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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Nah, Iger's got this. He just wants to retire, though.

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.

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> Marvel, Star Wars, and Disney+ are just a few of the highlights.

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...

Is this whole "woke" thing like an actual, serious problem for Disney? The box office for Disney movies since Iger took over in 2005 indicates people don't actually care.

More than that, it shows that people care in a positive way. The people crying about wokeness are the loud minority.

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.

You can't deduce that people don't care about the "woke" aspect because some movies are still popular, Disney could have made other movies that weren't "woke", that may or may not have been more popular.

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.

Could you go over the woke thing in more detail? I thought it was a positive change based on the fandom.

I dunno. My wife and I used to insta buy/ take our kids to see Disney movies, but now we double check what sorts messages the movie has in it.

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.

Moana is also rebellious however?

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.

It's not the fandom purchasing the tickets, but their parents.

The kiss scene in Rise of Skywalker felt particularly pandering and purely a marketing thing. The scene was two unnamed characters that were easily edited out for more restrictive markets. Though I suppose that's the opposite of general woke based criticisms.

It was good and bad. Disney had basically two hyper loyal bases throughout the last 20 years. Parents with young children…especially daughters, and the LGBT community. The woke stuffed appealed to one of those groups, but not the other.

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.

It would be great for Disney if he could get Mayer back.

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