The first round of layoffs are said to have eliminated the metaverse division
The Disney Divide and Strike: What’s Happening After Iger’s Discarded CEO (Memory)?
The team has reportedly been axed in the first of a planned three rounds of layoffs at Disney. A total of 7,000 employees are expected to be made redundant across the company, helping it cut around $5.5 billion in costs. The rumors of layoffs started after Bob Iger took over as Disney CEO.
While certain macroeconomic factors are out of our control, we still need to do our part to manage our costs, and that’s why we wrote the memo.
Disney missed earnings estimates on Tuesday, as the entertainment giant racked up more losses due to its push into streaming video. The company’s shares fell more than 13 percent on Wednesday.
Disney reported an operating loss of over 1.5 billion dollars despite adding 12 million subscribers in its fiscal fourth quarter. The company said Disney+ would become profitable in fiscal 2024, with losses having peaked in the quarter.
The streaming service is known for original series, including “The Mandalorian”, “Andor”, and “Obi-Wan”, as well as the movies “WandaVision” and “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law”.
Fox News: The Late Shift, The War For Late Night, and When The Universe Went Crazy: A Personal View on a Digital Entertainment Franchise
Corporate America is making deep cuts to its employee base to brace for an economic downturn. Meta said this week it would cut more than 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce to rein in costs.
Warner Bros Discovery underwent layoffs as part of a cost-cutting effort that took place when the company merged with Disney.
Chapek said Disney has established a task force, including Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy and General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez, to help him make “critical big picture decisions.”
The company already has begun looking at content and marketing spending, but Chapek said the cuts would not sacrifice quality. Hiring will be limited to a small subset of critical positions, and some staff reductions are anticipated as the company looks to make itself more cost-efficient, Chapek wrote.
Editor’s Note: Bill Carter, a media analyst for CNN, covered the television industry for The New York Times for 25 years. He has written four books on TV, including “The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night” and “The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has opinions on it.
Two: Elon Musk’s move to take over Twitter and begin imposing his idiosyncratic (to use a generous word) personal vision on a worldwide franchise important to hundreds of millions of consumers.
Remembering Bob Chapek: Disney’s Most Admirable Chairman & CEO in 15 Years, When Disney First Opens the Pandora’s Box
Disney announced late Sunday that it was bringing back Iger, the former chairman and CEO who had led the company for 15 years, after the board had decided to part ways with his heir apparent, Bob Chapek.
That does sound a bit like Brady’s resume, and if sports metaphors are your thing, Iger playing CEO like a quarterback certainly works – many long passes for touchdowns.
The difference between the Musk comparison and Iger’s is that he is controlled, subdued and respectful of a range of opinions, interested in the creative ideas of other people and not over-endowed with arrogance.
John Sias, then-president of ABC, seemed to acknowledge that Iger’s talents lay elsewhere, with strengths in his “ability in human relations” and being a “thoughtful individual.”
Being good at human relations was one of Iger’s talents. Early on he proved especially adept at managing relationships with the “talent” – as in stars.
He was always sucking up new information, sensing tectonic shifts. Any conversation with him wove its way around to finding ways to stay ahead of the curve. He clearly built much of his strategy around the conviction that brands were critical to whatever form the delivery of entertainment would take.
Disney’s brand is based on its founder creating a character in 1928 and still selling millions of mouse ears. So Iger believed brands such as ESPN, Pixar, “Star Wars” and Marvel would fuel the fires of audience interest well into the future, no matter how people accessed them.
The company appeared spectacularly, according to Iger. It clearly didn’t look that way to him in recent months as the ship started taking on water under Chapek.
WSJ: How is Disney and Meta facing the metaverse? Commentary on Disney’s cut-and-run efforts to remove the next generation storytelling and consumer experiences division
The WSJ stated that Disney has eliminated the next generation narrative and consumer experiences division, which was trying to figure out how to enter the metaverse. The team is thought to have been made up of around 50 employees, and was exploring how Disney could use its existing intellectual property in what former CEO Bob Chapek called “the next great storytelling frontier.”
The cuts have taken place under Iger and he is far from a metaverse-skeptic, with WSJ noting that he sits on the board of a startup that helps users createavatars.
The other companies are struggling to fulfill their big metaverse ambitions. Even Meta has struggled to build adoption of its technology. Its first major VR headset release after the rebrand, the Meta Quest Pro, was terrible, and its Reality Labs division reported an operating loss of $13.72 billion last year.
