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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a massive bomb. Elementals was one of Pixar’s worst openings of all time. Disney is in trouble. Its wokeness is going broke. And the man at the top will stay on until 2026.
The Walt Disney Company’s 2022 box office grosses are the worst the company has posted in nearly two decades. Not only are the grosses the worst in nearly two decades but just since 2019 the company has seen their grosses decline nearly 70%.
That was Bounding Into Comics. But even Variety, repping the usual Hollywood press, has bad news for Disney.
But this year, the long-reigning titan of the box office has shown cracks as four of its biggest releases from those brands and others have struggled in theaters. There was the dispiriting release of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” a rare Marvel movie to likely lose tens of millions in its theatrical run; “The Little Mermaid,” a remake of the 1989 animated classic that fell drastically short of expectations; “Elemental,” an original story that tried and failed to recapture Pixar’s magic; and most recently “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” a nearly $300 million investment in one of cinemas’ most venerable franchises, which no longer appears to have the same hold on today’s audiences.
Variety won’t touch the W-word, but Disney has spent years setting the IP it built its business model around. Now that business model is in trouble. And over at Disney, that means it’s time to make Bob Iger, the man behind this disaster, CEO for life.
The Walt Disney Co. announced that CEO Bob Iger has agreed to stay in his position with the company through the end of 2026.
In a news release posted Wednesday, the company said its board of directors voted unanimously to extend Iger’s contract by two years. Iger, 72, returned to the company last November after previously stepping down in 2020 following a 15-year tenure as CEO.
The company said Iger’s extension provides “continuity of leadership” during its “ongoing transformation.” It added that the move will give the company more time to execute a transition plan for CEO succession, which it noted is a top priority for the board of directors.
“Time and again, Bob has shown an unparalleled ability to successfully transform Disney to drive future growth and financial returns, earning him a reputation as one of the world’s best CEOs,” Disney Chairman Mark G. Parker said in a statement.
His unparalleled ability to milk IPs only matches his unparalleled ability to destroy them.
Disney bet everything on streaming and that’s not working. It leveraged IP but its Marvel properties are starting to falter, it’s having trouble launching new original animated properties, and it can’t manage a Star Wars movie. All of that is really bad news. Its theme park business has also been poisoned.
Bob Iger, who returned as CEO after a brief hiatus and displaced his successor Bob Chapek, is simultaneously battling Wall Street’s unrest over the unprofitability of Disney+, concerns that Disney’s parks business may have alienated customers with its higher prices, and a rise in cord cutting that’s imperiling its cable properties like ESPN.
The higher prices aren’t helping, nor are the men dressed as princesses. The usual long lines are disappearing.
Visitors to Disney theme parks this summer are encountering something they haven’t seen in a while: elbow room.
Travel analysts and advisers say traffic to Disney’s U.S. parks, and some rival parks, has slowed this summer. Data from a travel company that tracks line-waiting time at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., shows that the Independence Day weekend was one of the slowest in nearly a decade.
Disney executives have said they have expected weaker earnings from their U.S. parks this year. The Orlando-area resort is even offering hotel discounts around Christmas, typically a peak period.
So why does the Disney board refuse to consider new leadership? Why was Iger allowed to stage his coup and double down on wokeness?
While people fantasize about Disney firing Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy after she decided to make her stand-ins the star of every franchise including the recent Indiana Jones, she’s no more likely to go than Bob.
The Disney leadership is as locked into wokeness as the leaders of the old Soviet Union were into Communism. It’ll take a whole lot more brokenness, the way it did in the USSR, before they’re overthrown.
I knew Disney had gone wrong when I bought the “Lion King” video in the 1990s as a present for kids. It was subtle leftist propaganda, but noone else at that time could see it.
You can tell Iger is a dickhead just by looking at his eyes.
Indiana Jones was NOT a bomb. It was at least as good or better than Temple of Doom. It failed because a bunch of ignorant boobs decided it was not woke enough for the “modern” audience. It can be called that only by people who have not seen it.
The preview had a jab at “capitalism,” in it, I won’t bother. Odd position to take for people who are trying to turn a profit.
The “Temple of Doom” was good. Not as good as the original or the third one with awesome Sean Connery but better than that “Crystal skull” crap.
I can watch any of those movies and have a good time, though. Even “The Crystal Skull” was fun to watch.
Iger spent his career ruining the Disney brand. But he was a lot sneakier about it.
Yeah, he’s like that guy that CNN brought back to run the company.
Run it into the ground. America rejects “woke” programming.
This is a good development. It will cause Disney to continue its failures leading to reduced revenue and, just maybe, reconsideration of its wokeness. If this causes a return by Disney to its roots, it’s a move to be celebrated.
Yeah, I’ll take “Old Yeller” over “Elemental” any day. “Bambi,” too. My mother said I cried when Bambi’s mother and father were killed. Not at the same time but damn, that’s a lot of death for a kid’s movie. I was only four years old, so, y’know. I guess I imagined my own parents dying. I don’t remember any of it, though. That was a long time ago.
Great argument. But, no, wait! What films HAVE been making money in 2023? Let’s see, the Super Mario Bros movie. Have you seen it? What’s its woke quotient? How about Spider Man: Across the Spiderverse? That one has LESBIANS!!!! Guardians of the Galaxy 3? A paragon of anti-woke conservatism.
Disney films are bombing because they’re bad. Film revenue is down across the board because of the pandemic and the rise of the streamers. You know that. Everyone knows that. Your “Disney is doomed because of its wokeness” schpiel is tired old bull.
Yeah but no, douchetard. Disney films are bombing because they’re woke. When I was a kid those Kurt Russel Disney films mad money and people liked them. Even “The Treasure of the Matacumbe” made money.
“Mario Brothers?” Gay black/Latin Spider-man cartoon?
Flops.
And Chris Pratt of Guardians is a conservative Christian. That movie is about as left-wing as Chik-Fil-A. I watched it, dumbass. You’re lying, as always.
Keep in mind that Iger retired in early 2020 and didn’t come back on board until late 2022. These films sometimes take years. For example, much of Indiana Jones 5 was created while Iger was out. Spielberg stepped down from directing the same month Iger retired and a different director was chosen a few months after. Principal photography began in 2021. Filming ended in early 2022 with an estimated cost of almost 300 million. Prominent actors are sometimes booked over a year out. What was Iger supposed to do? Scrap hundreds of millions and take the movie back to the script writing stage?
All of that being said, Iger is no stranger to the Democrat party.
Those are good points and while I imagine Iger had limited oversight over Indiana Jones, the machine that made all of this possible was assembled on his watch. And he has kept it going.
Iger sucks and so do you.
I liked “Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantamania,” although the fact that they made Kang a black guy was lamer than lame. If Marvel wants a black villain because it’s “woke,” choose a black one, don’t murder a white guy and make him black. That’s extremely racist.
I haven’t seen the latest Indiana Jones movie yet but Harrison Ford is a very likable actor, and at age 80 or so, he won’t be around much longer. Too bad. I love that “1923” TV show he does.
I preferred to put my money behind “Sound of Freedom,” anyway.
Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to bankruptcy you go!
Oh, those were some good movies (with the Dwarves). I had forgotten about them.
The songs were good, too! I have several Disney cartoon CDs. The recent stuff sucks but the old stuff is great.
I see their latest offering is a one involving Blood Drinking Pagans worshipping a Floating Eye if their were not just trying to create Eco Propaganda with junk like Princess Molinoke pushing their message of Deep Ecology
I don’t even know what that references, but it sounds bad!
Disney’s problem is that they’re not doing enough of what they’re doing. If they push it harder, it’ll all work out.
Yeah, the company will work all its former viewers out of the picture.
I think Walt Disney would be upset, if he was alive today, with the way the company is being managed and the changes being made at Disneyland and Disney World. Being woke is not going to save the company. Go back to the way it was in the 70’s and 8o’s.
Or 40s, 50s and 60s.
The uk government funds British film companies, I’m sure the Bi Dung regime will rescue Dismal.
CEO for life sounds pretty awesome, especially if your HQ is USA. Dumbtardville. Like, I’m not even kidding, Just ask Dinesh.
Trump is so cool.
This comedy writes itself. Unfortunately there are no more comedians or perhaps they value their heads too highly.
Their latest film Elemental is probably going to Bomb as well