Disney+ Is Now in Sixth Place
Bob Iger’s obsessions have destroyed The Walt Disney Company.
When he worked for Roone Arledge at ABC sports, he gained a workman like knowledge of story telling. He learned the basics of story structure and drama. I can’t deny he had his successes. During the 1988 Winter Olympics, he saved the network’s bacon when an unexpected thaw cancelled a huge number of big events. He was able to find all kinds of dramatic stories among the athletes and have the sportscasters uses those. He himself described the Jamaican bobsled team as a godsend.
The problem is that he was never a creative himself. He made some daring decisions at ABC that paid off but he also made some terrible decisions while he was the head of programming. He wanted to attract major talent and he did so by saying, ‘come to ABC and do whatever.’ This got him David Lynch’s Twin Peaks for example and then Iger destroyed by demanding and answer to ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ Lynch had designed that entire show to be mystery without an answer or if an answer needed to be applied at all, it would be in the final episode of the series. The ratings fell off a cliff because of Iger’s decision. He also gave us the Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, a very high price tag show that was never going to carry the kind of interest movies did, nor could it bring in that kind of an audience. It was arguably worth trying anyway, however the numbers couldn’t possibly justify a second season. Bob gave it a second season.
I can give Iger credit where it’s due, he could see that the traditional channels of entertainment distribution were dying. Granted he started off in network TV and spent his first thirty years as a businessman watching his business disintegrate. But he was able to see it, plenty of network TV guys still can’t.
Iger has been obsessed with digital distribution since Day One. His very first meeting with Steve Jobs as the CEO of Disney wasn’t to discuss buying Pixar. Iger wanted to talk about distributing Disney programing on the iPod. This was in 2005, long before Netflix became something more than a DVD by-mail service.
Disney+ was his baby. The project that he was certain would secure the Walt Disney Company’s future and his legacy (in manner of speaking I’m afraid he was correct). Trying to figure out how many billion dollars has been spent on Disney+ is difficult at best due to Disney accountings legerdemain but the open sources indicate it’s somewhere between $11 billion and $27 billion. Theres a lot of other factors that could be added in as well.
For instance there is the $71 billion that got spent to acquire Fox studios. A big part of the reason that Bob bought that studio was to provide Disney + with a deeper back catalog. $35 billion was a bad idea but it was at least justifiable. Paying double that to make sure Comcast wouldn’t get it was a disastrous decision that will eventually sink Disney.
But what is more humiliating is what Rupert Murdoch did with a fraction of the money Bob paid him. He bought up tubi for $900 million, and used it as an ad supported free streaming service. Sure you can get a subscription to skip the ads but it’s tubi, the content isn’t worth the price of a sub. A lot that content is damn near abandoned media. Now, I like tubi because it’s got things like all of Gerry Anderson’s old TV shows and maybe that’s tubi’s genius because they seem to have a generous helping of something for everyone and it doesn’t look like it costs them much. However, tubi’s annual revenue last year was $3.21 billion. It is in the black.
Disney on the other hand just blew another $200 million on another tentpole series, Star Wars: The Acolyte. A project that was greenlit by Kathleen Kennedy after a rumor went out that she had been ordered to not green light anything. In fact there was at that point in 2020 a company wide moratorium on any new TV projects that was signed off on by both Iger and Chapek, one of the few things they both agreed on during their turbulent joint tenure. This series was aggressively pursued in the face of logic and business sense. The series isn’t even halfway through and it is now viewed as the project that dug up the corpse of Star Wars and fucked it.
tubi has been nipping at Disney+’s heels as it falls in viewing numbers, and now it has dropped behind this free service with the garbage tier content into 6th place. Bob Iger’s answer to this? Dismantle Hulu and stuff it into Disney+.
I’m quite certain the Bob Iger’s legacy is indeed secured, it’s just not the one he wanted.
