Bob Iger’s Netflix Moment

bob iger
The “right” strategy—the one that Iger and, to a lesser extent, others are seeing success with—seems to be a more modest, narrowly tailored content investment, aggressive windowing and third party licensing, and raising prices for ad-free products to push subscribers to watch commercials. Photo: Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney
Matthew Belloni
November 15, 2024

Listening to this morning’s Disney earnings reveal, it was easy to flash back to the same call exactly two years ago, the day Bob Chapek committed C.E.O. suicide. Remember the infamous Oogie Boogie Bash debacle? When Chapek, already under fire for myriad mishandlings, cheerily boasted about the “phenomenal” success of Halloween parties at Disneyland rather than address the shocking $1.5 billion quarterly loss in streaming, about double the year before? As Chapek rambled, the stock tanked, those of us on the call cringed with embarrassment, and Disney executives soon started talking to the board about bringing Bob Iger back.