In Brief: How to Fix Disney
Can you fix a company that seems hell-bent on destroying billions of dollars worth of intellectual property from The Little Mermaid to Indiana Jones?
Disney has been a mess for some time now. Conservatives lament this because the company went from providing pretty good family entertainment to woke propaganda. Steve Green has some thoughts.
Following Walt Disney’s untimely death in 1966, the company bearing his name entered a long creative and quality slump. Disney even lost direction, badly trying to outdo Star Wars with The Black Hole and producing “edgier” fare like The Devil And Max Devlin. By the late ‘80s, though, the company got back to Walt’s roots in classic animation with The Little Mermaid, beginning a decade-plus creative renaissance.
Then the bean counters took over and cash-flush Disney started gobbling up other people’s creative content — Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel Comics — instead of creating more of their own.
“Who cares about the quality? Just keep the content coming,” became the new attitude. I couldn’t begin to count how many Marvel series are streaming on the money-losing Disney+ service, but I can tell you that only two of the entire lot were worth watching. The damage done to Star Wars is so serious that a new movie hasn’t begun production in six years. An unbearably smug young woman — the heroine! — punches out 80-year-old Harrison Ford in the new Indiana Jones movie, projected to lose at least $200 million. Nobody knows any longer what a Pixar movie is supposed to be, including the management at Pixar.
The rot, it stinks.
Green “credits” two-time (and current) CEO Bob Iger with much of the wokeness that has corrupted the company. He notes rumors indicated that the CFO is in line to succeed the CEO, which means “I really do mean that the bean counters took over.” Green then says:
What Disney needs is a Chief Creative Officer — a spiritual heir to Walt whose only C-suite concern would be the quality and originality of the content.
Apple had great success with this model under Steve Jobs, Green says, and Disney, which “doesn’t need another bean counter,” could likewise benefit.
Disney needs a C-suite executive whose entire portfolio is the quality and originality of the studio’s many properties: A Chief Creative Officer. And that’s the position, not the CFO, that should be seen as the stepping stone to the CEO’s office.
He concludes with an insight that should be obvious:
The thing is, in order to fix Disney, first Disney needs to want to fix itself. For that to happen, angry shareholders — full disclosure: I own no shares in Disney — will have to clean the House of Mouse.
[Read the whole thing here](https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/07/06/i-just-figured-out-how-to-fix-disney-n17086090.
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