The Triumph of Bob II
He is here to stay. What was everyone thinking?
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Chapek (turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-Chapek, don't want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Chapek (turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-Chapek, just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can't trace time.
(Apologies to David Bowie, who probably wasn't thinking of Bob II when he wrote this song.)
So looks like we'll have Bob Chapek to kick around a little longer.
Or maybe to kick around a little less.
The Chapek trajectory is a business school or film school object lesson of how divorced the conversation about entertainment and the entertainment business has become from the reality of the business of entertainment.
In the past two years, we witnessed a rare phenomenon, almost unknown in nature, of the trade press being not just tough but brutal and dismissive to the head of a major studio — THE major (legacy) studio no less.
There's nothing the press loves more than beating up on someone on their way down to show how tough they are (kissing up shamelessly to the people on top the other 364 days of the year notwithstanding).
That sudden outburst of backbone was of course predicated on a couple of conditions:
A. We're all jumping together, so we can be tough as a group.
B. He's going to be gone soon so we'll never have to pay any price for our toughness.
On the first one, the pact held. On the second...Well, expect to see an avalanche of glowing Bob II profiles in the next couple months; expect reporters and commentators to suddenly find a strange new respect for Disney's plain-speaking leader, and for those Bob I comparisons to melt away from the coverage, the loyalists left to fend for themselves in the corner of the party, while suddenly no one can even remember who invited them.
If this announcement wasn't shocking, it was still surprising, interrupting the parlor game as it were.
Note: In January I examined the roots of Bob II-phobia and concluded, he’s staying. But it’s a good reminder of how pervasive the Bob I-Bob II drama colored Chapek’s ascension:
What are we to make of it all? Take it away, takeaways.
If we needed more proof of how little the media's obsessions have to do with the realities of... anything, here we go. The war over Scarlett Johansson's backend, the Florida fight, the departure of the comms chief, the back-and-forths on Disney+, the Peter Rice firing — all these were unsurvivable, the media narrative went. Just as the Dave Chappelle controversy was unsurvivable for Ted Sarandos.
In the rear-view mirror, none of those things were more than speed bumps. If that. If the board even noticed them. (Florida is potentially still a not small deal, but the rest...)
All of these were depicted as sky-is-falling, end-of-the-world cause célèbre on Twitter, echoed and amplified by the reporters who love the social media platform. Indeed, one hot take begets another.
Once again, if you didn't read Twitter for the past two years, you'd have a much better understanding of what's happening in the industry than if you did.
As far Bob v. Bob rooting goes, it’s something to see Mr. Woodland Hills ultimately outmanuever Bob of Brentwood. This should quiet down the sniping, but all the same, as the one in the chair, it is part of the job description of a Disney CEO to make one’s legendary predecessor feel appreciated, included and all that. The sniping has not played well for the Iger legacy. If it continues, it will become part of the Chapek package.
That's not to say these concerns are invalid. Employees’ concerns about the rights of gay employees are not nothing. And at the other end of the spectrum, outrage at the dismissal of an industry lion like Peter Rice can be well-rooted in concern for the direction of the company.
But category confusion is the disease of the social-media era. Outrage over a social issue, and being disappointed by a movie and business analysis, all get mashed together in one stew of woke/fanboy/pop-economics/blather.
Our root disease: the inability to imagine anyone else (in this case, the Disney board) doesn't see the world exactly as I do.
So what is the reality of the Bob I reign, from the board’s perspective?
Board chair Susan Arnold put it right there at the top: “Disney was dealt a tough hand by the pandemic, yet with Bob at the helm, our businesses — from parks to streaming — not only weathered the storm, but emerged in a position of strength.”
Whatever missteps there have been, given the realities of the disaster he inherited, what we all missed while the industry quibbled is that this period was going to be graded Pass/Fail. If in the face of the worst catastrophe an entertainment company had ever been through (that is not hyperbole) you could prevent the company from dying, that's a pass!
And in the face of that, it's hard to argue that Scarlett's pay or which-film-went-where, or even Florida, are first-order concerns. They may individually be significant, and some may have implications that may bear out in the years to come. But considering that it was an open question whether the company could make it to the end of 2021 without auctioning itself off for spare parts…all those are questions that they now live to wrestle with another day.
And now the hard part.
Having ridden out the typhoon, Bob II now goes on to the mere mundane problems of:
Figuring out how to balance theatrical and streaming services in a world where one medium's long term trajectory remains unclear, and the other has likely plateaued.
And how your streaming service fits with the still the giant money machine of broadcast and cable fees for that matter.
Figuring out the place of big broad entertainment in an increasingly fragmented, combative world.
Reconciling the will of increasingly vocal progressive employees with a decidedly less progressive consumer base.
For that matter, what does it mean to be the big, cuddly, safe brand in a world where the public seems to thrive on raw, fractious Battledrome content?
Worrying about the many divisions that if not troubled, are at least in transition. Marvel's latest outings are nothing to sneeze at, but Eternals, Black Widow, and Dr. Strange 2 are definitely a step off from world-devouring juggernaut of yore. Lucasfilm has become a streaming juggernaut, but whether the world awaits its next big-screen chapter is an open question. Pixar's troubles have been noted. And then there's the big Avatar question, on which all the marbles might sit. You'd be a fool to bet against any of the above, but the days when you could just put your feet up and count on each of them to hand you a couple billion-dollar blockbusters a year on a silver platter are not where we currently are.
Most of all, Bob II's got to figure out what it means to be Disney, and to be a Disney CEO, during these times.
In the first period just past, the press may have harped on his shortcomings but it turned out his basic strengths — hard-headed nuts-and-bolts management — were what the company needed most.
But now the company needs a vision and a leader, not just a spreadsheet and data points.
A Warner Bros. Discovery or Comcast could get away with being Entertainment Inc. — a bland box of “content”. As much as Disney may wish on many days it could be that, that will never be its fate. It has the fortune and the burden of being the one studio brand that has a meaning, and that meaning, as we see, will spark constant debate and drag it into controversy where others can just tip-toe away.
The genius of Bob I (bow our heads) was to bring in these new parts that grew the company while still being true to the Disney brand — that expanded the concept of what the world's leading family-friendly company was, but remained true to it. As Eisner did before him. And that's what Bob II will have to do in a moment when the concept of entertainment is going through a revolution.
A lot of the innovations look to press the brand into new frontiers, but some like talk of online gaming and ever higher pricepoints at the parks don’t fit quite so neatly into the profile of the world’s great family brand. How for instance does this fit that beloved legacy:
Because of course, as ever, it all comes back to Ankler Rule #1: It's a business of hits. The flywheel and the spreadsheets only operate if they are fueled by even more hits. Which, unfortunately, requires a vision of what you're looking for, and talent to achieve them — at a moment when the competition for top talent has become extremely expensive.
That's the tragedy of being in the entertainment business, the whole juggernaut breaks down if you can't bring in and manage the talent. And to do that, a man who has positioned himself as the nuts-and-bolts manager of few words, is going to have to find his inner cuddly side. And probably pretty fast. But for now, a brief victory lap.
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