Posted on 06/06/2024 9:24:51 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
There is something of a subculture on YouTube of armchair analysts and commentators, WDW Pro, Valliant Renegade, and ClownfishTV, to name just three (beyond traditional financial websites like CNBC and Seeking Alpha), who track every cultural, corporate, programming, and financial move of The Walt Disney Company, previously one of America’s most iconic and trusted companies.
Note: I used the past tense in describing The Walt Disney Company.
It is no longer one of America’s most trusted brands, and it’s about to lose its iconic status.
How did this happen?
On May 7, 2024, in the wake of its successful battle to keep activist investor Nelson Peltz off its Board of Directors back in April (after which Peltz liquidated his Disney holdings, walking away with more than $1 billion), Disney CEO Bob Iger held Disney’s quarterly earnings call, during which its stock tanked almost 10%, losing $20 billion in its market cap. While it has recovered a bit, to $105 a share, it’s well below its 52-week high, $123.72, and off its all-time highest closing price of $201.91 on March 8, 2021. Those investors who abandoned Peltz in his proxy battle for two seats on the Disney Board of Directors can now lick their financial wounds.
There is speculation in the financial community that if Disney stock again falls below $90 a share, Peltz could mount a third bid for two or more seats on the Disney board or possibly oust Iger. It’s hilarious to watch the New York Times put its spin on the battle, saying Peltz lost his battle with Iger. Actually, Peltz and his Trian Partners investment group walked away with $1 billion. Yes, Peltz lost the battle, but he won the war.
Despite the current dip, many stock analysts are predicting that Disney stock will rebound. That seems unlikely. Here are the reasons why things are likely to get worse, not better, for The Walt Disney Company for the remainder of 2024 and into 2025.
Disney is one of America’s wokest companies. It sees itself as being out in front on cultural and social issues, especially where Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are concerned. This has been a huge issue in America’s—especially American parents’—loss of trust in the House of Mouse. You can’t watch this clip from Disney programming Vice President Latoya Raveneau bragging about how she pushed LGBTQ messages anywhere she could into Disney’s programming without parents seeing that agenda. Because of this agenda, Disney parks, Disney feature films, Disney animation, and especially the Disney Channel have lost trust with many parents.
Disney has lost its decades-long leadership in animation to NBCUniversal’s Dreamworks Animation studio. Its slate of feature films—with their bloated $250,000,000 production budgets requiring a $500,000,000 theatrical run to just break even—has been an unmitigated disaster. Along the way, it has destroyed two of the successful film franchises it acquired during Iger’s first term as CEO: Star Wars and Indiana Jones. And its long-delayed live-action remake of its own 1937 Snow White classic animated film is mired in its own disaster, mostly due to woke comments from its star, Rachel Ziegler. It was moved back a year from a March 2024 release to 2025. But could its theatrical release be scrapped entirely and go directly to the Disney+ streaming service?
Related to its film franchises, which also include Marvel and Pixar (which just laid off 175 employees), was the company’s $250,000,000 misadventure, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, a $6,000 two-night Star Wars-themed hotel experience that opened on March 1, 2022, and closed on September 30, 2023. It was forced to take a charge against earnings for this catastrophe. This disaster was documented in a four-hour viral video by YouTuber Jenny Nicholson that has received an incredible seven million views in a little more than two weeks. (That was 10 times the number of views CNN’s coverage of the debacle received.)
On top of its injection of its left-wing DEI agenda, Disney has more nuts-and-bolts financial issues to contend with.
They include:
Theme park attendance is flatlining. What is the measurement matrix? Waiting times at the most popular attractions at its theme parks, Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California, are plummeting. Over the all-important Memorial Day 2024 weekend, waiting times at the most popular attractions at both theme parks were at decade lows (with the exception of during COVID-19). In addition, its newest attraction at Walt Disney World in Florida, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which replaced Splash Mountain, has been panned by the Disney faithful. This review is typical.
Then there’s Disney’s forced acquisition of the share of the Hulu streaming service it didn’t own (it shared ownership with Comcast), which has been an utter disaster for the company. (As of today’s date, the parties have yet to come to a final agreement on the value of Hulu.) Disney was forced to buy out Comcast’s share, and it is struggling to integrate Hulu into its Disney+ streaming service. This forced payout is now funding Comcast so that it can bid for sporting rights for entities like its recently concluded agreement with NASCAR and the upcoming agreement with the NBA. Both are in direct competition with one the last of Disney’s crown jewels, ESPN. The sports network is trying to reinvent itself as content distribution moves from cable to streaming. Last July it laid off dozens of employees, including high-profile names like Suzy Kolber, Jeff Van Gundy, Jalen Rose, and Steve Young, in what was a cost-cutting move.
Disney is no longer American parents’ babysitter. Here’s one parent’s open letter to Disney.
I say all this as a baby boomer who grew up with Disney in the 1950s and 1960s (that will give you an idea of how old I am). Disney’s current values are no longer those of its namesake founder, Walt Disney. Parents, especially those in the center and on the right, that are trying to raise their kids with the traditional values that made America great in the last century, no longer trust the House of Mouse. And until there is housecleaning, starting at the top of the C-suite, Disney will not be trusted again.
Putting ideology ahead of entertainment has decimated an American institution. Walt Disney has been spinning in his grave ever since Bob Iger first became CEO back in 2005 during his first term. It continued during the short reign of Bob Chapek from 2020 to 2021, then accelerated at warp speed after Iger returned to the CEO role in 2022, post-COVID. The Walt Disney Company is broken, and until it gets new leadership at the top and refocuses on its core mission, to entertain, it is headed in only one direction: down. And that’s a shame for baby boomers like me who grew up with Walt Disney when our parents could trust the company to deliver wholesome entertainment not tainted by an agenda or ideology.
Disney is evil.
Everything else is just noise.
Nowadays, Disney’s just for homos. Walt would have been very disappointed.
Plenty of uninformed & willfully ignorant families more than happy to patronize Disney despite the exposure to its predatory agenda.
Once again, everything the left touches turns to chit.
“Disney is evil.
Everything else is just noise.”
^
DEI has ruined my previous employer, an important aspect of law enforcement and the courts.
Even 25 years after my retirement, the State Attorney is still sending subpoenas for my appearance. In one recent case, the State Attorney begged for my testimony.
Even in better days before Disney went woke, the flip side of their pledge of nondiscrimination against gays in hiring was that it provided shelter to pedophile employees in its theme parks by not screening them out. Meanwhile, an unprincipled drive for profits undermined park maintenance standards and created safety hazards. In essence, like Detroit in the days before federal safety standards, Disney adopted the view that it was easier to fight and pay off law suits than make reforms that protected its customers.
Here's the deal - if Disney hires enough people based on Color, Kink, and/or Kin (is your daddy connected) then they'll start losing money because top people will be incompetent and Marxist.
Conservative need to simply STOP going to Disney theme parks.
Its amazing how thorough of a demolition job Bob Iger has done on that company. They’ve wrecked sports fans’ trust in ESPN. They’ve wrecked parents trust in their programming. Their films are so woke audiences are staying away in droves and they’re losing piles of cash there. They let Kathleen Kennedy single handedly destroy both the Indiana Jones and the much more valuable Star Wars franchises, and they’ve fallen out with the state of Florida which used to give them a sweetheart deal no other company got but which now took that away, looks at them with suspicion and frequently busts their pedo employees for being twisted pedos.
People just need to quit going to movies. Buying video games, going to concerts, purchasing music or “art”, watching sporting events for 1 year.
Once you get that useless poison out of your system you realise how much time you have wasted.
The amount of time that it frees up for you and the people in your life that you care about is amazing.
Plus it would cause most of these “brands” to crumble upon themselves, and that would be alot of fun to watch.
New leadership will not help. Disney and its various businesses (Pixar, Marvel) is full of wokesters now, and cleaning them all out would be impossible.
Disney is kind of like FedGov. The door was flung wide open for the camel, and the tent is now full of camel crap and wokesters who maintain it smells like roses.
That's not going to happen. People have been committing art since our ancestors started painting animals on cave walls, chipping out fertility goddess figurines, stringing beads, shells, and bear teeth into necklaces, and performing hunting dances around the campfire. It's hardwired.
The death of Hollywood doesn't mean movies or electronic entertainment will go away. It means the streamers will have crushed theatrical films and turned everything into television, with TikTok and YouTube as their key competitors. The TikTokers are rapidly devolving into something like the pod people in The Matrix movie. One of the reasons theater attendance is collapsing is that the young people no longer have the attention span to sit through a whole movie -- but they're still spending more hours than ever before staring at a screen.
Hollywood/the film industry always had issues, but there was always room for newcomers, upstarts and dissident voices to find an audience. The very recent dominance of the streaming revolution has created an ecosystem that is leading to unprecedented concentration and strangling creativity.
People should rebel against the streamers. Be highly selective in what you watch, but make a point of watching the good movies that are still being made here and there, and watch them in the theater if you can. Buy physical media. Pay to buy or rent a good movie and watch it PVOD; that's the home viewing functional equivalent of buying a ticket. Just try to avoid feeding the passive revenue stream on which the streamers rely.
The movie business used to be run by people who, whatever their flaws, were still totally committed to movies, and the success of a film depended on selling tickets and putting butts in seats. Now the industry is dominated by giant global conglomerates that are selling subscriptions, not movies, and the big tech companies run their movie subsidiaries as loss leaders in the race for an edge in the PixelVerse Wars.
Good economic analysis.
However the economic analysis pales in importance to the moral one.
These folks are evil—and should be identified clearly and correctly.
Doing Disney financial analysis is like discussing the economics of the Reich death camps—it is missing the point.
I agree with you about the moral analysis. In my comments, I was addressing the streaming issue more generally, not just Disney. But I agree Disney is the worst of the bunch at this point.
I didn’t follow the Disney proxy battle closely, but I was rooting for Nelson Peltz to win his bid. Disney needs new leadership and that would have been a start. Failing that, the sooner Disney crashes and burns, the better.
FWIW, that analysis pushes beyond Disney itself. In the end, the Peltz bid failed because most of the big institutional investors who own most of the Disney stock supported the incumbent regime. There were at least some cracks in that wall; a few of the institutional investors supported Peltz. But in the end, it’s the big money players who pull the strings.
We used to think of the big Hollywood studios as industry giants — and they were, in their little sandbox. But when the streaming mania hit, the big tech companies moved in, and the biggest movie studios are chump change to Amazon, Apple, Comcast, etc. The film industry is now dominated by non-movie people who are vacuuming up generic “content” for generic global subscribers.
Disney is interesting because it is still independent. Even Disney, however, relies on subsidizing streaming losses through cross subsidies from the parks and merchandise. That’s starting to erode now — and even if it didn’t, Disney can’t hang in indefinitely against vastly larger tech giants. A lot of analysts expect that Disney will be broken up and sold.
As you know, I’m always rooting for the newbie indie producers with a writer-director team of one. I look for the guys who check under their couch cushions and max out their credit cards to get their movies made, and I want the festivals and theaters to stay healthy so they have a way to find an audience and possibly break out independently of the streamer Borg. In addition, a lot of us are now watching a lot of foreign films. But that still leaves us with the problem of the streamers dominating distribution and throwing their influence upstream at independent producers who are looking for financing or distribution.
Disney is a problem. The streaming cancer is a bigger problem. Hollywood? The film industry has been diversifying away from California for years, and that may become a stampede. Let Disney die. The question is, what comes next?
Disney has gone the way of the Boy Scouts — destroyed by cultural marxism, DEI, and Democrat non-Christian secularists in its leadership.
O’Sullivan’s Law, as quoted often by Rush Limbaugh:
“All organizations that are not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
The last 4 ceo’s from Eisner forward made several hundreds of millions while the company is losing billions.
Eisner started the gay day at Disneyland.
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