Disney caves to Florida, a sign of weakness from a failing corporation

The Disney horror movie started when Disney sided with the groomers and opposed a Florida law protecting the K-3 crowd in elementary school from being exposed to sexual and sexualizing material. Scene two was a Florida law taking over the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which had long been Disney’s fiefdom. Scene three was Disney (a) suing Florida and (b) entering into multiple 11th-hour deals to destroy the state’s control over the Reedy Creek Improvement District. The fourth act happened today: Disney dropped its lawsuit and abandoned the deals. The fifth act remains to be seen but will determine whether the woke monster that is Disney self-destructs or is reborn in a pure form.

The Daily Mail reports on Disney’s total climb-down:

Disney agreed to drop its lawsuits against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a major win for the new board overseeing the land encompassing Walt Disney World Resorts.

The settlement agreement on Wednesday includes Disney acknowledging eleventh hour deals it made with the outgoing Reedy Creek Improvement District are now null and void.

Walt Disney Co. made these last-ditch efforts in an attempt to solidify property rights and grant the theme park additional powers as DeSantis appointed a new board to oversee the area and hold the corporation accountable to laws and taxes in Orlando.

Image created using a photo of Disneyland’s Main Street USA by Theme Park Tourist. CC BY 2.0.  

Twitter responded appropriately, noting not only the settlement but the fact that leftists who celebrated Disney’s cleverness in one-upping Florida’s Reedy Creek takeover were wrong:

Moving forward, things will get interesting because there is a major shareholder battle shaping up. Disney’s hard left shift in the last few years has seen its core customers (i.e., parents) abandon the outlet, along with the all-important Marvel movie fans. There’s going to be a shareholder’s meeting on April 3, at which time Bob Iger, the current CEO, will be fighting to maintain his hold over the company in the face of pressure from Nelson Peltz, who has objected to Disney’s woke policies, especially regarding its purchase of the Marvel Entertainment franchise in 2009:

Fifteen years later and Disney finds itself at a crossroads, facing a bitter proxy fight with Nelson Peltz and his Trian Partners, who are backed by billions of dollars in Disney stock owned by [former Marvel chairman Ike] Perlmutter, all set to come to a head April 3 at Disney’s annual meeting.

The former Marvel chairman, who was let go last year in a round of corporate cost-cutting, plays a shadow role in Peltz’s push, with the Trian chief telling Financial Times in an interview, “Why do I have to have a Marvel that’s all women? Not that I have anything against women, but why do I have to do that? Why can’t I have Marvels that are both? Why do I need an all-Black cast?” — comments that mirror critiques of Iger’s strategy by Perlmutter. And Peltz said of Marvel chief Kevin Feige, “I question his record,” again mirroring comments from Perlmutter, and sparking a rebuke from Disney, which noted that with $30 billion at the box office, Feige is the top-grossing producer of all time.

According to the same article, Iger insists that Disney is turning around and Peltz is damaging it with his “distraction.” Iger is getting help from people such as former CEO Michael Eisner, Steve Jobs’s widow, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, and even George Lucas. And of course, he’s got the leftist members of the Disney family, especially Abigail Disney (who was born one inch away from home base and thinks she hit a Grand Slam).

But Pletz has some heft on his side, too. He got a recommendation from Institutional Shareholder Services (“ISS”). That’s a dry name for an incredibly powerful organization that is a proxy advisory firm. Per Wikipedia, which is honest as to this specific point,

Hedge funds, mutual funds and similar organizations that own shares of multiple companies pay ISS to advise (and often vote their shares) regarding share holder votes. As the leading firm in the industry, ISS commands a 48 percent market share as of 2021…

It sounds as if ISS isn’t interested in ideological warfare. It believes its job is to give advice regarding a corporation’s financial well-being, and (as you can see in the X thread at the end of this post) Disney’s share prices reveal a financial basket case. Its woke movies, the ones that emphasize gender, race, and feminism, rather than storytelling and family values, are all box office failures.

Iger’s climbdown on the Reedy Creek matter is probably an effort to show that he is, in fact, a responsible steward for Disney. But he isn’t. He was wrong about the Reedy Creek matter from the beginning and his sudden cave 10 days before the shareholder meeting reveals weakness, not strength.

Immediately following Disney’s retreat, America First Legal issued a demand letter against the Disney corporation because of its financially and culturally disastrous policies (some of which seem to violate Civil Rights laws). The letter and an accompanying X thread detail just how horrible Iger and the current Disney board’s corporate management has been, which is a clear violation of Iger’s and the Board’s fiduciary duty to the company’s shareholders. I urge you to read the entire thread but, because it’s long, I’ve embedded it at the end of this post.

I was a Disney kid. Walt passed away when I was only five, but his shadow—his values—lingered over the corporation long after he was born. While the 1970s were a decade of truly dismal animation, the company never embroiled itself in the culture wars. Instead, it dedicated itself to creating family-friendly entertainment.

However, between the garbage that was the Disney channel (where the corporation competed for space in the gutter with Nickelodeon), the emotional downfalls of so many of the studio’s young stars after Walt’s mentorship ended, and the corporation’s loving embrace of gender madness and other woke doctrines, Disney abandoned everything Walt stood for. Instead of charm, Judeo-Christian values, and patriotism, it now stands for anti-family, anti-American, anti-science ideas, as well as gender and race madness.

I hope Peltz can fix Disney. If not, I look forward to its demise because it no longer contributes value to America. It only breaks things.

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