I write this in the aftermath of the Great Robotic Shareholder Show of the Bob Iger (formerly Walt Disney) Company, and I know we’re all feeling various degrees of anger, disappointment, and, to be honest, disgust. I’m not talking about the results because we knew that for Trian to win this time was a very long shot and all agreed the outcome was, in the words of Winston Churchill, not the end nor the beginning of the end but, perhaps, marked the end of the beginning.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – APRIL 27: (L-R) The Walt Disney Company Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger and Chris Pratt attend the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 World Premiere at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California on April 27, 2023. (Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Disney)
In thinking back over the many things said on that show, one, perhaps overlooked by most, sticks out at me prompting this little meditation about how we measure stuff and how it exposes our values, good or bad.
Now, we’ve all seen how famously Disney plays games with statistics these days, promoting bluesky as if it was real by adding dollar figures to it that mean less than nothing, touting various shows and movies as “The best” within a very narrowly defined set of circumstances that have next to nothing to do with their real-world dollars-and-cents success and usually that try to hide the lack of that. Indeed, all of this fudgery of figures and witchery of words reminds me of the title of a book I once bought when attending a program for allegedly gifted high school students at Northwestern University long ago called—for real–“How To Lie With Statistics,” but I’m talking about something bigger than merely any “new” or even “newer” math.
(L-R): Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk/Kingpin and Alaqua Cox as Maya Lopez in Marvel Studios’ ECHO, releasing on Hulu and Disney+. Photo by Chuck Zlotnick. © 2023 MARVEL.
DO YOU REMEMBER when, in cheering his own and his company’s many achievements, Bob Iger told us that Disney’s work with the “Make A Wish” Foundation (which gives joyful holidays to families with kids in dire health and is a wonderful outfit indeed) amounted to the fact that “We’ve granted more wishes than anyone else” with that big proud smile on his face? Well, maybe I’m cynical at this stage of things, but it made ME think (and maybe you, too) “Did he ask who’d given the most and make a point of giving at least one more so he could claim first place?”
You see what I mean—if you do good, you just DO it for its own sake and because your values say it is the right thing to do—not to use it for self-promotion or validation. You don’t talk about it—you just do it. And this attitude carried through when he answered the AI-spoken and surely PR-department massaged “tough question” about how he promotes his own political and social agenda through the company and how “As long as I’m in charge we’re going to do the right thing” language, never once questioning his own unique and self-anointed ability to decide on behalf of the stockholders he was addressing whether his own standards of right and wrong were accurate, meritorious, or theirs?
Bob Iger via New York Times Events YouTube
This pattern of presumption and self-definition extends beyond that staged “show” we watched and listened to. There is a lot of talk now about who will be chosen to follow Bob into the Executive Suite and run the company into the future (and, I have to think THIS time, to inherit his famous shower, too.) Among the most touted names is one of the leaders of the company’s movie division, and a lot of the obvious PR puffery already being circulated to warm what passes as journalism these days’ reception is the fact of her gender.
In a more subtle way, this is the same self-definition word wonkery measuring process as when we were told that with the hiring of an outspokenly and abrasively “feminist” director for a movie the Star Wars “universe” was getting a female in charge “at last” in utter defiance of the facts of the past that included George Lucas’ expert editor and storyteller ex-wife in such things decades ago. Believe it or not, and for those without my span of knowledge of movie biz history, a lady named Sherry Lansing was the boss of 20th Century Fox for many, many years decades ago, too. Ooops.
Emperor Palpatine in a scene from “STAR WARS: THE BAD BATCH”, season 3 exclusively on Disney+. © 2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™. All Rights Reserved.
But here’s the big thing about measurement and how it exposes values: I know this is a tough competition, but of all of the many endeavors and arenas that The Walt Disney Company competes in nowadays—theme parks, cruise ships, hotels, timeshares, streaming, linear networks, animation, and those pesky little things called Major Motion Pictures, which of them has had the MOST consistent record of late for pure, unadulterated financial failure? Which has been the most mismanaged, reshot, budget-blownout, and utterly box office nullifying record of mismanagement in our modern times?
Well, do BILLIONS of dollars in losses qualify? They do if WE or any RATIONAL or MERIT-based person is doing the measurement. And, therefore, if you have to go “in house” to pick a leader, which division is MOST disqualified when it comes to the company’s finances—you know those pesky dollars and cents that the OWNERS of the company, the shareholders, are and should be most concerned about? Not that the other contenders are exactly genius choices, but that’s what happens when a company goes into a major, overarching decline in both creativity AND financial competence—thanks again for that too, Bob.
(And of course, by that measurement, having the guy who is most directly responsible for those many and systemic failures in judgement and measurement and his hand-picked puppet board members decide who’s next is probably the kind of not-rocket-science to avoid, too—even if only the fantasy rocket science of a galaxy far, far away.)
Jonathan Majors as Kang The Conqueror in Marvel Studios’ ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.
SO you see what I’m getting at here, right? HOW you measure things, HOW you apply merit or mendacity to that measurement process, and HOW you decide your future based on how you measure the present and the past? It MATTERS and it follows an old adage of business and life that I learned a long time ago: Time either promotes you or exposes you.
In other words, the mismeasurement of merit, the mendacity of measurement, and the compounding of all those fudge-the-scale, redefine-the-terms-you-measure-by-to-get-the-result-you-preordained gimmicks, tricks, and outright smiling, proud lies catches up with you over time, and for Bob Iger, despite this last “victory” over reality in the board vote, time has truly run out.
He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) in Marvel Studios’ LOKI, exclusively on Disney+. Photo by Chuck Zlotnick. ©Marvel Studios 2021. All Rights Reserved.
Why should we care? Why shouldn’t we all, as so many of you have said in your comments on our videos, just declare “a pox on their mousehouses” and wish for the company’s utter destruction and bankruptcy in a divine retributive justice that is richly deserved?
Because we DO care, we DO believe in merit, and we have a common cultural experience of the joys, the time spent together in the dark watching those flickering images, the sitting around the cultural campfire and enjoying the stories being told, and the sharing of the parks and experiences with our parents, siblings, friends, kids, grandkids, and our world—and that MATTERS. It really does.
Snow White in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Walt Disney Studios
During our shows of late, Pro has asked me twice to tell a story about being able to share a part of all this with my own father, now gone, and the joy we both felt sharing it together. I have long had as a personal goal the wish to share it with all of my kids and grandkids together that, in the last year or two, has been defeated by what the parks have become under this mendaciously measuring management.
Now I hope to do it at Epic Universe, or even Dollywood, or somewhere that remembers that merit matters, but if it is just a family dinner, a camping trip, or even an online zoom call like the last one I had with my family, my brother’s family, and my 97 years young mom for her birthday, that’s okay, too.
Dark Universe portal concept art for Epic Universe
The point is that these communal, shared, culturally profound and meritoriously meaningful experiences together are important, we all know it, the destruction of them is why we’re all so righteously angry, and we will all vigilantly continue to properly measure the achievements and the failures of those whose business it is to provide us options to share them together…and their values will be judged based on our desire for merit, our intolerance for mendacity, and our positive values based on our love and reverence for the truth.
And as the Bob Igers of this world in all arenas—financial, cultural, political, recreational, you-name-it—continue to measure themselves based on mendacity or merit, judging and measuring the successes or failures of that is not just the “mission” of TPP, The Pro Show, and all of us in what has been amusingly dubbed the “Walt-Right,” it is our calling from the depths of our own values which we so rightly hold so dear. Don’t give up, dear readers. Hold the line…and push it forward, too.
No. Apathy is all Disney deserves for all their properties. Valuing merit also means that we ignore those without it. Cutting the nostalgia cord may be difficult for some, but it’s necessary if we’re to win the culture war.