The Disney shareholders meeting is about to take place, and we’re going to bring you all of the information live. Check back and refresh the article for up to the minute coverage and watch along with the Valiant Renegade YouTube channel!
12:50 PM EST: With 10 minutes until the call begins, the Walt Disney Company’s stock sits at $99.36
1:00 PM EST: Board Chairman calls the meeting to order after a hype video plays. He made it a point to promote Bob Iger. “We’re grateful to Bob Iger and the company’s exceptional management team for their leadership.”
1:06 PM: A pre-taped Bob Iger video plays in which he addresses the Disney shareholders meeting and talks about visiting the various parks and headquarters for the company. He then showed off the new BDX droids. He confirms they’ll be in the Mandalorian and Grogu movie.
Bob holds up Inside Out 2, Deadpool and Wolverine and Moana 2 as major wins and talks about their “quality over quantity” approach. He actually mentioned Snow White by saying that it will open tomorrow. Instead of showing clips from Snow White, Bob introduced an extended preview for Lilo and Stitch.
Lilo and Stitch with Nani in the Live Action Lilo & Stitch movie – YouTube, IGN
This falls in line with an observation earlier this week from Valiant Renegade that the company has moved its marketing away from Snow White and onto Stitch.
1:12 PM: Bob confirmed that there will be a sequel to Coco from Pixar. He then showed an extended preview for the horror FX series Alien Earth.
1:16 PM: Iger touted the Disney Parks expansions that will destroy the Rivers of America and MuppetVision 3D in Walt Disney World.
An image of Tom Sawyer’s Island via DocumentDisney YouTube
1:18 PM: Iger touted Disney IP coming more heavily into Fortnite. One of the characters featured was Peter Griffin from Family Guy, a show that once featured a song about teen mothers discarding babies on Prom night.
1:20 PM: Iger ended his pre-taped reel without making any major announcements.
1:29 PM: The Free Enterprise Project asked Disney to reconsider its participation in the HRC, describing it as a type of “mafia” that pushes radical gender politics on kids. The Board of Directors then recommended voting against the proposal.
1:31 PM: Another proponent advocated for Disney keeping politics out of their advertising, citing Disney’s support of GARM. Referred to the damage of Disney’s politically partisan ad buying policies and called for a change. The Board of Directors then recommended voting against the proposal.
1:34 PM: Rather than taking direct questions from Disney shareholders during the meeting, Iger took pre-screened questions delivered by an AI voice. He sounded as though he was reading pre-prepared answers to these questions. When touting the company’s creative triumphs, Bob ignored Snow White and did not mention it.
1:36 PM: Iger was asked a generic AI-delivered question on how he will increase the stock price. The stock price then immediately dropped to $98.97. Valiant Renegade, WDW Pro, and Jonas J Campbell questioned whether this was pre-taped.
Bob Iger | 2019 Disney Legends Awards Ceremony | D23 EXPO 2019. Photo Credit: nagi usano from Tokyo, Japan, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
1:41 PM: Iger is asked about returning the company to its core values and returning to kids and families. Iger touted the company’s perceived success while once more sounding as though he was reading off a prepared statement. He did not actually answer this question.
1:45 PM: When asked about the EPCOT character Figment taking on a larger role, Iger said that he’s asked creative teams to explore expanding Figment’s reach into a series or short animation in the future.
1:46 PM: The meeting ended abruptly after Iger finished answering his last questions with no official closing remarks. The stock price ended at $99.22. There were no questions on Universal’s Epic Universe, which opens in two months.
Did you watch along with the Disney Shareholders Meeting? Do you think Bob Iger actually answered questions live? Sound off in the comments below and let us know!
Strip away the hype and doublespeak and what we saw was bad. Really bad. The pre-taped stuff alone comes off as a desperate attempt to hide just how unsettled Bob Iger really is by what’s happening to the company. Then the parts he was “live” for came off as more scripted than a movie. Especially when he was “answering” questions. Finally, ending things so abruptly without taking shareholder questions is always a really bad move. I actually believe this was some LLM avatar they pushed because the real Bob Iger is hiding in his basement, panicking.
The stock price at the end could easily be just daily market volatility, so IDK why it was brought up. But I will say I don’t believe that this is going to assuage investors and may even drive the price down as the smart ones sell. Because nothing Iger or anyone else talked about is actually performative and comes off as more empty words. Even touting a new show on FX and Family Guy characters in Fortnite came off as a massive reach; I don’t see either making them much, if any, money.
Iger is hell bent on DEI, and the woke mind virus agenda. This is globalism, not business.