Disney

You might have thought Bob Iger returning to Disney would have smoothed things over with the board and investors, but activist investor Nelson Peltz is back baby.

Peltz and his firm, Trian Fund Management are looking for two seats on the board. When Iger was asked about it yesterday at New York Time’s Dealbook conference he demurred.

But today the company responded to the proxy fight accusing Peltz of collaborating with Ike Perlmutter (who owns most of the shares Peltz is relying on). Perlmutter was fired from the board this year after losing more and more of his once iron grip on the Marvel franchise. He once called women-led superhero films a “disaster” and attempted to scuttle both the hugely successful Black Panther and Captain Marvel films for exactly the reasons you think.

Disney is one on a growing list of companies that have stopped advertising on X, formerly known as Twitter, following antisemitic posts from Elon Musk.

During his interview at the DealBook 2023 event, Bob Iger didn’t comment on whether Disney would ever go back to advertising on X, but he had this to say about the decision:

By him taking the position he took, we felt that the association with that position, and Elon Musk and X, was not a positive one for us.

Speaking during the NYT DealBook Summit 2023, he did not blame the actors' strike and lack of publicity for the film's performance. Nor did he blame the weird hatred of the film driven by sexism coming from a small and vocal cadre of Marvel fans upset over a film helmed by three women.

He did blame the sheer volume of content being created for making it more difficult to maintain quality and said, "The Marvels was shot during Covid, and there wasn't enough supervision on set" from executives.

But given that overreliance on executive creative control is one of the things that have driven the Marvel brand to its current nadir... that's certainly an interesting assessment.

Responding to a DealBook question about recent box office disappointments, Iger says, “we need to get more realistic” about what a hit looks like in the streaming age.

The Disney CEO also says it was a “definite mistake” to increase output for streaming and that an increase in quantity led to diluted quality.

How Agatha Harkness: Darkhold Diaries will address the events of WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is anyone’s guess.

But in a new WandaVision behind-the-scenes feature reel which also includes some new Darkhold Diaries production footage), Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness appears to be back to her old seld, and messing with the kind of magic that tends to get people roped into big crossover events.

The first of three new Doctor Who episodes is about to premiere at 6:30PM GMT (1:30PM ET, and if you’re not in the UK or Ireland, you’ll find the new episodes on Disney Plus now). And after fans watch “The Star Beast,” for the first time, there will be an official post-show podcast (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts) to extend the experience.

The only odd thing about this is that Doctor Who didn’t have one before, and if you’re still wondering why every new show has a podcast, Hot Pod has tried to answer that very question.

The Muppets Mayhem lasted just one season before Disney canceled it. Variety reported today that the show won’t get a second season on the platform.

The show followed Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem Band as they tried to record an album. Bummer for fans of the Muppet Show’s house band.

Disney has already confirmed a Frozen 3 is on the way, but now CEO Bob Iger said Frozen 4 might be “in the works” during an interview on Good Morning America:

I don’t have much to say about those films right now. But Jenn Lee, who created Frozen, the original Frozen and Frozen 2, is hard at work with her team at Disney Animation on not one but actually two stories.

Can you make an app that’s good for music, podcasts, audiobooks, discovery, library management, and like 100 other things? That’s what Spotify’s trying to figure out. Meanwhile, Disney is out here trying to eat the entire entertainment business one brand at a time. And trust me, friends: it’s going to be called Disney Plus.

The Captain Marvel sequel has only managed $47 million in its opening weekend at the US box office. That may be respectable for some movies, but as Deadline notes, only two MCU movies have opened under $60 million, let alone $50 million.

The Marvels may get a lot right, as Charles said in his Verge review, but that doesn’t help if viewers don’t trust Marvel anymore.

The entertainment giant is considering bundling some channels — including the History Channel and Lifetime — with A&E, sources tell the WSJ. Disney owns A&E as part of a joint venture with Hearst.

While it seemed like Disney CEO Bob Iger was looking to sell some of the company's linear assets, Iger hinted that the company might just try to cut costs instead in a recent interview with CNBC:

We have been considering various strategic options for each of our networks, not necessarily all together, but each of them... While we’ve been actually taking a look at the linear networks, we’ve uncovered a number of really interesting opportunities to reduce costs and improve the business.

According to Disney CEO Bob Iger, the company has targeted 2025 to launch a direct-to-consumer version of ESPN as the cable market continues to shrink. In a CNBC interview ahead of its earnings, he discussed the possibility of finding “one or two” strategic partners that could add support via either technology, marketing, or content.

On the call with investors, Iger also hinted at how streaming ESPN could work:

The technology that we will have for ESPN, DTC will give us the ability to provide local sports in a pretty robust way basically, what the RSN ends are doing, but we’re not really aiming to do so by taking on significant risk. So if we can find the right kind of business arrangements and partnerships I think we will look very seriously at providing local sports as part of their platform.

That is even more interesting considering some RSN rights may return to the NBA and NHL next year.

Just ahead of Disney’s quarterly earnings release, CEO Bob Iger made a brief appearance on CNBC, where he shared that the company is “mostly focused now on delivering profitability” instead of increasing subs.

And I say that with love. Disney quietly refuses to host the second-season episode, which, as Polygon writes, lightly touches on gender as a concept.

With Bandit pretending to give birth as an entertaining, educational exercise, it sounds like it’s pretty standard Bluey fare. Here’s a YouTube clip from it.

Correction November 6th, 2023, 11:53AM ET: It was Bandit, not Bingo, who pretended to give birth. We regret the error.

In early 2022, Bob Chapek was Disney’s CEO, and it was “placing its bets on sports streaming and the metaverse.” Those metaverse plans evaporated, Chapek lost a petty war with Bob Iger, and ESPN is up for sale despite still making tons of money.

But the gambling thing — that’s still happening. The more than $1.5 billion licensing deal that will replace Barstool branding on a sportsbook and bring more gambling content to the network launches in force on November 14th.

Subject to final approvals, ESPN BET will go live in 17 states, which include: Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Additionally, ESPN is now using official odds provided by ESPN BET across editorial and other content. 

You can stream the movie starting December 1st. If you want to learn more about the movie, check out our review by Charles Pulliam-Moore.

On Monday night, NHL and NBA fans in Detroit, Minnesota, Milwaukee, Dallas, and other places covered by Bally Sports (which operates regional sports networks spun off in the big Fox / Disney deal), who subscribe just to watch their local teams got mostly error messages instead of games.

In a statement to the Detroit Free Press, Bally Sports SVP/GM Greg Hammaren blamed the outage on Okta and problems with its Auth0 platform.

Of course, it’s not Okta that still blacked out local access to the games via other platforms despite the outage.

Somehow (see: the relentless passage of time) Loki season two is already two episodes out from its big finale. And this new teaser Marvel’s just dropped makes it seem like the Asgardian god of mischief (and friends) are going to be busy as hell keeping the universe from falling apart as this latest chapter draws to a close.

Marvel’s new Daredevil: Born Again Disney Plus series seemed to be in trouble earlier this month when the studio dismissed co-head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman, and announced that it planned to bring on a proper showrunner to lead the project.

It wasn’t clear then just how long the hunt for a showrunner might take, but according to The Hollywood Reporter, Marvel has just tapped Dario Scardapane — who showran Netflix’s The Punisher — to step in.

During an earnings call on Friday, Charter CFO Jessica Fischer said that loss was still “less” than what the company initially expected. Charter execs also seem pretty optimistic about its cable bundle with Disney, with CEO Chris Winfrey saying the deal marks a “significant step forward for the video ecosystem.”

“The Star Beast” will air on November 25.

“Wild Blue Yonder” will air December 2.

“The Giggle” will air December 9.

All three episodes will air on BBC in the UK, and Disney Plus in the US and elsewhere. They’ll also mark the official return of David Tennant as the Doctor (it’s complicated), Russell T. Davies as showrunner, and Catherine Tate as the best of the modern companions, Donna Noble.