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Disney Crashing Against the Rocks of Reality
I was with Disney during some of their business ventures that were real doozies. Remember ESPN Mobile? That blew up after 13 months in 2005.
ESPN3D? High cost and absolutely no demand. And when I say no demand, I mean the audience was so minuscule A.C. Nielsen couldn’t even measure it. Still, they threw money down that rabbit hole for three years.
I watched as a lot of friends at the network got blown out. Every two years and always around Father’s Day, ESPN would go through massive layoffs.
Now, with their stock down over 40%, still financially limping along from the Fox Studios buyout, engaging in brutal political battles with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and finding the direct-to-consumer streaming business not what they hoped, Disney CEO Bob Chapek sent out a “Dear Leaders” letter to upper-level management on Friday.
“While we will not sacrifice quality or the strength of our unrivaled synergy machine,” he wrote, “we must ensure our investments are both efficient and come with tangible benefits to both audiences and the company.”
Unrivaled synergy machine? Oh, goodie. Maybe ESPN the Weekend is coming back to Disney World. No? Oh, well. I could never tell the difference between Stephen A. Smith and Goofy anyway.
“I am fully aware this will be a difficult process for many of you and your teams. We are going to have to make tough and uncomfortable decisions.” No, they’re not. They are going to make the easy ones and the politically correct ones, too. Large numbers of lower-level staff will be cut. Customer service will suffer. Creative teams will stagnate more than they already are. But Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity staff will continue to blossom even as Chapek tries to fend off the “queer uprising” from his left at Pixar that hurts a lot of their overseas distribution.
Some of Disney’s problems are external. China shut down Shanghai Disney again on October 31. The pandemic forced Disney to borrow another $11B and push its debt load to a high of $52B in late April of 2022. But their embrace of leftist politics and shunning half the country, well, that’s voluntary and willful. And it’s also stupid. Especially when two of your biggest properties are bidding for sports rights.
They wanted a partnership with the Chinese Communist Party and they wanted to embrace leftist politics at home. And now they’re feeling the reality that goes along with those decisions.
How’s it going? Not great, Bob.
Published in General
And even if absolutely nobody watches it, they won’t care.
Great line and me either!
F/X was one of the networks purchased in the Fox Studio deal. (The other one was NatGeo, which National Geographic owns 49%.)
I have all my old Disney stuff ripped and re-burned and treble-backed up. Molon Labe, rodent.
I’m probably not a good American. I don’t care much about Disney things. I read some Mickey Mouse comic books when I was a kid, but they were not the greatest of that genre. My parents took us to Disneyland when we visited family in southern California in 1961, but it was far from the highlight of that trip. In 1985 my attendance at a DECUS meeting in Anaheim meant a free evening with thousands of others at Disneyland but I had no sooner entered than I realized it was no more interesting to me then than when I was a kid, so I turned around went back to my hotel. I’m sure my parents took us kids to 2-3 Disney movies when I was a kid, but those are far from the most memorable of such outings. We never took our kids to Disney-anything that I can remember, and I don’t remember that there was any interest in it, anyway. If Disney has gone woke that’s not good, but I have no personal sense of loss.
Good ahead, call me unAmerican. Call the HUAC and tell them they should investigate me.
If Rocky and Bullwinkle were to go woke, that would be a tragedy. I do have a collection of Soviet Russian movies backed up in several places. I would have kept my mouth shut about it, but now I’ve seen what Putin’s army can do.
Oooh, DECUS! Old times…
Well come on, you should have Fantasia and such, regardless.
Disney was wonderful precisely because it was not about current political angst. It was a separate world, wondrous and colorful and stories were not allegories of the struggle against the patriarchy. In a similar vein, sports is supposed to be apart from daily struggles, a visual feast of excellence and drama, an escape. That Disney management somehow managed to miss such fundamental and obvious truths about the value of their offerings deserves retribution from shareholders and customers who are currently paying big salaries to morons.
In the meantime, we should look forward to a CGI version of Steven A. Smith as Pinocchio, wishing to be turned into a girl or maybe the first trans Disney princess.
Good times, too.
That sounds like a title that Disney would do. Don’t need it.
Fantasia is from 1940 and is completely un-woke.
Sounds boring.
As my daughter said when she was 7-8 years old, “I want books about real things.” She eventually tried Chronicles of Narnia anyway, and liked them. But that was an exception.
I’m going to assume you’re “trolling” because I doubt anyone could see the movie and call it boring.
I didn’t say I had seen the movie. Why would I go to watch something that sounds boring?
That’s odd, considering that the BBC already has an American cable network of its own (which is half-owned by AMC).
BBC America receives no subsidy from the UK government. It survives entirely on its own. Why the heck would the BBC deprive BBC America of the revenue from the next season of Doctor Who, and what does AMC have to say about it?
It only makes sense if Disney pays BBC America more than it would be able to get on its own from advertising and subscriptions.
[Misthiocracy runs to Wikipedia and DuckDuckGo…]
According to the Hollywood Reporter article referenced at the Wikipedia page, Disney has purchased the streaming rights. Perhaps BBC America still has the cable rights.
Does BBC America ever show anything NEW? That wasn’t my experience, during times when it was available to me.