Disney Quietly Cancels Movies and TV Shows as Bob Iger Scrambles to Hoodwink Investors Into Thinking the Company Is Well-Managed

Iger is feeling the pressure from Nelson Peltz, Jay Rasulo, and Trump buddy Ike Perlmutter.

Iger pushes back against the idea that there is "Marvel fatigue" keeping people from watching Disney's crap movies. But, to make that case, he's forced to admit the real problem is that Disney has been making a lot of crap movies and TV shows, and that's what people are fatigued about.

Disney CEO Bob Iger is pursuing a major overhaul of the company's film output.

In the midst of something of a strike-induced box office drought and after a challenging year for Disney's film slate, the executive said Tuesday that "we're doing a lot" to turn around Disney's feature film business, which "hit on hard times that needed addressing."

Iger, speaking at a conference hosted by Morgan Stanley in San Francisco on Tuesday, was pressed about what he is doing to turn the film business around.

"You have to kill things you no longer believe in, and that's not easy in this business, because either you've gotten started, you have some sunk costs, or it's a relationship with either your employees or with the creative community," Iger said. "It's not an easy thing, but you got to make those tough calls. We've actually made those tough calls. We've not been that public about it, but we've killed a few projects already that we just didn't feel were strong enough."

Last month, She-Hulk "star" Tatiana Maslowski (that's my best guess, I'm not looking this no-name up) confirmed that Disney had shelved any second season to the terrible, terrible show. I wonder now if she had been asked to put this information out there in a soft, ripple-free sort of way.

Oh by the way, she made the nonsensical claim that the first season had spent all the money budgeted for a second season so that's why the series had been cancelled.

Sure. Sure, it was just about spending next year's money this year, and not about She-Hulk being a terrible, terrible show that attacked the main audience for Marvel content.

...

"A lot of people think it's audience fatigue, it's not audience fatigue. They want great films. And if you build it great, they will come and there are countless examples of that. Some are ours and some are others'. Oppenheimer is a perfect example of that. Just a fantastic film," Iger said.

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"Not only do you look at the films you're making, you you look at every part of that process, who the directors are, who's being cast, reading scripts, I personally watch films three to five times with the team and just create a culture of excellence and respect, which is really important with the creative community," he added. "And again, the track record speaks for itself."

He watches movies, after they've already been shot and edited into a coherent form, "three to five times," and he's saying that is the way he guarantees excellence?

He watches movies "three to five times." Only in Hollywood could this ever be put forward as workin' hard.

Disney+, which is a failure on par with Brian Stelter, continues losing subscribers. There was another huge wave of cancellations in the UK.

From Newsweek:

The embattled company looks to be dealing with a potential public relations nightmare in the United Kingdom where the cost of an annual Disney+ subscription is giving some subscribers sticker shock followed by out right cancellations:

The X user (formerly Twitter) @mellyfratelli, who lives in the United Kingdom, shared a screenshot of an email she received from Disney. It said from March 30, 2024, her premium subscription cost would increase to $139.50 (L109.90) a year.

She also shared a screenshot of her bank statement; it showed that, in 2020, she had paid $63.45 (L49.99) for the Disney+ annual premium subscription. In 2021, she spent $76.15 (L59.99), and in 2022, it cost her $101.40 (L79.90).

"Goodbye Disney+, you must be crazy x," she captioned her post, which went viral. At the time of writing, it had been viewed more than 4.3 million times.

John Nolte adds:

Another xweeter wrote, "Disney Plus more than doubling in price over 4 years is absolutely wild... [I]f only the caliber of content being released on the platform made the price seem worthwhile."

If only...

This, of course, comes after a disastrous year at the box office for Disney on top of losing 1.3 million subscribers.

You gotta love it.

,,,,

Keep canceling Disney+, America.

Do it for the children.

Bob Iger is desperate to show that Disney Minus is profitable. It's actually losing billions of dollars, but to hold off Nelson Peltz's challenges, he has to claim it's turning a profit.

A guy who calls himself "Lew Wasserman's Ghost" previewed the accounting tricks that Bob Iger will use to make Disney Minus seem like a good investment: they will take some of the horrible projects they've developed for Disney Minus and release these crap TV shows in an edited form as "movies" in theaters, where they will be laughed at before bombing.

But the point isn't to make money in theaters -- it's to remove the costs of making them from Disney Minus's ledger and put those costs on Disney's movie studios budget. By shifting the costs of these terrible, wreteched TV shows from the Disney Minus vertical to another vertical, Iger will reduce the costs of Disney Minus -- on paper, anyway -- and make Disney Minus closer to profitable.

On paper, again. This is all a lie and a scam but he needs this lie to reassure investors.

And what else will these woke corporations have to do to show a profit, even if only a paper one?

Well, they'll have to fire a lot of their bloated, untalented, charity-hire staff.

And how will they do that?

They'll replace these poor performers with the also-poor-performing, but very cheap, AI option.

A marketing professor says that corporations will increasingly use AI to slash their workforces. But he says they would have had to cut these bad employees anyway. They'll just use AI as "corporate Ozempic" to shed deadweight.

Lots of big tech companies are slimming down and cutting their workforces. This corporate trimming of the fat has become common in the tech sector in the last couple years.

Well-known marketing professor and media impresario Scott Galloway has a theory as to what's behind the layoffs: AI. The catch is many executives are hesitant to admit they're laying off employees with the intent of replacing their jobs with artificial intelligence.

Galloway likens the move to the open secret many people use to lose weight themselves, calling AI "corporate Ozempic."

"My thesis is that firms (notably tech companies) have also discovered a weight loss drug and are also being coy about it," Galloway writes on his blog No Malice, No Mercy. "Recent financial news features two stories: layoffs and record profits. These are related."

A spate of tech companies have had layoffs in recent months. Meta, a Silicon Valley stalwart, has laid off around 20,000 employees since November 2022. Apple might be cutting hundreds of employees from its self-driving car unit after killing its self-driving car project. Salesforce laid off about 700 employees at the beginning of the year after cutting more than 7,000 people in 2023. In January, across two rounds of layoffs that hit its ad sales and hardware teams, Alphabet laid off over 1,000 employees after handing out 12,000 pink slips in 2022.

All this comes, Galloway notes, as the tech industry has seen stellar business results. Some of them even delivered historic results: Meta announced a record $40.1 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2023, while tripling net income compared to the same period the year before. The discrepancy points to a strategic shift rather than a need to right size an ailing company, according to Galloway.

"I believe AI is playing a larger role in layoffs than CEOs are willing to admit," Galloway writes in the post. "CEOs are being coy about this, at least in public, because there's a sense of fear surrounding the brave new world of AI."

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Galloway predicts over the next year, executives will be open about the fact they're replacing people with AI as its usage in the workplace becomes more common. When that does happen, "pundits will clutch their pearls for a hot minute until the stock explodes, and the secret hiding in plain sight will be visible to everyone: [AI is] corporate Ozempic. It's not about less bread, but less craving for bread. Read: hiring people," Galloway writes.

At Disney, they'll soon be firing all those untalented Tumblr "artists" they hired for their animation department. Animation will be heavily, heavily shifted to AI. Human beings will still draw the "key frames," but humans will be replaced as far as creating the interpolations, the small frame-by-frame changes to get from one key frame to the next.

All of the crap animators Disney hired in the past couple of years will be back to annoying people on Tumblr soon enough.

Finally, Warner Bros. has finally shut down woke anime studio Rooster Teeth.

Back in August 2020, Rooster Teeth loudly broadcasts on Twitter, "This is your regular reminder that we happily and proudly stand for social justice. We have no tolerance for racism, sexism, or harassment of any kind."

The company added, "If you're not with us -- this isn't an airport, no need to announce your departure."

A little less than four years since that post, Rooster Teeth has been shut down.

Variety's Todd Spangler reports, "Rooster Teeth is biting the dust after more than two decades."

He adds, "Parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, after unsuccessful attempts to sell the unprofitable fandom, gaming and comedy entertainment division is shutting down Rooster Teeth's operations."

S a D, B's.