There are at least signs that Disney recognizes they have a problem. The last decade has been a Lost Decade for their shareholders, the stock price is the same as it was 10 years ago while the S&P 500 has been in the midst of a raging bull market only briefly interrupted by Corvid
There are deeper problems in Disney too, such as how their revenues from entertainment (TV shows, movies, etc.) have collapsed and most of their money now comes from theme parks. It's absurd to realize that 60% of their revenue share now comes from theme parks. Disney is no longer an entertainment company, they are a theme park operator. They are Six Flags with Mickey Mouse theming. They have raised prices at theme parks for decades to try and make up for lost revenue from entertainment but that is now more or less no longer feasible to continue to do forever. It already costs a family of 4 around $4000 for a trip to Disneyland and that's basically as far as they can go with constantly jacking up theme park pricing
The last decade of wokeslop has destroyed their traditional entertainment business. Everyone knows it but Disney themselves are so woke that they can't see past their political ideology far enough to see how much they have been systematically mass suiciding their cultural influence and power. This is also a generally larger Hollywood problem, the entertainment industry in Los Angeles is dying because Hollywood has exhausted their cultural influence and power as a whole after spending the last decade trying to ram The Message™ down the throats of the West instead of making enjoyable content people want to consume
It wasn't that long ago that parents could just park the kids in front of the TV and put on some Disney show or movie and feel safe to leave them alone for a few hours. That's long gone now, and Disney is still not quite able to fathom how much they have destroyed the trust of families who could previously just freely consume their content because it was safe, friendly to children, and didn't push woke political ideology constantly. Nowadays Disney's children content openly tries to turn children gay or trans and you can see how this might not be palatable to the vast majority of American families who don't live in California
This brings me around to Star Wars. Star Wars was once the most culturally iconic franchise in the West, and indeed probably on Earth. Disney only paid $4 billion to take it off George Lucas's hands after George had been frustrated with trying to single handedly maintain the franchise for decades. Everyone thought Disney was going to print money with Star Wars because they could open the floodgates on releasing a ton of content to an audience which was desperate for new content, since George hadn't done anything with Star Wars after the (critically maligned) Prequel Trilogy
What Disney did instead was systematically dismantle and destroy everything that everyone loved about Star Wars. We all know about killing Han, Luke, and Leia after first destroying their characters and tearing everything previously good about them down. We all know about The Last Jedi, which today we can look back at and understand that it was arguably the absolute worst genre and franchise film ever made in any ongoing franchise. And I'm saying a lot here, because Disney was also in the process of systematically dismantling and destroying other beloved properties like Indiana Jones and Marvel Comics. Basically what I'm saying is fuck Rian Johnson but also fuck Disney for letting him do what he did to single handedly destroy Star Wars
Disney has a new CEO now, again. The saga of Bob Iger and his fruitless search for a successor is Hollywood legend these days, but Iger seems to have found the guy he wants (really) to succeed him this time (maybe). This new CEO seems to recognize there is a problem. The problem cannot be instantly solved as long as Disney's rank and file employees are all super woke Californians but the reality is that Disney is financially very precarious for reasons I outlined above and shareholders have been restless. Disney might be woke, but shareholders demand revenue and profits. And for a decade, Disney has not delivered on this. Most Disney employees might be socialist, but Wall Street is openly capitalist and they aren't going to bend to wokeness or anything else besides the Almighty Dollar
Which is why we are here wondering if the rumors that the Disney Trilogy is going to be decanonized. Disney's executives have to be more than a little desperate. When your stock price has been the same for a decade, you aren't a dynamic entertainment company enthralling millions of people with quality content. You're.... Ford Motor Company. (Their stock has been the same price for 30 years, but I'm digressing.) The fact they are even thinking about just memory holing the Disney Trilogy out of existence should give you an idea of how internally desperate things are at Disney. They destroyed Marvel after building a money printing factory in just a few years. They destroyed Indiana Jones. And yes, they took less than a decade to destroy Star Wars. Drastic measures must be taken to resurrect their entertainment business, because Disneyland already costs you like $300 a day if you want a decent experience since they have like 7 tiers of line skipping now or something absolutely insane
The fact that they are thinking about also retconning the entire past few years of Marvel Cinematic Universe out of existence shows you how desperate they are. If it's true that Avengers Doomsday starts right after Endgame and pretends everything else after Endgame didn't happen, then the panic at Disney is real. The real question is, can they actually do what needs to be done to save their company's future or not. The new CEO has a lot of work ahead of him and turning a gigantic company like Disney around will not be easy, especially when most of the employees will actively resist any attempts to roll back the Woke Agenda. Good luck, Disney CEO
Josh D'Amaro!
LOL fuck, I didn't mean to write so much
