In a twist worthy of a Hollywood screenplay, the board of the Walt Disney Company ousted CEO Bob Chapek on Sunday and replaced him with a familiar face: Bob Iger, who ran the entertainment giant for 15 years and stepped aside two years ago.
Iger is widely considered entertainment industry royalty, celebrated for his management acumen and creative chops. He turned Disney into a global powerhouse by acquiring marquee brands such as Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 21st Century Fox.
In contrast, Chapek’s tenure at the helm of Disney was rocky, starting off with the turmoil of the pandemic and culminating this month in a dismal fourth-quarter earnings report that rattled Wall Street. (He did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
How did we get here?
Covid crisis, ‘Black Widow’ battle
Chapek took the reins at Disney in the early days of the pandemic, an unprecedented calamity that forced him to close the company’s world-famous theme parks, pull blockbuster movies from multiplexes and shut down other operations.
In the second year of the pandemic, when many consumers were still nervous about returning to theaters, Disney decided to make certain movies available to rent simultaneously on its streaming service — including Marvel’s “Black Widow.”
The move infuriated “Black Widow” star Scarlett Johansson, who filed a lawsuit against the company and argued that the simultaneous release ate into the film’s theatrical box-office revenue and deprived her a substantial cut of the ticket sales.
In a sharply worded statement that raised eyebrows in Hollywood, Disney said the lawsuit was “especially sad and distressing in its callous disregard for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Disney and Johansson ultimately settled the suit on undisclosed terms, but the episode signaled to many in the entertainment industry that Chapek was not as deft as Iger when it came to managing all-important relationships with megawatt talent.
Florida fiasco
Nearly two years after taking over, Chapek became entangled in a public relations snafu that angered employees and made the corporation a magnet for criticism from people on both sides of America’s culture wars.
In March, Florida — home to Orlando’s Walt Disney World — enacted a measure that bars instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary schools up to the third grade, a law that opponents called the “Don’t Say Gay” rule.
Initially, Chapek tried to avoid directly criticizing the bill. But when employees rebelled, he apologized and vowed to take a more forceful stand in defense of the LGBTQ community.
