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?