Disney hasn’t had a good few months. They’ve lost billions with their idiotic fight with Gov. Ron DeSantis over the so-called ‘don’t say gay’ bill. It’s a popular bill. Ron won. Disney lost. And now, there’s the fallout in the front office. CEO Bob Chapek knows he needs to shore up his base of support and neutralize threats. That includes people who might be viewed as his successor. It’s nothing new. It did reportedly sink morale at the company to an all-time low. Chapek recently fired TV content executive Peter Rice—and now the world of Walt Disney is a wasteland (via NY Post):
Morale is at an all-time low at the beleaguered Mouse House after Disney CEO Bob Chapek dumped TV content boss Peter Rice.
Rice, who joined Disney after the media giant acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, was replaced on Thursday by his number two, Dana Walden, in what many have described as a “shocking” shakeup.
“It’s not good for the company. Morale is terrible,” a Disney insider told The Hollywood Reporter.
No reason was given by Disney as to why Rice was let go, but sources buzzed Thursday that Chapek sharpened the axe before it fell on him after he butted heads with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“During all the press about the DeSantis fiasco, it’s incredibly uncomfortable, for a CEO whose power is slipping away, to have the person who is seen as your successor sitting in the room with you,” the source told The Hollywood Reporter. “You kill that person.”
[…]
Axing a potential successor isn’t new in the cutthroat world of media, nor is it an anomaly at Disney.
Iger purged chief operating officer Tom Staggs in 2016 when the exec was widely seen as the CEO’s successor, and Michael Eisner pushed out Jeffrey Katzenberg in 1994.
So, there’s some Game of Thrones stuff going on at Disney. Chapek’s contract is reportedly up in less than two years. There’s no signal that it will be renewed. That all could change, but maybe all this drama could have been avoided if Disney didn’t overplay their hand with DeSantis. There’s no way Disney was ever going to relocate so what was the plan here? This story is also out of the cycle because no one really cared. When folks read the bill, it made sense. It cost Disney some $44 billion to appease the angry pretzel stand worker. This was an avoidable loss, but Disney just had to play woke games and lost quite a bit of money in the process.