Failing Disney Fires Woke CEO Bob Chapek, Re-Hires Super-Woke Former CEO Bob Iger

But wait -- I thought everything was going great at Disney Star Wars and Disney Marvel...?

Companies usually don't shock-fire their CEOs when everything is going great, do they

Note that while this Breitbart article dances on Chapek's grave, calling him woke -- which he was -- but it wasn't Chapek who made Disney woke.

It was Iger.

And now Iger's back, to do even more damage.

In a statement on Sunday, Susan Arnold, chairman of Disney's Board of Directors, announced Chapek has stepped down from his position as head of the company and former CEO Bob Iger would be returning from retirement to take back the reins of power.

"We thank Bob Chapek for his service to Disney over his long career, including navigating the company through the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic," the statement said. "The Board has concluded that as Disney embarks on an increasingly complex period of industry transformation, Bob Iger is uniquely situated to lead the Company through this pivotal period."

As noted by The Hollywood Reporter (THR), Chapek exited after signing a multi-year contract in June despite a turbulent year of leadership, during which he plunged the company deep into woke politics by opposing Florida's anti-groomer law that barred teachers from discussing sexuality with third-graders.

The move proved disastrous on Chapek's part when the state of Florida stripped Disney of its special tax jurisdiction that essentially allowed it to function like a city government.

On the content front, Chapek's Disney took the political posturing even further, whether it was casting a trans "non-binary" actress in Marvel's Ironheart or including a same-sex kiss in a children's movie like Lightyear, which bombed at the box office.

The Disney brand became so undeniably toxic in recent months that the company's bottom line fell out right from under it, leading to layoffs, drops in stock prices, and overall negative employee morale.

Chapek was just the hapless captain left at the wheel as the ship closed, unavoidably, towards the looming iceberg.

Chapek is woke too. No doubt about that.

But Chapek isn't the guy who made Disney into a super-woke Democrat propaganda machine. That was Bob Iger -- who has reportedly dreamed of running for president as a woke Democrat, and perhaps re-made Disney to show the left that his leftwing papers are in order.

Chapek only became CEO a couple of years ago -- and until last year, had Iger looking over his shoulder as co-CEO. Basically, he was just a CEO-in-training.

The "toxic" leftwing DEI people and agenda-pushing culture was brought into Disney by Iger. The crap movies were mostly greenlit on Iger's watch.

Chapek's getting fired because Disney is failing, and he has a big hand in that.

But Iger has a bigger hand in that -- and Disney is doubling down on Woke, not walking away from it.

Below, a short Midnight's Edge video about this. Note that Midnight's Edge has long pushed the baffling claim that Bob Chapek is secretly anti-woke and has been trying to get the wokies out of Disney's upper management.

This is a belief shared by Overlord DVD/Doomcock. I don't know why they believe this. I think maybe someone in Chapek's camp is telling them this, that he's really on their side. Midnight Edge's argument is that Chapek simply doesn't have the power to fire all the activists, because so many Disney shares are held by leftwingers, such as by Iger himself, and the leftwing ESG-centric investment groups Vanguard and BlackRock. He says that Chapek's only available strategy is to let the leftwingers like Kathleen Kennedy and Kevin Feige/Victoria Alonzo fail -- and then take his case to the shareholders that this isn't working, and that Disney must return to being a non-controversial, apolitical entertainment company.

But the trouble is, this excuse keeps getting trotted out to explain why Chapek lets the woke "creatives" and corporate heads at Disney do whatever they want. Whatever woke bullshit Disney does, the claim is made that this is part of Chapek's master plan to "let them fail" so he can return Disney to political neutrality, and profitability.

But this claimed "let them fail" approach does not look any different from... Chapek simply being either 1, woke, or 2, weak and letting the wokesters do whatever they want because he can't say boo to a vinegary old feminist hag like Kathleen Kennedy or black lesbian DEI coordinator with Problem Hair.

Still, you don't have to believe that Chapek is a good guy actor to know that Iger is a really foul one.

This is no win -- except it is, in the most important way.

This is confirmation that Disney is failing and they can't even hide it.

Nerdrotic said he got a phone call from someone, who seemed to be someone big on the inside, who told him things at Disney were about to get worse than ever as far as woke propaganda (and, I assume -- financial losses).

I kinda-sorta believe that person might have been Chapek himself, or someone close to Chapek. I've long thought that someone close to Chapek is spinning these guys, because they're always repeating pro-Chapek spin that he's really on "our side" and trying to de-wokify Disney.

Meanwhile, no one is watching the new Star Wars show Andor, and even the producer is admitting that. He complains the critics all love it -- but the audience isn't showing up.

Weird how that keeps happening huh?

Andor creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy says he expected the audience to swarm to the show and the critics to lag behind, but the opposite has happened.

After getting some brief clarification about the question, [Tony Gilroy] answered, "I'm very pleased with what they did. The materials are great. I think I was surprised. I thought the show would go the other way, that we would have this gigantic, instantaneous audience that would just be everywhere, but that it would take forever for non-"Star Wars" people or critics or my cohort of friends to get involved in the show."

"The opposite happened. We ended up with all this critical praise, all this deep appreciation and understanding from really surprising number of sources, and we're chasing the audience," he admitted.

I've heard mixed things about the show. Some say it's okay, others say it's boring. The consensus seems to be that it's not awful, but that the Star Wars audience has been burned by too many awful movies and shows in the past, and now just doesn't care.

In other words, the Star Wars audience is where the Marvel audience will be two years from now.

Disney has a huge Woke flop coming, by the way. Grace Randolph, who is super-woke and praises any movie with a woman or gay or minority just for the miracle of merely existing, tries to spin Wakanda Forever as "doing just fine," but it's falling far behind the original.

But that's not the flop I mean. Even though she praises anything with the slightest You Go Gay! messaging, she says Disney's upcoming Strange World animated feature, which is being promoted as the first Disney "entertainment" with a gay teenager as its main character, is boring and almost all "lecture." In fact, she predicts box office will be so bad that Strange World, combined with the Woke flop that was Lightyear (which featured Disney's first gay kiss in a cartoon for children), that it will prompt a "LucasFilm-like pause" at Disney animation in which all projects are put on hold until they can take stock of what they're doing wrong and fire the people who are doing it wrong.

That's a reference to the fact that Disney has put a hold on any new Star Wars films from Kathleen Kennedy's House of Catastrophes, though she keeps announcing them in the trades. (Though no one believes her vaporware pitches any longer.)

When even Grace Randolph thinks your gay propaganda is too much of a lecture, you've really gone too far.

But no leftwinger ever gets fired at Disney. So I don't expect that such a pause, even if it happened, would result in any positive change.

(Note: Randolph's prediction of a "pause" came before the Chapek/Iger news. Iger may just decide "if woke doesn't work, why fix it?" As long as leftwing shareholders control huge blocs of shares and decide that it's more important that Disney push The Message than be profitable, this will continue.)

Below, "Grace Randolph" (actually Chrissie Mayr) appears on Friday Night Tights.

posted by Ace at 12:00 PM

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