[COLUMN] Bob Iger Has No Idea What's Wrong at Disney, Let Alone How to Fix It | by Darren Mooney

Last week, Disney CEO Bob Iger talked to a New York Times business summit about the company’s recent troubles, including the underperformance of The Marvels.

Iger offered several theories about why the company’s output wasn’t connecting with audiences in the way that it had been. Of course, it’s worth acknowledging that Iger is not an impartial observer and that he was effectively making an argument for his own importance to the company. Still, allowing that these statements were part of a public performance, it’s fascinating how profoundly they misdiagnose the issues that Disney is currently facing.

Broadly speaking, Iger seemed to blame some of the company’s woes on “messaging”, telling the assembled audience, “Creators lost sight of what their number one objective needed to be. We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.” This feels like something of a dog whistle to the extremely vocal online criticism from right-wing culture war pundits about the perceived pervasiveness of “politics” within contemporary mainstream culture.

These arguments are unconvincing for a few reasons. Most obviously, art is always political. It often seems like these outraged pundits are reacting to the fact that they are returning to media aimed at kids and teenagers as adults, engaging with themes they previously absorbed passively. There’s truth in the old cliché that the “golden age of science-fiction” is “twelve.” This criticism says more about the audience than it does about the media.

Beyond that, Disney has never been uniquely progressive. To pick a relevant example, Captain Marvel was basically a military recruitment film. The studio’s efforts to include queer characters have often been criticized as tokenistic, as demonstrated by its willingness to cut those characters out to appease foreign markets. Even if something as simple as inclusivity counts as “a message”, it has never truly been a “number one objective” for the company.

What were the “messages” in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania or The Marvels? Those two movies were so incoherent in plot that trying to derive a cohesive theme is an Herculean task. Sure, if the viewer squints both movies are kinda about the perils of ill-considered foreign intervention, but these themes are buried pretty deeply. Both movies are relatively subtle in their politics when compared to something like Avatar: The Way of Water.

More broadly, there’s also the very obvious fact that audiences seem to actually want to engage with movies that have big ideas and themes, things to say about the state of the world. Oppenheimer is a film engaged with big and charged ideas, and it outgrossed every Disney film this year. Barbie, the most successful movie of the year, was targeted by these same internet pundits because of its feminist politics. None of this outrage prevented Barbie from becoming a smash hit.

Although released under the 20th Century Films brand, James Cameron’s The Way of Water was the highest-grossing movie of 2022, the highest-grossing Disney release since Avengers: Endgame and one of the studio’s biggest releases ever. Even within the company’s more established brands, the most successful Marvel Studios release since Endgame was Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, a movie from which they refused to cut content to appease Saudi Arabian censors.

Even setting aside that they are easily falsifiable, Iger’s comments about “creators” needing to understand “their number one objective” tie into his more specific arguments about the failure of The Marvels. Accounting for the film’s underperformance, Iger stated, ″The Marvels was shot during COVID. There wasn’t as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives [that are] really looking over what’s being done day after day after day.”

There is something inherently self-serving in this argument. Iger is an executive arguing for the importance of executives. After all, Hollywood has just emerged from a massive labor strike in which creative talent asserted their value as part of the commercial process and enshrined protections against exploitation. Those strikes were deeply unpleasant for everybody involved, creating a “heightened antagonism” between workers and executives.

Towards the end of the strikes, Iger became directly involved on the part of the studios. However, he was never especially sensitive to the concerns of the creative class. “There’s a level of expectation that they have, that is just not realistic,” Iger stated early during the strike. “And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.” These comments were not conducive to fostering trust between creatives and executives.

Executives were frequently (and often personally) criticized for their conduct during the strike, with unflattering coverage of David Zaslav’s yacht party at Cannes and SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher reacting to Iger’s comments by suggesting that Disney “lock him behind doors and never let him talk to anybody about this.” The strikes may have been resolved, but it seems safe to suggest that there are lingering scars, a clear rift between studio executives and the talent that they employ.

With studios facing massive layoffs, there is an obvious incentive to argue for the importance and necessity of executives. More than that, executives failed to enshrine the same protections against artificial intelligence that the writers and actors secured during the strikes. Given that advances in generative AI are now threatening white collar jobs, it makes sense to emphasize the vital functions provided by executives that cannot be outsourced to machines – most obviously, supervising a set.

There may also be a more personal motivation behind Iger’s framing of this crisis. Iger presided over what was, financially, a golden age for Disney. During his previous tenure as CEO, he guided the company to massive profits. When he retired in 2019, Disney was on top of the world. It made more money in the first seven months of 2019 than any studio had made in any year ever. Iger got off the ride at the perfect time. Even without the pandemic, Disney was unlikely to match that performance.

Of course, subsequent reports suggest that Iger was never truly gone. He remained actively involved in the company during the tenure of his successor, Bob Chapek. Many of the problems facing Disney over the past four years stem from choices Iger made during his time in charge. Iger has since conceded that the company over-exploited its brands, as if fracking the intellectual property. However, it was Iger who pushed for that approach.

Disney’s success in 2019 was built on ruthless exploitation of existing brands, with remakes of both Aladdin and The Lion King lining up with crescendos of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Iger pushed the studio towards streaming, hoping to build a brand in that space by leveraging existing properties. Chapek just continued down that path. However, Chapek probably would have taken the blame for it, if Iger hadn’t returned.

Iger’s return is one of the greatest unforced errors in recent Hollywood history, a CEO undermining his own myth and revealing that the emperor has no clothes. These comments feel like an attempt to save face, to reassert his own value as a creative leader. Given that one of Iger’s lasting creative legacies is forcing Mark Frost and David Lynch to reveal the identity of the killer on Twin Peaks, derailing the show, it’s hard to get too excited by this.

It’s also hard to look at The Marvels and argue that it needed more executive meddling. The Marvels feels like it has been fed through a meat-grinder. The plot has been hastily cut down, giving the film the shortest runtime in the shared universe. The story’s inciting incident, which serves as motivation for Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) and back story for villain Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), is buried in an voice-over-laden flashback arriving an hour into the runtime.

As a rule, Marvel Studios productions are not director-driven. Key sequences are pre-visualized years in advance. Lucrecia Martel has talked about turning down Black Widow after being told that she would not direct her own action sequences. There is perhaps a reason why so many of the defining directors of the shared universe, like Joss Whedon or the Russo Brothers, have a background in television. These movies often feel like episodes in a show run by Kevin Feige, President of Marvel.

The Marvels is directed by Nia DaCosta, a talented filmmaker. She has spoken candidly about how The Marvels is not her film. “It is a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie,” DaCosta told Vanity Fair. “So I think you live in that reality, but I tried to go in with the knowledge that some of you is going to take a back seat.” Reportedly, DaCosta left The Marvels “with a few months to go” in postproduction. DaCosta insists her departure was “not dramatic”, but it was a result of the studio pushing dates.

Since the release, there has been an effort to lay the blame for the movie’s failure at her feet. There were reports of DaCosta declining to attend a cast and crew screening of the film, even though DaCosta was not invited and the scheduling of the screening conflicted with her birthday party. Iger’s comments play into this, suggesting the problem with The Marvels was a runaway director to avoid acknowledging the studio’s complicity in the movie’s issues.

Again, Iger’s argument is easily falsifiable by looking at the data. Barbie, the biggest movie of the year, is a Greta Gerwig movie, it is not a David Zaslav movie. Oppenheimer was a critical and commercial smash because it was undeniably a Christopher Nolan movie. The most successful Marvel Studios release this year was Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, a deeply personal movie for director James Gunn about his complicated relationship with Disney.

The two biggest movies of last year were also both driven by creatives. The Way of Water is a James Cameron movie to its core. Top Gun: Maverick is a movie starring and about Tom Cruise, and one that Cruise had to fight to get made and released. To be fair to Iger, he concedes the success that Disney enjoyed in 2019 was never sustainable, setting “an unrealistically high standard.” This is true. Disney enjoyed incredible and sustained cultural dominance that set unreasonable expectations.

Looking at the state of the company and the industry, Disney doesn’t need more executives doing more meddling in its films. Instead, it needs to take more chances and trust more completely in its creatives’ vision.