How do you fix Disney, a company that seems hell-bent on destroying billions of dollars worth of intellectual property from The Little Mermaid to Indiana Jones?
Following Walt Disney’s untimely death in 1966, the company bearing his name entered a long creative and quality slump. Disney even lost direction, badly trying to outdo Star Wars with The Black Hole and producing “edgier” fare like The Devil And Max Devlin. By the late ’80s, though, the company got back to Walt’s roots in classic animation with The Little Mermaid, beginning a decade-plus creative renaissance.
Then the bean counters took over and cash-flush Disney started gobbling up other people’s creative content — Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel Comics — instead of creating more of their own.
“Who cares about the quality? Just keep the content coming,” became the new attitude. I couldn’t begin to count how many Marvel series are streaming on the money-losing Disney+ service, but I can tell you that only two of the entire lot were worth watching. The damage done to Star Wars is so serious that a new movie hasn’t begun production in six years. An unbearably smug young woman — the heroine! — punches out 80-year-old Harrison Ford in the new Indiana Jones movie, projected to lose at least $200 million. Nobody knows any longer what a Pixar movie is supposed to be, including the management at Pixar.
The rot, it stinks.
Even worse, two-time (and current) CEO Bob Iger introduced wokeness to Disney’s brand, in effect gutting all those golden geese.
I really do mean that the bean counters took over. I learned just today from this Apple News+ exclusive Hollywood Reporter story that “at Disney, the CFO job has long been intertwined with rumors of succession” to the top CEO spot.
That’s Chief Financial Officer. It makes sense for a CFO — who likely sees entertainment properties as just more widgets to be bought and sold at a markup — to spend billions on properties like Star Wars with plans to slap on new labels and market them as new.
What Disney needs is a Chief Creative Officer — a spiritual heir to Walt whose only C-suite concern would be the quality and originality of the content.
Apple used to have a position like that when Steve Jobs came back to the company in the ’90s. While his official position was CEO, one tech writer (I can’t find the link, sadly) realized that Jobs’ actual position was “consumer ombudsman.” He approached the development of his company’s products like a consumer of them, not like a bean counter. Build quality consumer electronics and computers, he reasoned, and the profits would follow. Jobs was right, and it’s no coincidence that the consumer experience of Apple’s products isn’t what it was now that Jobs is gone.
Disney doesn’t need another bean counter. The company’s headlong rush to produce a high-pressure firehose of content — with no eye for quality or age-appropriate material — has hammered the company’s share price and profits and caused damage to its high-priced properties that may well prove irreparable.
Disney needs a C-suite executive whose entire portfolio is the quality and originality of the studio’s many properties: A Chief Creative Officer. And that’s the position, not the CFO, that should be seen as the stepping stone to the CEO’s office.
The thing is, in order to fix Disney, first Disney needs to want to fix itself. For that to happen, angry shareholders — full disclosure: I own no shares in Disney — will have to clean the House of Mouse.
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