him, and he continues to produce exactly the kinds of thing that you specifically like.
There are tons of things to dig into if you want. Netflix does a better job than most of surfacing small filmmakers (because they can get them cheaply). Film festivals have even more -- more than you can possibly watch in ten lifetimes. Most of it, of course, is dreck -- same as everything else.
I'm glad your friend likes Tarantino, but it just feels a bit like saying, "Gosh, I wish they made more stuff like Tarantino." What I want is an alternative to both Tarantino and the major studios -- and it exists. It just takes more effort.
And also the other big development is that they have lost the Chinese box office marker, though this seems largely out of their control as China is an aggressive geopolitical adversary of the US and is also strictly against LGBTQ representation, and Marvel is (rightfully so) not budging on the edits suggested by Chinese censors.
And then there’s also the case for superhero fatigue, and I am saying this as a fan of most of these movies, (I watched most of their previous movies during high school and college almost religiously), but the amount of content they dumped on Disney+ which was of varying quality was too much for me to really watch. I skipped half their shows and most of their movies (waited for Disney+ for most of the movies except for Spider-Man and BP2). I genuinely don’t feel interested in most of their upcoming lineup, except maybe GoTG 3 and Captain America 4 (if it’s any good). I might be speaking for only myself here, but I potentially see that happening more so in future with general audiences.
I'm confident you're actually behind the curve here. The term 'capeshit' has been around for years to express annoyance with the oversaturation of the market with superhero content.
Considering that Marvel movies are not making “all of the money” and are instead making “most of the money” in the eyes of its investors, they may be thinking that the head winds are changing and might want to forestall such a thing.
Of course, there were other reasons that Chapel may have been sacked as well, such as the “Dont say Gay” bill fiasco, as well as having lost their tax free status in Florida,the Mulan controversy, the previously mentioned issues at Marvel, alienating creatives (including publicly fighting one of its biggest stars),underwhelming Star Wars and Disney movies and shows, (possibly) losing the streaming rights for the IPL in India (cause Hotstar in India had a decent chunk of the streaming market in India cause of it).
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/
4 of the top 10 grossing movies of 2022 are super hero movies. Black Adam is #12
I think Disney got soured off of gaming when the fan and critical response was so harsh against Battlefront 2. They tried microtransactions and ended up going down as the most downvoted comment in reddit history.[1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...
In other words, they have distorted the market because over-capacity should let prices fall.
But even if they keep their prices, cash doesn't have to be the limiting factor. The available cash is not fixed. If they spend their income instantly, 'new' cash is available to the market, and Disney can sell more entertainment.
>So the question is, once your corporate mega machine has become this efficient what do you even do next?
Expand to other markets. They know everything about human perception. They can leverage that to make more games or VR applications. They can build better education platforms or even create new cities. They could even try to convince Apple, Amazon and Google to open up the declining personal assistant market [1].
However, stable diffusion threatens their position. Who needs Disney's capacities if other algorithms can do it better? Disney will have to enter the AI race and spend all their money on developers and researchers. Unfortunately for them, they haven't used the last 20 years to create something like an online Cinderella university to globally identify young geniuses and funnel them into their company.
[1] Amazon Is Gutting Its Voice-Assistant Alexa
An extremely well-oiled movie-making machine is not a good games-making machine, VR or not.
And while there may be some cross-over with game-making, there is certainly no cross-over with voice assistants, where did you even think of that? Home assistants don't actually assist you in the home, they are mostly a device you buy to serve you ads (and occasionally switch the music when your hands are dirty).
> However, stable diffusion threatens their position. Who needs Disney's capacities if other algorithms can do it better? Disney will have to enter the AI race and spend all their money on developers and researchers.
You really don't understand the AAA movie business if you think Stable Diffusion is anywhere near threatening Disney.
They just explained that they've gotten so good at making blockbusters, they don't have enough clients for how many blockbusters they can make. Even if Stable Diffusion was any good at making AAA movies (they're a few decades away from that), someone trying to use it to compete with Disney would quickly find they have no power whatsoever to actually market their movies - that is where Disney truly shines.
And it's not about movie posters and reviews, marketing in the business is greatly tied to creating stars. People arent just coming to see Iron Man, they're coming to see Robert Downey Jr, or Chriss Pratt etc. AI-generated movies have no hope to compete with the marketing power of a big-name celebrity.
>there is certainly no cross-over with voice assistants, where did you even think of that?
Disney Land is a beautiful environment where the technical details are hidden. That's what they can replicate with assistants outside their parks.
>Home assistants don't actually assist you in the home
That's the point. Unlike Amazon, who hasn't managed to integrate their home automation with Alexa (see comments in [1]), Disney could approach assistants more holistically like they approach their parks and create a blissful experience of their clients' lives.
Voice assistants are voice assistants because the system doesn't know position, movement and other signals yet. People trust Disney so they can collect all data to react to movements or whatever else is possible.
Additionally, they are skilled in stories, in decision-making. Right now, assistants are servants who fulfill commands. A good assistant supports beyond that. The system has to know what people care about, what moves them, to turn their complex life into a linear, beautiful story.
*edit: If Disney does know everybody's location, they can use their movies for the ultimate gamification of work: You can only watch the next episode of your favorite series if you complete your milestone at work.
But the world doesn't have will to look at it.
However, and this statement is made with no actual knowledge of the economics of Disney content creation budgets, but I like to imagine that one positive thing that comes from the monetary success of the Marvel movies is the Pixar Shorts that are being made for Disney+ .
If you haven't seen them I recommend them. They are these original ~4 minute short films that are pet-projects by various creatives working at Disney/Pixar. The shorts include a small interview from the creator where they discuss their inspiration and the fun they had working on the project.
I remember a line from the Daily Show when it was still Craig Kilborn. The show had just gotten a nice newly renovated set, and Kilborn thanked South Park for the money to pay for it.
I suspect (again with no real knowledge) that the Pixar Shorts are financed from the success of the Marvel movies. Or maybe it's just Disney+ subscriber fees.
The Disney shorts are a good suggestion. I will track them down. Thanks.
But the shorts took me by surprise. They were so deep, content packed, and beautiful. I sat and watched them all with my daughter, by accident really - both of us completely silent just watching, one after the other. A couple made us choke up, at different points. Probably the most beautiful television I've ever seen.
I'd probably pay megabucks to watch such a collection of shorts on the big screen, and that's from someone who hasn't been to the theatre in a decade.
It's remarkable that the most controversial thing disney has done in decades is making main characters not white.
For example, in star wars, instead of doing something interesting or different, they just magicked the "first order" or whatever into existence so they could have big bad empire again, before eventually just saying "fuck it palpatine is back". They also took a back story that was left untold (getting the death star plans), rejected the expanded universe version that was about a usually ignored population having a big impact and sacrificing much for the good of the universe, and replaced it with a super generic "one important ideologically pure character plus one clearly ideologically evil villain" story with basic action.
Meanwhile in the marvel universe, they've adapted the comic book tactic of saying "multiverse and time travel and alternate realities exist" because then they can keep using popular avatar characters. This of course also means nothing freaking matters, because you can literally retcon in universe. It's so boring, nothing matters.
While I agree with everything you said as such, the Andor TV show (and Rogue One to lesser extent) indicates that they are at least capable of doing interesting things in the Star Wars universe, beyond Good space wizard vs Evil space wizard. I fear however that most fans don't actually want that and that Andor will be an aberration.
Kids will, if left to their own devices, watch the same movie over and over again (my VHS copy of Land Before Time just about wore out by the time I was 6). Producers realize this, so they just reshuffle the same story over and over again and sell it to them, over, and over, and over again. Adults tend not to be quite so easy to amuse.
Bonus woke points if they imply that K.E.V.I.N. is a sexist AI made by SV techbros that’s sabotaging She-Hulk’s series.
https://www.cbr.com/she-hulk-wanted-kevin-feige-cameo-mcu-bo...
You can imagine how pleased he was with any of the K.E.V.I.N stuff in the show at all.. or the show itself.
Although it would be hilarious if they just started releasing a new superhero movie every week. The Marvel universe is pretty deep.
Especially since the reason Iger left is that he just wanted to retire. Basically everyone at Disney wanted him to stay.
However, maybe it isn’t. The stock is down 40% YTD, 10% over the last 5 years. Pretty mediocre. Not that it’s been a great year for any stock, but losing 2/5ths value is still an outlier.
It’s not hard to see why. A $1.5 billion operating loss in the streaming division last quarter, despite 164M subscribers, is a major black eye. With $5.96/mo. being the average worth of a user, that means approximately $977 million monthly in streaming revenue, or $2.93 Billion per quarter - yet Disney is somehow spending $4.43 Billion per quarter to keep the streaming subscription ship afloat. If I’m an investor, I’m skeptical that Disney+ will ever obtain profitability. Raise prices, lose subscriptions. Make original content to keep people subscribed - but it costs money to make, eats profitability, and so far hasn’t been a huge subscription-saver. Thus the ad-based tier upcoming to try to fix the hole…
Because what is a physical disc? It’s basically a cache, physically delivered, but you purchase it once and it’s yours. Don’t want to purchase? Netflix will rotate discs back and forth by mail.
Such a system would be the same thing - just more expensive, less private, no ownership option, and without the physical disc or mailing time…
I don’t know. I get that it’s more convenient than the old system but seems like a downgrade in almost every other respect. Less ownership, less privacy, worse selection (how many streaming services needed?), quite possibly worse for the environment (discs break even with streaming after ~4 plays and last an average of 16 rentals, and far more than that when frequently watched in a home)…
These downloads are DRM'ed, they cannot be shared or moved outside of their storage (cache).
Firstly, the median salary of workers in India is much lower than salaries you will find in the west. $8,000 AUD is more than the median salary.
Second, cricket is big. Disney+ had IPL rights for a long time, but lost them to another streamer. (Disney still owns the Pay TV rights).
Thirdly, many plans from mobile phone providers include Disney+
A retail Disney+ Hotstar subscription goes for the same price as a monthly phone subscription that includes 4GB of data a day.
Competitors in India have plans that are at similar prices to Disney+. It's hard for Disney to charge more for the product there.
It's just bad news for Disney+ profitability even if there's nothing Disney can do about that.
Most media these days is basically all CGI and kind of crappy. Add some Disney cooking shows, talk shows, and stuff like that to bring in grandmas and busy moms. Add some nerd Star Wars podcasts and bring in people like me who want to nerd out on Mandalorian. Don’t always need to spend 50-200m on cgi heavy shows.
Additionally, Chapek's timid personality did not seem as conducive in the people-centric entertainment industry.
If you really want to think in a Machiavellian way, perhaps Iger hand picked Chapek to act as a fall guy so that market pressure would hit the stock during his watch and not spoil his own tenure.
The most likely thing is that Chapek was simply seen as failing to maintain all the growth Iger managed to deliver and they want him back in order to try claw some of that stock price back.
With so many executives all maneuvering it likely was the least painful option to pick him.
History is muddled due to the last few years, I thought Iger got caught up in a "#metoo" situation. But that was probably someone else.
A good overview can be found on this video essay: https://youtu.be/w-4k9c8LZU4?t=377
Disney's long term debt for 2020 was $52.917B, a 38.78% increase from 2019.
Disney's long term debt for 2019 was $38.129B, a 123.19% increase from 2018.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/long-te...
Yes, Disney is slowly throwing money at the problem and reducing it's debt, but it's still a pretty high load.
Still not as bad as Warner Bro's Discovery though.
Warner Bros Discovery long term debt for the quarter ending September 30, 2022 was $48.612B, a 236.74% increase year-over-year.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WBD/warner-bros-di...
2019 $71.3 B for 21st Century Fox
2012 $4.1 B for Lucasfilm
2009 $4.2 B for Marvel
2006 $6.3 B for Pixar
2016 $2.9 B for BAMTech
2001 $2.9 B for Fox Family
1999 $1.8 B for Infoseek
1996 $19.0 B for Capital Cities/ABC
Bob Iger must have been eager to bulk up before the launch of Disney+?
21st Century Fox also owned the rights to hundreds of movies (Avatar, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Dr. Seuss) and plenty of television (1/3 of Hulu, The Simpsons).
They also had the movie rights to some of the Marvel characters. I don't know how much that was worth to Igor, but it seems that he really wants to get the family all back under one roof.
It's interesting that you mention the ABC acquisition - in today's money that would cost $36.09 billion - just roughly half of the Fox acquisition.
What did Comcast get other than the 39% of Sky that Fox owned? The Fox Sports RSN went to Sinclair.
I can appreciate the issues around debt, but Disney also acquired a huge amount of IP and market control in entertainment in the deal. They've left the Fox broadcast networks without a TV studio for their content (and first-run is becoming less important in the era of streaming). They've gotten so many of the most important IP franchises out there. They've become by far the largest movie studio. In an era where entertainment is becoming vertically integrated from creation to streaming, it seems like Disney has locked down so much of the future.
We see how others are struggling. Paramount is trying to make the most of Star Trek and is the smallest major movie studio. Warner Bros Discovery is an also-ran with HBO Max - and having trouble figuring out the way forward with HBO Max/Discovery+/(the canceled) CNN+. WBD is also struggling with many of their franchises fizzling out: the Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts universe is mired by JK Rowling's problematic politics and Ezra Miller's many issues; they seem to be having trouble getting their DC properties to perform how they'd like having canceled Batgirl when it was almost finished and talking about refocusing the franchise. Sony is an independent studio, but lacks the integrated platform that the other 4 have. Comcast/NBCUniversal is still trying to figure out what Peacock is and having trouble even attracting free users.
Iger talked about making the call to buy the IP needed to really create a vertically integrated company that would be able to support a streaming service without licensing lots of outside content. It started with Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel who gave Disney a huge amount of content and talent. Fox was expensive, but also gave Disney the rest of the Marvel universe (except Spiderman) along with so much more content and a huge amount of control of the box office and TV. Disney is in a very strong position relative to their competitors. I think Disney is going to look pretty good in a decade. The economies of scale of running a large streaming service seem likely to help Disney a lot (having many more customers paying for the same content and allowing you to afford more of it). That's not to say Paramount, WBD, and others can't compete, but it does seem like Disney owns so much more which lets them offer more and secures their position. People got Netflix because it offered more and it's hard to see how Paramount or WBD or NBCUniversal could offer as much as Disney could. Now, Disney will try and figure out what the minimum it can offer while keeping users is, but they have such a depth of content that it puts them in the driver's seat a bit.
What they didn’t expect was Iger - figuring out the model - building a good streaming app - buying up all the could. Truly a high performance CEO imo and one of the best in the history of entertainment.
It’s funny to read in the biographies of S. Jobs just how blown away he was by Disney’s institutional knowledge of marketing when he got into bed with them with Pixar. From the bios I read I remember it was the first time he realised you could make an effective corporate culture last - Disney will soon be around a century old.
It could be they just hired extremely competent people to build it, outsourced?
Disney acquired 75% of BAMTech Media for $2 billion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toys-to-life
I wonder if that was Bob Iger. Or maybe he was smart enough to dump it.
By far the worst part of the experience was that it was too crowded. Raising prices or limiting annual pass holders would help solve this but I feel like that falls into the penny pinching category. Lower attendance cap would also help but would be surprised if they did that given it is capping your income.
0: which was instated to prevent 4+ hour wait times for Rise of the Resistance
I mean other than universal
I think they are worried a third US park would eat into the brand - but have always been a bit surprised they haven't tried to do one in Texas. There is a lot of land there that is cheap and geographically could serve different audience.
Disney is already freeing up more space in Anaheim, and they still (aFAIK) have a huge interest in land around long beach (a bit more problematic). And they have huge tracts of land in Orlando.
The Anaheim expansion is limited. They are pretty much just taking over the parking lot. The city council has made it very difficult (fair enough) to just expand onto property they already own so I imagine an expansion into land they acquire would be even more challenging
I obviously cannot verify this, but I hope it's true because I like the idea that it's not unthinkable how someone can get to the top of the corporate world while also being a nice person.
Oooh, you wouldn't have some sort of a link that elaborates on this?
https://ew.com/books/2019/09/24/bob-iger-george-lucas-felt-b...
That being said, since no one ever has seen that script except maybe some high level execs, it will be quite pointless to speculate on its quality.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/06/george-lucas-reveals-...
That link editorializes in its URL that the plan was awful, but you can read it yourself.
(I felt it pretty easy to speculate that its quality might not be great in reading George Lucas' book adaptation of A New Hope, personally, and guessed at some of the answers he later gave in interviews. Though it would have been a fun spectacle/drug trip.)
He gets away with this and is still an effective CEO because he gets others in his circle to play the bad cop and take bad press.
I say all this as someone with huge respect for Iger and all he's done.
I'm not sure why you expect Iger to do that, he is 100% responsible for Disney movies and animations cultural shift and decided that one group of people are the audience they want to focus on and pander to, probably because it makes them more money than the alternative. Purely a profit driven decision. This is just the way it is, at the end of the day, money talks.
Chapek is no different, but "optics" were against him as he mishandled the PR aspect of the pandering.
That kind of preachiness is there to stay, at least until there is yet another cultural paradigm shift.
He feels guilty that the chain of technological progress eventually leads to Hiroshima, but I don't think everybody would agree that it's his responsibility.
The new shows also have had decent viewership numbers too even when introducing completely new characters or scenarios.
What we all seemed to like about the show was that it was lighthearted and funny, without overly dour world ending scenarios. It was clearly written with women involved because a lot of the humour was both targeted and different, which as a guy, I enjoyed because there were a ton of really great subversions of traditional male tropes in writing.
I liked that it was basically Ally McBeal.
She-Hulk definitely appeals (or tries to) to more politically/socially progressive individuals.
Eternals has a scene with two characters having sex on a beach. Spider Man Homecoming has a gag where Ned says he's watching porn on his laptop. In She Hulk, a key plot point is she's filmed having sex and the video is then broadcast.
If they want to make Marvel for teens and older, then by all means. But they clearly market the franchise to the under-10 crowd, and the content above was not subtle. It wasn't written to go over the little ones' heads... it's in their face.
But the sexual content is unexpected and random. She Hulk is "hulk for girls"... and one episode is about revenge porn. As a parent, that's pretty awkward.
Note that my complaint isn't about movies having sexual content. It's that 95% of Marvel movies don't have overtly sexual references, and then a couple suddenly do, within the same sub-franchise. The right way to go is like Jessica Jones (on Netflix), which was a Marvel series but it was very clearly marketed for adults.
That the protagonist is a woman doesn’t mean it’s for girls btw.
If you’re looking for a more child focused Marvel series with a female protagonist, Ms.Marvel would be it.
The Marvel episodic content is (with the exception of Falcon and the Winter Soldier) is a lot more diverse in style content than the films, and unapologetically so. This is where Marvel is experimenting and providing a more varied range of content.
Yeah, I didn't really mean that the show is "for girls", but just that here was a new female-protagonist show. Ms. Marvel was fantastic, by the way (for many reasons).
I didn't notice the TV-14 on She Hulk at first, but did catch on pretty quick that the series leaned more mature. Still, the Avengers movies dropped all the overt sexual references after Iron Man 2 and became more "kiddie-friendly", so I find it odd (and frustrating) to have the maturity level vary within the same set of characters. That is my problem. In the other mega-franchise brands (Star Wars, Pixar, Disney) you know the maturity and sensibility to expect.
Streaming/episodic is much lower budget so they take more risks to try and bring in a different set of audiences that their films weren’t pulling in. My wife for example doesn’t care at all for the films, but really got into Wandavision and She-Hulk because the premise was more interesting to her.
I think the safety of the films might also disappear soon too as China and a few other countries recently rebuffed them. Marvel has tried very hard for years to be very China friendly because it’s a huge market, but recently with Shang-Chi they got blocked. So now they’ve stopped pandering to a more conservative market.
Coincidentally the big up and coming market is progressive youths and I think you’ll see a lot more topics that speak to them (or at least what a Disney exec thinks does). I don’t think Disney gives a crap about being progressive for the morality of it, but after they’ve had a pretty bad few years at the hands of conservatives (China, Florida gay rights etc), they’re now realizing this progressive market is ripe for the picking.
I think She-Hulks tone comes firmly from that pivot. So I suspect what is traditionally seen as child friendly values will see a down turn in their big projects.
That said, media is both a reflection of us and we are a reflection of it. So I think what topics will be considered child friendly will also change dramatically over the next few years.
Also there’s straight guys on there who were just fine. Wong and Matt for example were issue free. So was Bruce and a ton of extras.
A lot of the women on the show weren’t the nicest either, like Titania and the friend whose wedding she went to.
Matt, i.e. Daredevil, was reduced to carrying his shoes in his hands in a “walk of shame” (his shoes are uncomfortable heels? He feels shame after sex with a fellow lawyer?), because he’s a sorority girl now.
Bruce, who spent two decades learning to control his inner Hulk and multiple times watched friends die in service of a higher calling was upstaged in 5 seconds by a girl who told him what real anger is because she gets catcalled and asked out on dates by people she doesn’t find attractive.
Whatever boys are supposed to get from this show, they’re probably not getting it. Or perhaps boys are getting exactly what the writers want them to get.
Matt had a good time and then they made a casual joke that you’re reading far too much into.
Regarding Bruce, they had to short circuit her origin story. Nobody wants to see her go through the exact same motions.
Regardless, it seems the show was not your cup of tea. That’s fine.
There’s plenty of straight men out there who enjoyed it, and we have enough shows pandering to our male egos that having one fun show focused on a woman isn’t going to upset my balance of whatever it is you think one must get from a show.
That's disingenuous. I reject this show for the same reason women reject a show that fails the Bechdel test. It's full of caricatures of men that exist only to confirm the protagonist's (i.e. head writer's) view that men are either toxic leering creeps, oblivious privileged mansplainers or idiotic adult children.
Shockingly the men who played the villains weren’t portrayed as good people. So were the women who were the villains.
Maybe that should start an awkward conversation then? Revenge porn and sending naked pictures to other “friends” is happening in middle school
TBH I'm a little confused by this claim, why do you think any of the marvel movies or shows are targeted to kids younger than 10? I'm pretty sure basically every MCU movie has a PG-13 rating, which is definitely a deliberate choice they made. Certainly the ratings are just a suggestion, but I don't feel like they're making any attempt at targeting kids younger than 10, they have completely separate shows like Spidey that target that demographic and (AFAIK) have nothing to do with the MCU.
* Merchandise targeted at little ones. Toys, costumes, Lego…
* Avengers Campus in Disney California Adventure, next to all the kiddie IP
* Precedence: No f-bombs in the films, no blood, no sex, etc
Beyond that, many of those things are also collectables, so a lot of that stuff is not _just_ for kids. But kids who know the characters will enjoy them even if they don't specifically know the MCU versions.
> No f-bombs in the films, no blood, no sex, etc
I agree to an extent, but you basically just listed the requirements for a PG-13 movie, not whether a movie is for ages younger than 10. They definitely earn a PG-13 rating, many of them have (sometimes less than subtle) sex jokes, a few have brief sex scenes, they do have some blood and a few gruesome character deaths (for kids), and all of them have a fair amount of swearing (much more than I'd let my young daughter watch). I feel like you've just equated anything that's not R rated as "targeting kids 10 and under", ignoring the middle area that is PG-13.
You might be shocked that there are action figures for a mass murdering vigilante (The Punisher), a homicidal maniac (Joker), a guy who literally killed dozens of kids (Darth Vader), etc
“The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” is a story about talking magical animals, and is for kids. And therefore obviously has no hidden motives behind the story.
Let's go further back to any of the old Disney films, came from fables, moral tales of old. In fact what piece of media outside of the most boring and bland ever are not a tale to learn, think or expand your thoughts? Is that not a sermon?
I think it does when it's "in your face" like the latest movies. It feels like a kind of propaganda that I'm not interested in. I just want to enjoy my time and watch a f*** good and entertaining movie not a jehovah witness sermon or a diversity soup.
Just massive crowds everywhere.
IMO they're struggling to open and maintain enough lasting attractions and park atmosphere areas in the existing parks, and they're making lots of money from inflating queue times and sending people to the shops so I don't really see what they'll do.
I wouldn't want to own it. All content producers seem to be performing poorly.
Some images/info here: https://www.roadtovr.com/end-of-an-era-disneyquest-first-vr-...
Iger put Disney on the right path after Eisner. He fixed a lot of the issues animators were having and put creative decision makers in the right places. Marvel, Star Wars, and Disney+ are just a few of the highlights of his bigger impact. He fundamentally understands the direction of the business. (So long as it doesn't get disrupted by AI/ML, which could cannibalize franchises.)
Iger wanted to retire, and he picked one of his subordinates to take over. He picked very wrong.
Kevin Mayer and Peter Rice were other picks that got snubbed. Meyer became the short-lived CEO of TikTok US (and left after the Trump admin threatened to shut it down), and Chapek got rid of Rice.
Chapek bungled LGBT / Don't Say Gay, and for the former head of Parks didn't seem to manage COVID right.
Iger's biggest mistake was Chapek.
It's good to have Iger back. But he has to find a new replacement.
How much of the absurdly poor quality content that made to screens, were projects left in the pipe by Iger though? Iger is also the CEO that failed to reign in the woke agenda at Disney which has become the guiding principle of most of Disney's content.
I would also argue that Chapek didn't bungle the Parental Rights in Education Act, he just inherited a company that is extremely aligned with a single political party in the US, and those values don't translate well outside of that one political party. Do you think Japan or China disagree with Florida's stance on the issue for example? Those two countries represent 3 of Disney's resorts, literally half of the entire portfolio.
Don't get me wrong, Iger has ran Disney for decades and importantly, he's ran Disney through business cycles that aren't just Congress and the Fed going nuts with stimulus. He knows what it means when consumers are suddenly squeezed for pennies and you know it's bad when the de-facto Prime Minister of Canada uses cutting Disney+ as an example of consumer cost-cutting[1]. What I'd be worried about, is that he's not necessarily the best person to reign in the woke and return to universal values, which is a key pillar of why people consume Disney.
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[1] https://www.disneydining.com/canadians-are-urged-to-ditch-th...
Coco , Black Panther, Turning Red, Soul all did phenomenally well.
If you look at media embracing diversity, they’re largely doing pretty well when compared to projects of equivalent quality, because they’re bringing in new demographics AND giving something new to existing fans.
Others in this thread have mentioned that China's kept some Marvel movies out due to "LGBTQ representation". Suggesting that they omit that goes against my own biases.
But I don't see how a CEO could make the financial case that doing so wouldn't be worth catering to those large foreign markets.
For example, Turning Red. It seems to have a message of… never listen to your parents? Rebel against authority? I’m not sure exactly. It’s a weird movie.
Which is interesting because Moana is, as an adult, possibly one of my favorite movies of all time. The messaging of the heroes journey, venerating your ancestors, but being able to look toward the future and find a new way that sometimes faces resistance is a perfect tale. Then there’s also the subtext of Maui and Tefiti being the archetypal divorced couple, with Maui stealing her heart which causes severe emotional trauma until she is healed by Moana, the archetypal child mending the family.
Frozen is a weird one, I could write a book about it.
Princess and the Frog is great.
It’s so weird! I never know if a mainline Disney movie is going to be good or terrible. I don’t really know what’s going on over at Disney right now.
Turning Red isn’t about rebelling. It’s about finding out who you are. In the film she only really rebels against her mom about one thing, which is the same number of times Moana defies her dad. The rest of the movie is about her desire to venerate her ancestors while still being true to herself. In many ways it’s similar to Moana.
I’m unsure how any of these are “woke” so much as messages you disagree with. Which is fine, but I would encourage reflecting on it further.
Disney has had tons of rebellious characters over the decades. Ariel is rebellious. Simba is rebellious. Belle is rebellious. Mulan is rebellious. Lilo is rebellious. Aladdin is rebellious. Tony Stark is rebellious. Peter Parker is rebellious.
Interesting characters tend to be rebellious. Luke is literally a rebel who doesn’t listen to his father after all.
The group it didn’t appeal to has immense political power in Florida and this threatened Disney’s control of the RCID, which Disney really needs to control…there was a lot of speculation about how this was a loser for Florida, but it wasn’t. It’s a loser for Disney because they need to maintain a specific standard both for grounds and roads, but also control for future development needs. Especially with the parks busting at the seams.
I am willing to bet in the next two years there is some political repair happening between Iger and Florida.
edit: see echelon's comment
For reference, link to echelon's comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688663
Disney uses its IP and theme parks to print money. Sure, it could have been doing better, but as long as people keep paying to see more of Star Wars, MCU, and Pixar, it would take almost intentional mismanagement to actually be in trouble.