It was a phenomenal quarterly earnings report for The Walt Disney World. But for everyone who is against Bob Chapek, today is a very rough day.
It’s unlikely to be the headline you see across various mainstream and access media outlets today. But the truth is that every segment of The Walt Disney Company that is in concert with Bob Chapek’s vision is doing fantastic. Every part of the company that has fought against him and is at odd’s with the forward hopes of the CEO and Board are floundering. I’m not saying that to brag or run down those who disagree with Chapek… there’s just no way around it. Take for example the Disney Parks division and the Genie+ service. It’s making the company tons of money. CFO Christine McCarthy today declared that 50% of park guests are using it at Walt Disney World. That’s great for the income, but in terms of the benefits you receive from the service, I think it’s often a waste of money. So whether or not I think it’s a worthwhile service, guests in general are buying it and Disney’s not suffering at all from the lack of return on their purchase.
According to Disney Dining, if Genie+ is that successful, Disney has monetized the old FastPass system for more than half-a-billion dollars at relatively no public relations damage. I think the service sucks. Doesn’t matter — people are buying it happily.
But in the opposite vein, there are segments of The Walt Disney Company that are not fairing so well. They’re the ones that are disconcerted from Bob Chapek. One example is the domestic Disney+ service. While the studios associated with Disney+ have been pumping out more partisan content (at a time when Chapek has now publicly declared they will moderate), Disney+ subscriptions for North American have essentially stalled. That’s simultaneous to the vast majority of Disney exploding with success in the last quarter. And that’s despite Netflix having nearly double the domestic subscriptions (lest anyone declare Disney has reached a saturation point). Disney went from 44.4 million subscriptions to 44.5 subscriptions domestically in Q3. That’s utter stagnation and awfully close to a drop. It points directly to the backlash that we’ve seen manifesting at the box office and in streaming ratings.
So the backlash is real and the backlash is specifically to those things that Chapek is allegedly fighting against. Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm… they’re all flopping and floundering while the rest of Disney rockets up, up and away. When it comes time for Disney+ ad revenue to come in, do you think that Chapek is going to allow studios to continue creating content that won’t draw massive viewership which translates to massive ad revenue?
Disney+ Basic will launch with about 4 minutes of ads per hour. It will start with 15- and 30-second spots.
The tier will cost $7.99 per month. pic.twitter.com/pDKUSO7734
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) August 10, 2022
Essentially, all of this means Chapek is fully in control for better or worse. The junk about Iger saying Chapek is the worst decision and yadda yadda yadda… it’s all rubbish. The stuff about websites saying Chapek will be booed at D23: who cares? He’s had a three-year contract extension, he’s fired the chief architect of partisan employees flooding the company, he’s silenced his CDO, he’s neutered the Story Matters Initiative and his Q3 results are outstanding. He’s not going to make all the decisions I would — I’d pay the money to hide the show buildings throughout the parks. But in terms of who is driving the company and how well it’s doing, this was the day for Bob Chapek to rule the House of Mouse.
All those fools at studios having pubic bets on how long he had left at the company, I wonder if they have their bags packed yet? At the least you could say that they struggle with predicting the future.
Maybe Chapek will stumble in the future, but for now, he’s the big cheese.
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