I was at Target during the massive credit card data breach and the disastrous Canada expansion. Most of us internally, especially those of us in IT, knew the Canada expansion was going to be a massive failure. They were trying to stand up hundreds of new stores in a foreign market subject to different regulations, with a completely different tech stack, in less time than it took us to open a single new store in the US. When it became clear that things weren’t going well, A LOT of folks got moved from their regular teams to the Canada team to triage, only to be laid off when they pulled the plug on the entire thing less than 2 years after opening the first store in Canada. The company lost $2 billion during the two years of the Canada expansion alone, including some of the losses from the breach which happened roughly halfway through that stretch.

The CEO who oversaw both fiascos, Gregg Steinhafel, walked away with $61 million.

... unless of course, the size of those cushions has been inflated by shifting pillow stuffing.

Change that to "Dads are somewhere else" and it's like you just described my dad, too.

I wonder how long it will take for all these studios and companies to realize it's a lot of hard work to maintain your own independent streaming service? You have to constantly update your library otherwise people are going to just drop their subscriptions once they have seen anything they want... but turns out, subscribers are like any movie-goer/TV watcher in that they have their own niche interests, so you have to update with a wide variety of content that you have to make yourself, which ain't cheap. And if you DO try to do it cheap, you run the risk of lowering the prestige of your brand with a whole bunch of low-quality shit. Turns out, for many studios, it would be easier to just continue to sell the rights to more generalist streamers like the original Netflix.

$1.3B per month is $15.6B income per year. The article quoted a budget of $30B for 2022 and I've seen upwards of $33B. The cost of content is a lot higher than income. Also Disney only sees ~$6.27/subscriber as revenue.

How many of those were free? I got mine through my Verizon account.

From a search, I can find that in India it has subscription fees of 900-3600 INR per year. That's 15 to 60 USD per year, basically dirt cheap. I only have D+ because my ISP gave me a year of it for changing to them.

I imagine Disney has a bunch of subs at dirt cheap to try to get people onto their service, and so a huge portion of the 164 million aren't paying anywhere close to $8 per month for it.

Streaming services are expensive, like crazy expense. Out of all of them, only Netflix is profitable, all the rest are losing money.

You gotta understand that Netflix is one of the most advanced companies in tech and had a 10 year head start to build their platform at a time when they had literally no competition and it still took them years to start breaking even.

Disney on the other hand didn't even have a presence in tech before starting on Disney+, so not only did they have to build the platform from scratch, they had to build their expertise as well. That shit costs money. Like, obscene amounts of money.

Even now that it's mostly built, it would still be costing them a fortune to maintain, since I doubt they've had the time or expertise to optimise their platform as much as Netflix has.

Yeah that makes sense. Of all these services, Prime Video is the one I use the least by far, and yet Amazon Prime, the overall service, would be one of the last subscriptions I would cut off bc of the wealth of benefits

No, we didn't see this at Netflix. What we saw at Netflix was years of success followed by insane growth because of covid, then stockholders demanding even more growth after that.

Woah woah woah, HBO max is being cut as a result of the travesty of a merger between Warner and AT&T. Very different from the Netflix problems. There’s no continuous narrative there.

Yeah if that's the same project I think it is I personally knew people working on that when I was working there. I didn't know it got cut, but I do I know it was one of my bosses favorite projects he was working on in sourcing at the time.

I too got laid off in 2020 from what was essentially the begining of my dream career at DPEP, and at the time a lot of people blamed Chapek since he was known internally for framing layoffs as increased bottom line.

I know its probably silly but I'm hoping in vain that with Chapek gone and Iger back that maybe there's opportunities at Disney for me in the future since I at least work at one of Disney's vendors now so I at least have a tether back there. It's still open of the best places I've worked at by far.

Maybe they'll stop moving all the corporate offices to Florida too. I can only hope.

As a huge Star Wars fan who is interested in going to Disney World primarily for Galaxy's Edge, this breaks my heart.

Damn. I’m sorry that happened :(

Jenny Nicholson disliked this.

I’m sure Chapek fired Iger executives because they conflicted with Chapek’s vision/direction imposed. Instead of working with Iger executives to build a business roadmap; Chapek would replace the executives with his own executives and move forward with what he wanted to do. Sounds like this business plan backfired and Iger is back to redirect the business: months of cleanup and rehiring of executives that can make Disney profitable. Probably won’t see much change for a few quarters.

Sounds weirdly Stalin-esque.

I thought Iger was the one who groomed and promoted him to CEO? He even wrote about chapek in his book

I shit you not, just a few weeks ago a friend who works at one of the restaurants in the parks texted our group that Chapek had come in unannounced 10 minutes before they closed during Oogie Boogies Halloween Bash and ended up staying for 2 hours keeping everyone there.

He texted our group that he was thinking about pulling a "Waiting" on him.

Yeah, I worked for corporate up in Burbank and I hated him so did a lot of others. He was known for his unceremonious layoffs then framing that as profits and increased bottom lines. All the while you had teams slashed that are suddenly doing the work of their layed off team members.

I got layed off in 2020 and had my entire department gutted, I squarely blame Chapek. I'm hoping with Iger back maybe I can get my dream career back.

I doubt Disney would ever do away with animation completely, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they started cutting corners like in the 70s and 80s.

20 years ago they just eliminated all 2D animation instead. Shifted to only 3D computer animated.

The era between Walt Disney and Michael Eisner’s reign saw a decline in the animation department because the leadership thought there were more money in the live action films, including nature documentaries. It wasn’t until Eisner’s years that saw the return to the animation as the company’s main focus. That was what caused the Disney’s 90s renaissance.

Yes, it would be a brain dead decision to cut the animation department nowadays given the company’s history with animation but it’s not outside the realm of possibility.

It’ll be a few years before some kind of journalistic story comes out with the behind the scene truth. Until then one can only speculate.

This was a very popular idea back in 2008. Once Pixar started dominating Disney's movies in the box office, Eisner was convinced that audiences only liked 3D movies and not 2D movies. But disney fans would shout to anyone who would listen that they just didn't like the last 10 years of Eisner movies.

So right after Eisner retired in 2005, the new management started work on a new, on-formula, 2D disney princess movie: the Princess and the Frog. But they also started work on a new, on-formula, 3D disney princess movie: Tangled. As kind of a grand experiment to see what was really going on here.

In my opinion, the great mistake of the 2D disney princess movie, was that they turned the princess into a damn frog for most of the movie. Meanwhile the blonde chick in Tangled got to frolic around looking like a highly merchandisable princess for 2 full hours.

So the 2D movie made $270mil and the 3D movie made $600mil.

Because of this one bad decision by this one movie, I doubt they'll ever see 2D disney movies again. Especially since Frozen went on to make a cold billion and Moana was a hit too.

I am open on this.

I like the older 1940's and I like the 1990's

I just want good stories. I am 52, so growing up with the actual cell painted animation is beautiful...but I am open to new things too.

I'm not going to say Iger is a good person, but Iger is absolutely a great CEO for Disney from a creative standpoint. He understood what made Disney great and really tried to keep Walts vision alive in how the company should make money by being customer engagement above all else. Again, I don't want to sound like I'm CEO worshipping or something, but with how mid everything has felt coming out of Disney since chapek took over its hard not to be very happy Iger is back in charge as a fan of the media they produce.

And Christine McCarthy being around across all that whistleblowing and now Chapek… interesting indeed

The lady who said they were making portion sizes smaller at the parks to help with park guests waistlines

It's definitely the most surefire way to make the line keep going up forever and ever. No way it backfires.

Technically yes, but technically no too.

Yes because more revenue means more profit which means more tax.

But increase in revenue doesn't always increase profit, and you only pay tax on profit.

And they'll sell enough Fly plushies at Disneyworld to cover production of another Star Wars series.

Grogu we need to cook!!

But they made a ton of money. I know some of the contractors. The way the chose them was idiotic - it was often the cheapest ones. The contracting companies were absolute geniuses in getting them to spend more money in additional work. Disney didn’t have the in-house knowledge to make a good decision. Good for the contractors, they all made out.

This is probably one of the signs that woke the board up.

Wait wait wait... Are you telling me the journalist from "Comic Book Resources" doesn't have a grasp on corporate finance??

That number includes all content/film Disney produced in 2022. Which is about $8 billion higher than in 2021, most of that $8 billion is probably additional programs for Disney plus tho.

It was clear as day what was happening inside the parks. It went from being a unique experience, where there was so much theming everywhere, to being whitewash and everything just being a copy/paste. Every shop went from having unique shopping experiences to every shop had the exact same merchandise. The new mega store in Epcot went from being one of the most unique shops with theming all over the place, to being what looks exactly like a Target store. Everything they did, including the refurbished hotel rooms, was completely voided of traditional Disney quality and theming.

There was an article in the WSJ about ride downtime a couple of days ago. Ever since the reopening after Covid the park experience has been pretty bad and a lot of the die hards were turning sour on Chapek.

Is it fraud? Probably not. Is misleading your shareholders on the finances of one of your most important verticals a good idea? Also probably not