To Save Disney, Bring Back the Takeover Market
null By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.Nov. 10, 2023 5:26 pm ETWith streaming disrupting the economics of the TV and film industries, it doesn’t help to alienate your audience with political posturing like Disney has with its refashioning of classic fairy tales including the upcoming 'Snow White.' Images: Disney/Shutterstock/Bloomberg News/Getty Images for CAA Composite: Mark KellyDisney CEO Bob Iger faces a world of problems, some of which he set in motion himself, and he doesn’t know what to do about them despite the pep talk he delivered on Wednesday’s earnings call. This is normal. Listeners were hanging on the call for any strategy signal via Hulu, via ESPN, via its money-losing Disney+ streaming efforts, via its declining cable channels, via its faltering “Star Wars” and Marvel franchises. The most personal of his quandaries, which brought him out of retirement last year, is still his failure to find a successor.If a CEO can’t be expected to have all the answers, sometimes the markets w
Nov. 10, 2023 5:26 pm ET
Disney CEO Bob Iger faces a world of problems, some of which he set in motion himself, and he doesn’t know what to do about them despite the pep talk he delivered on Wednesday’s earnings call. This is normal. Listeners were hanging on the call for any strategy signal via Hulu, via ESPN, via its money-losing Disney+ streaming efforts, via its declining cable channels, via its faltering “Star Wars” and Marvel franchises. The most personal of his quandaries, which brought him out of retirement last year, is still his failure to find a successor.
If a CEO can’t be expected to have all the answers, sometimes the markets will reveal one, when someone who believes they can make better use of some or all of Disney’s assets puts their money where their theory is. But now a problem arises: Joe Biden’s regulators, as Mr. Iger himself has alluded, likely are deterring deals that might otherwise be proposed.
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About this article
Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. He writes the twice-weekly “Business World” column that appears on the paper's op-ed page on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
Mr. Jenkins joined the Journal in May 1992 as a writer for the editorial page in New York. In February 1994, he moved to Hong Kong as editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal's editorial page. He returned to the domestic Journal in December 1995 as a member of the paper's editorial board and was based in San Francisco. Mr. Jenkins won a 1997 Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and financial coverage.
Born in Philadelphia, Mr. Jenkins received a bachelor's degree from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University. He was a 1991 journalism fellow at the University of Michigan.
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