The Patriot Post® · Disney Scapegoats CEO
The bottom line is always the bottom line. That’s the unavoidable reality of business in our free market capitalist system. Thus, when Disney ousted CEO Bob Chapek and brought back his predecessor, Bob Iger, for a two-year interim stint, it’s because the entertainment giant was suffering financially and had to change course.
Many conservatives are eager to tout the favorite “go woke, go broke” slogan as an explanation, but we’re not so sure that’s what happened here.
Yes, Disney has gone ridiculously woke under Chapek. “Strange World,” the Disney movie hitting theaters tomorrow, is the company’s first full-feature cartoon to showcase an “out” gay character. This isn’t a side character, as most of Disney’s LGBTQ characters have been in recent years; this is a main character and his sexual proclivities are reportedly a key part of the story. Recent movies “Onward” and “Lightyear” had gay characters, but less prominent. Clearly, Disney has an agenda to grow this representation.
It’s also true that those movies disappointed at the box office, and Disney has faced somewhat of a backlash from parents who’d rather not have their children indoctrinated by entertainment. Identifying with characters in fiction is a powerful recruitment tool for the groomers.
Under Chapek, Disney parks no longer greet “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls.” The company famously fired conservative actress Gina Carano for having the wrong opinions. Meanwhile, it thanked the ChiComs for being able to film “Mulan” in Xinjiang — the same region where genocide is happening.
Chapek also managed to pull off the feat of angering parents in Florida over the state’s parental rights bill (falsely smeared by the media as the “Don’t Say Gay” law), but only after also irritating his Rainbow Mafia allies for not being sufficiently dedicated to The Cause.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that this past year in particular has brought big bad numbers for Disney’s stock. It once had a market cap of $366 billion, but that’s now in the $160 billion range. Chapek took a successful business in the wrong direction, and he’ll leave with a severance package worth more than $23 million for his trouble.
But the wokeness at Disney didn’t start with Chapek. It started with Iger, who took over in 2005 and built Disney into the juggernaut it is today. Iger bought Marvel and Star Wars, as well as Pixar and 21st Century Fox, greatly expanding its empire. He also started the company down the Rainbow Road. In fact, it was partly at Iger’s loud urging that Chapek finally jumped aboard the train to take on Florida in the aforementioned kerfuffle.
In reality, argues political analyst Jim Geraghty, “Chapek wanted to make Disney less woke, and his efforts didn’t improve the company’s bottom line.”
Indeed, going woke may have hurt Disney, but the board appears to be answering that by returning to the guy who started the company’s leftist activism. And its stock jumped 6% on the announcement.