Bob Iger is out as CEO of Disney. Effective Immediately.
“Iger will remain executive chairman of Disney through the end of 2021, according to the company. He has been instrumental in making Disney a media powerhouse with key acquisitions and content plays. He launched Disney+, immediately making Disney a popular streaming service provider. Disney said the service had 26.5 million paying subscribers during the first quarter of 2020 after launching in November.”
Bob Chapek the head of Disney Parks, and infrequent target of the Dark Herald will be the new CEO of Disney.
They are putting a nice face on this but Executive Chairman was a job last held by Micheal Eisner after his execution by the board.
Iger’s departure was announced at the close of the market and Disney stock still fell 2.5% on the news of the king having fallen.
Iger has been dancing around his retirement for years but kept putting it off because there were various projects that needed to be finished or there wasn’t anyone quite ready to fill his shoes or the guy who was ready to fill his shoes just got fired by Iger, so now he has to stay on a bit longer. You get the idea. It was as constant stream of delays.
Its the “effective immediately” part that is the big tell here. You don’t want to scare the market with the headline of a big change overnight. You make an announcement of an expected departure date a few months down the road.
So why has Iger gotten the shove? Marvel is doing as well as ever. The Disney Parks were doing fine, until recently. Disney Animation and Pixar are raking it in.
What could be the problem?
O-o-o-h, yes. That.
Star Wars isn’t a complete failure.
I mean it’s not Ghostbusters 2015.
But that said, it is a failure. The movies have been under-performing since The Last Jedi. Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland was an outright flop. Nobody cares about these new characters enough to want to play with them in the Parks. Topping it off, the real cash cow, the toys aren’t selling at all.
Worst of all, and I think this is what finished Iger off, is the complete lack of course correction. Kathleen Kennedy is still the head of Lucasfilm when she should have been fired two years ago. Whether he was unwilling to part with the most important whamon in Hollywood or he just couldn’t bring himself to throw the dice on a replacement. The end was the same. What had been the biggest franchise out there, was severely damaged after Iger paid billions for it.
I’m not expecting miracles but lets see what Chapek, the gruff mid-Westerner will do with Walt Disney’s damages legacy.
The Dark Herald 
Good reason not to hire women as subordinates, if you’re going to play by woke rules: you can’t fire them if they fail, which means the responsibility will flow up to you.
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Kathleen Kennedy was excellent at fulfilling the vision of others. Tragically her own ideas were all terrible.
The madness of going out of your way to attack the massive and fanatically loyal fanbase should have been obvious and got Kennedy put in a rubber room at the least.
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All Disney had to do was continue the direction they started in with Force Awakens. As much as I dislike that movie, it got everyone excited about Star Wars again while also making lots of money.
Instead, KK turned the franchise into her personal woke missionary project, with predictable results. Attacking the fans who objected to this new direction didn’t help either. I’ll give them credit for at least attempting to course-correct with Fall of Skywalker, but no amount of fanservice or retcons was going to win back the crowd at this point.
I look forward to the next season of The Mandalorian, but I won’t be seeing any more movies.
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Would three JJ movies have been better? Yes. Would they have been good and gotten people excited for more Star Wars movies? Doubtful. If you look at what happened with JJ Trek, the second movie would have been more member berries, a nonsensical plot, and mystery boxes. See ST:Into Darkness for a reference. Sure, it wouldn’t have nuked Star Wars like TLJ did. But, once TFA’s euphoria wore off, a lot of people realized the movie was mediocre at best. Movie two had to deliver or the franchise would start bleeding fans.
The thing is, is Star Wars has always been a young boys franchise. Sure some girls like it. However, those are the young girls who hate Twilight. TFA started the path of a female-centric trilogy. It wasn’t going to work.
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Yeah, TFA signaled Kennedy’s intentions pretty well. A lot of people just didn’t see it, or told themselves it wouldn’t get any worse, because they were too excited to have a non-prequel Star Wars-ish movie to watch. Those who did point it out were quickly labeled anti-woman and anti-diversity, even though that was unnecessary, since they were too few to stop the movie from making $2B. But JJ and the gang went on interviews to say how sad it was that some fanboys couldn’t handle a female lead, etc. That was really the first time I recall seeing a movie’s creators openly attack a portion of the core fan base like that. Of course, it’s standard practice now.
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“The Iger Sanction” – now closing its run in a theater near you.
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