Why Disney is the Biggest Loser of the Election
If not the biggest certainly the most high profile is The Walt Disney Company.
Under Bob Iger’s leadership, Disney has become the company that always and ever only ever only puts its money on one side of the table. Not a great idea for a high-profile business. Hollywood used to be smarter about it. The Moguls would back Republicans and the talent would back Democrats. It gave Tinsel Town a foot in each camp.
Now it’s only one side but since everyone in Hollywood bets on the same side of the table there is a certain degree of safety in numbers or at least that’s the theory.
Except this year, Disney turned their casino into a burn joint.
Dana Walden is the co-chair of Disney Entertainment with Alan Bergman. Bergman runs the movie side of the business but Dana Walden is in charge of all things having to do with TV (except for ESPN). This includes Hulu, Disney +, the cable Channels, and of course the ABC network.
Walden is also long-time besties with Veep of the USA and now former presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Walden is the one who introduced Harris to her husband. They are quite close. Walden has been the senior Disney executive charged with attending high-level White House social functions.
Walden and her boss Peter Rice were acquired as part of the Fox buyout. Rice very famously, openly opposed Bob Chapek during the Florida Grooming Law affair. It had looked like Rice had gained the upper hand when Chapek had to make a public and humiliating apology. But then Florida came down like an avalanche on Reedy Creek, the entire company was ordered by the BOD to shut the hell up and Chapek now had a designated scapegoat in the form of Peter Rice.
With Rice shitcanned his number two, Dana Walden, became number one.
All of the signs had been pointing at her to be Bob Iger’s next designated successor as CEO of Disney. She gets all the high-profile social engagements, she exercises with Bob Iger on the daily and even lives in the same neighborhood as he does.
However, the Trump debate on ABC was so obviously slanted that even the other networks felt compelled to comment on it. Then came the revelations that it was all agreed to by the Harris campaign in advance. She would not be fact-checked by the moderators and she was allegedly fed the questions in advance.
When Dana Walden was asked about this by the very friendly trade media outlet Variety, her response was shockingly awful. A standard corporate speak boilerplate answer of, “We take these allegations seriously and are conducting an internal review, so I obviously can’t make any more comments; except to say that ABC News has a reputation for having the highest standards of integrity and is the most trusted blah, blah, blah.” Instead, Walden gave a prolonged and stumbling ‘you wound me deeply by even mentioning this baseless lie” reply to the question. She may as well have worn a tee shirt that said. “I. Did. It.”
The truth is ABC News didn’t do anything exactly illegal, they just demonstrated terrible journalistic standards. Granted this is kind of an issue since ad revenues from broadcast news are now one of the better sources of network income since entertainment is now mostly streamed.
The real issue here is that Dana Walden is the face of this scandal. And frankly, if Kamala Harris had won, it wouldn’t matter in the least. Disney would be stupid not to make her CEO if she was best friends with the President of the United States.
But she’s not. She’s besties with a now failed politician with no political standing left.
Dana Walden as CEO of the Walt Disney Company would be a major liability. Frankly, she was going to be one anyway. There is nothing in her background that gives her the depth of experience needed for running something as massive as the Walt Disney Company.
Disney’s current CEO Bob Iger has become almost as big of a liability overnight. Making himself the figurehead and instigator of the ad boycott against X.com made a mortal enemy out of Elon Musk, who incidently, is now besties with the actual incoming president of the United States.
Given all of Disney’s problems, a CEO who started a feud with the richest man in the world is a millstone around the company’s neck. While Iger still has the backing of Black Rock, Vanguard, and State Street he appears to have lost whatever faith the other institutional investors had in him. Apparently they feel Disney’s stock price has been at bargain basement values long enough.
Replacing Mark Parker with James Gorman as chairman of the board is a very big smoke signal that Bob Iger will no longer be choosing his own successor.
More importantly, it is now beginning to look like Gorman will be going outside of Disney to find the company’s next CEO.
He is right to do so.
Bob Iger has arranged things so that there is no internal candidate at Disney who can do the job. He has never fostered and groomed the kind of candidate that could take over for him. His constant mergers and over-promotion of outsiders have demolished the incubator system that Roy Disney Sr created. Iger was only ever concerned about making the company bigger by buying assets, not growing it internally from the ground up.
The bigger problem Disney has is the creative leadership. Although truthfully all of Hollywood has that problem too.
When you start going over potential names of creative executives in Hollywood, you quickly realize that none of them are younger than 60 and quite a few are in their 70s.
In case you are wondering why you can see Coming to America 2 on Netflix but can’t see anything original, this is why. And it’s the reason Hollywood is collapsing.
