Disney+ CEO and Chief Executive: “Hiring and Recruiting in the Disney Divide and Confronting the Company with Wall Street Analysts”
Chief Executive Bob Chapek sent the memo to Disney’s leaders, saying the company is instituting a targeted hiring freeze and anticipates “some small staff reductions” as it looks to manage costs.
Our costs are out of our control but we have to keep doing our part in order to meet these goals.
Wall Street analysts voiced their concerns about Disney’s streaming costs. MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson observed in a note this week that “the company has to prove that their pivot to DTC will be worth the investment price that is currently being paid.”
Disney has said the fast-growing service added 12 million subscribers in its fiscal fourth quarter but reported an operating loss of nearly $1.5 billion. The company said Disney+ would become profitable in fiscal 2024, with losses having peaked in the quarter.
The streaming service is well-known for its original series, including the Star Wars entries, as well as the characters from the movie and TV shows.
Corporate America is making deep cuts to its employee base to brace for an economic downturn. Meta said it would cut more than 11,000 jobs in order to bring costs under control.
Warner Bros Discovery has undergone cost cutting, including layoffs, as it restructures its content operations after being merged with Disney.
Chapek said Disney has established a task force, including Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy and General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez, to help him make “critical big picture decisions.”
The company already has begun looking at content and marketing spending, but Chapek said the cuts would not sacrifice quality. The company will only hire for a small subset of critical positions, and some staff reductions are expected as it looks to make itself more cost efficient.
The Late Shift: From Letterman, Leno, and the Network War for the Night, to Disney+: How I Gerry Met Elon Musk
The New York Times has a story on Bill Carter, a media analyst for CNN, that covered the television industry for 25 years. He wrote “The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night” and “The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has opinions on it.
Two: Elon Musk’s move to take over Twitter and begin imposing his idiosyncratic (to use a generous word) personal vision on a worldwide franchise important to hundreds of millions of consumers.
Iger raised Disney to powerhouse status with those acquisitions while also managing assets all over the map, from cruise ships to Broadway musicals to theme parks. And right before he finally decided he would actually step away from the mega-brand he’d expanded, he pushed a giant pile of chips on the bet that streaming was the future, which drove the company’s launch of Disney+.
That does sound a bit like Brady’s resume, and if sports metaphors are your thing, Iger playing CEO like a quarterback certainly works – many long passes for touchdowns.
The Musk comparison is not really a contrast because Iger has a lot in common with Musk, which is progressive in his politics and not arrogant of the creative ideas of others.
When he was promoted to ABC in the late 1980s, he was told he was a thoughtFUL individual and that his other skill was consequential. Iger was very concerned about the future of entertainment and Disney’s role in it. He was hiding at the most famous studio in Hollywood because it has a tradition of family entertainment. Iger never believed in the status quo.
Unlike other entertainment executives I have encountered, many of whom emphasized business-school management strategies, Iger put enormous faith in backing creative people. They made the company’s product.
He was always sucking up new information, sensing tectonic shifts. He would have conversations with him and find ways to stay ahead of the curve. The strategy was built on the conviction that brands were crucial in the delivery of entertainment.
“Brand” was the essence of Disney, a company still selling millions of mouse ears because its founder co-created a character in 1928. So Iger believed brands such as ESPN, Pixar, “Star Wars” and Marvel would fuel the fires of audience interest well into the future, no matter how people accessed them.
Iger thought that the company did very well. It clearly didn’t look that way to him in recent months as the ship started taking on water under Chapek.
What Has Disney Learned in the Disney Divide and What Has It Done Recently: Comment on Mike White, CEO and COO of Meta & Disney Interactive
Disney announced its metaverse ambitions to its employees last February — four months after Facebook renamed itself to Meta — when then-CEO Bob Chapek appointed Mike White to lead the next generation storytelling unit. White has worked at Disney for over a decade and was not affected by the layoffs. He started in the Disney Interactive video games division.
Although the cuts have taken place under Iger, he appears to be far from a metaverse-skeptic, with WSJ noting that he sits on the board of a startup, Genies Inc, that’s focused on helping users create avatars.
Disney isn’t the only company struggling to deliver on big metaverse ambitions. Meta has struggled to build a following with its technology. Its first major VR headset release after the rebrand, the Meta Quest Pro, was terrible, and its Reality Labs division reported an operating loss of $13.72 billion last year.