Activist investor Nelson Peltz nominated himself and former Disney CFO Jay Rasulo to the company's board of directors on Thursday, setting in motion a proxy fight for control of the all-media and amusement park giant.
Peltz said in a statement that "Disney is resisting change and asking shareholders to endorse a board comprised mainly of legacy directors (and their hand-picked successors) who have repeatedly failed to properly plan for CEO succession, misaligned the incentives of management, and failed to oversee or drive a strategy to get the streaming business to profitability or the studios to produce good content."
Peltz isn't kidding, either. I shocked myself a couple of weeks ago when I ran the numbers and found that Disney might have actually lost money on Star Wars since purchasing Lucasfilm in 2012. If Disney has generated a profit on the franchise, it hasn't been nearly enough to justify the enormous expenses — and embarrassing flops like "Solo" and the Galactic Starcruiser luxury Star Wars resort. The latter was built at a ridiculous cost of $1 billion and closed without fanfare after a single year due to lack of interest.
Last year's Indiana Jones movie might have made money... if it hadn't cost a profit-sucking $425 million or more to produce and market. Next year's live-action "Snow White" remake was originally supposed to come out this year and cost $200 million (!!!) just to produce, but reshoots and delays may have added another $100 million to the production budget. Crappy Disney+ TV shows like "Obi-Wan" and "She-Hulk" cost $25 million per episode.
No wonder Disney+ is losing billions. And how is a movie, even a blockbuster, supposed to generate the returns that investors expect when budgets are completely out of control? Shareholders ought to be banging down Peltz's door and demanding that he take over.
Peltz's Trian investment firm is one of Disney's largest single investors, controlling more than $3 billion in shares last time I checked, but there's also a personal element. One of Peltz's allies is billionaire Ike Perlmutter, who may own as many as 25 million of the 33 million Disney shares controlled by Trian. Perlmutter used to run Marvel Studios and oversaw the production of some of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's most successful productions. He was removed from direct day-to-day control over Marvel in 2015 and was forced out of Disney completely in 2023.
This is their second proxy fight for Disney in the last 11 months. They lost their first fight due to "overwhelming support" from shareholders "for the Disney-recommended slate of 11 directors," according to Variety.
I can tell you this much for sure. No matter whether you love or loathe the direction Disney has taken in recent years, the company could use someone like Rasulo with financial sense at the top of the Mouse House.
Disney has yet to schedule its next shareholder meeting where Peltz's proxy fight will take place but it ought to stream on Disney+. Maybe that would finally make them some money.
Certain readers might not care much about various rich people vying for control over a movie studio showing serious signs of decline. But I must tell you that this stuff matters. Like it or not, Disney-owned franchises like Star Wars and Marvel — along with Walt Disney's original beloved creations — are as much a part of American culture as baseball, hamburgers, Duke Ellington, and corrupt politicians.
And politics, as the late, great Andrew Breitbart reminded us years ago, lies downstream of the culture. Every time a conservative harrumphs and says "I don't care about such-and-such entertainment anymore," a woke progressive sprouts xher wings.
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