Pick up a quarterly report and see how big Disney really is.... Theme parks in 3 countries Disney Channel and Disney Plus ESPN/ESPN+ ABC HULU Marvel Star Wars Animation Studios They are making some missteps but pt shots from DeSantis for political currency not going to do much to a global enterntainment empire.... Disney biggest enemy is itself with using up marvel/star wars content and needing newer non re-made stories.
Disney is facing financial performance pressure and activist investors as well. Not all is roses and sunshine in the mouse land company... and for 7000 employees it will no longer be the world's happiest place. Being fair, Bob Iger announced his plans to restructure the divisions and cut staff when he took over as CEO last year -- so this news should not be a surprise. Iger was probably hoping that DeSantis would give up on his campaign to take over the Reedy Creek district. However DeSantis is moving full steam ahead with his "anti-woke" campaign as part of his Presidential ambitions... and targeting Disney is part of it. However Disney has bigger problems than dealing with DeSantis. Disney to Cut 7,000 Jobs as Iger Seeks $5.5 Billion in Savings https://www.smh.com.au/business/com...s-7-9-billion-in-savings-20230209-p5cj50.html Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger announced plans for a dramatic restructuring of the world’s largest entertainment company, including 7,000 job cuts and $5.5 billion in cost savings. The reductions include lower spending on programming and $US2.5 billion in non-content related cuts. About $US1 billion of the savings are already underway, Iger said on a conference call with investors on Wednesday. The job cuts amount to about 3 per cent of Disney’s global workforce. As part of the change, Disney’s CEO also announced that the company will be reorganised into three divisions: an entertainment unit that includes its main TV and film businesses, the ESPN sports networks, and the theme-park unit, which includes cruise ships and consumer products. The reorganisation is intended to improve profit margins, Iger said, and represents his third major transformation of the business following efforts to beef up its film franchises through acquisitions and the development of its online business. Iger, who returned to the lead the company in November after his successor Bob Chapek was fired, has been under pressure to improve results. Activist investor Nelson Peltz is seeking a board seat at the April 3 annual meeting, arguing in part that Disney shares have underperformed and the company needs better cost controls. Earlier on Wednesday, Disney announced upbeat financial results, led by big gains at its theme parks. Profit came to 99 US cents a share in the period ended December. 31, Disney said, above the 74-US-cent average of analysts’ estimates. Revenue grew 7.8 per cent to $US23.5 billion, slightly above projections. Subscribers to the Disney+ streaming business declined 1 per cent in the quarter to 161.8 million, the first such decline, amid cancellations of the Hotstar service in India after Disney lost streaming rights to cricket there. Losses in the streaming business more than doubled to $US1.05 billion from a year earlier, but that was better than management had forecast three months ago. “The work we are doing to reshape our company around creativity, while reducing expenses, will lead to sustained growth and profitability for our streaming business, better position us to weather future disruption and global economic challenges, and deliver value for our shareholders,” Iger said in a statement. Outsized losses in streaming contributed to the ouster of Chief Executive Officer Bob Chapek late last year and the return of Iger, who led the company from 2005 to 2020. The Burbank, California-based entertainment giant is seeking to achieve profitability in its streaming division next year and fend off Peltz, who holds a stake worth about $US1 billion. After years of focusing on subscriber growth in streaming, Wall Street’s attention in recent months has turned to when the media industry’s staggering investments in online film and TV shows will begin earning a return. To help counter the losses in streaming, Iger is considering licensing more of Disney’s films and TV series to rivals after years of keeping the vast majority of the titles exclusive to its own platforms. Disney’s parks continued to shine, with revenue in that division increasing 21 per cent to $US8.74 billion and earnings climbing 25 per cent to $US3.05 billion. The results included sales and earnings from consumer products that were little changed. Revenue from Disney’s traditional broadcast and cable TV business, such as ESPN, fell 5 per cent to $US7.29 billion, while operating income slumped 16 per cent to $US1.26 billion, hurt by weakness outside the US.
Nuff said... Disneys conglomerate spitting out billions in several sectors.... some minor smoke from desantis not going to derail the Mouse. Streaming lost revenue because their programmign dropped off after a hot 2020-2021. But $25.5 BILLION in revenues....boom,
Yep... at this point Disney has broader business issues to be concerned about. DeSantis with his Florida shenanigans is basically the equivalent of a fly buzzing a large horse. Bob Iger and Disney were probably hoping that DeSantis would simply drop his proposals targeting Disney -- but DeSantis is still on his anti-Woke campaign using Disney to target higher office. At this point probably private polite negotiations have failed between Disney and the Florida GOP government. The next step is for Disney to bring in the lawyers.... and as a reminder...
The Hill has fired Katie Halper from its morning show, Rising, for describing Israel's policies as tantamount to apartheid. It's a blatant act of censorship to silence a pro-Palestinian journalist. The Intercept reported today that Halper, a popular left-wing podcaster and cohost of Useful Idiots with Matt Taibbi, was earlier this week let go from Rising, the Hill’s political morning program, for which Halper had been doing a once-weekly weekend show for the past three years. After taping a monologue, this time covering the recent controversy over Rashida Tlaib’s comments about Israeli apartheid, Halper was at first told her “Radar,” as the monologues are known on the show, was being delayed while it underwent a review. Before long, Halper was informed it wouldn’t run at all by Hill editor in chief Bob Cusack, who told her it was “not in our sweet spot of coverage.” When Halper asked him explicitly if the segment was being nixed because it was about Israel, he confirmed that that was the “rationale,” and that the Hill’s focus is largely on domestic, not foreign, policy. Soon, she was told by an executive in an email that they wouldn’t need her to record a show the next day. “We wish you all the best,” was the sign-off. It’s not clear what Cusack was referring to when he said that the Hill doesn’t cover foreign policy. In the past week alone, Rising’s other cohosts have run segments on the Brazilian election, Italy’s new neofascist prime minister, the South Korean president’s hot mic scandal, and multiple segments on the war in Ukraine. And while Halper’s monologue was largely devoted to laying out the evidence for Tlaib’s labeling of Israel as an apartheid state, it had a domestic element, too, given what a major flashpoint it became in US politics and the intraparty factional war among Democrats, with establishment, pro-Israel officials piling on the socialist Tlaib in concert. According to Ryan Grim, who broke the Halper story and who himself recorded more than 150 Radars as a cohost for Rising, “There is no approval process.” The hosts simply upload their script to a teleprompter and record. Krystal Ball, who co-helmed the show for years, says that while she and cohost Saagar Enjeti faced occasional pushback on certain topics, they were “never blocked from guests or topics.” It’s hard to know what’s driving this. But one thing that has changed since Ball and Enjeti’s stint on the show is a changeover in ownership of the Hill, which was sold to media conglomerate Nexstar Media Group, Inc., for $130 million last August. This month, Psagot Value Holdings Ltd., an investment firm based in Tel Aviv, bought 6,100 shares in Nexstar, to the tune of more than $1 million. But there were signs of a possible tilt in the Hill’s editorial line on Israel even before that. In late August, Nexstar filled the position of deputy managing editor of NewsNation, its cable channel, with Jake Novak, a journalist who spent the preceding year and a half as the media director of the Israeli consulate general in New York. Novak most recently achieved infamy for being embroiled in the Matt Gaetz underage-sex controversy, where he appeared to admit to Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, of all people, that he was involved in the extortion attempt on Gaetz’s rich father in order to funnel millions of dollars to a “commando team leader” to free a US hostage in Iran. Novak has written approvingly of Donald Trump’s dropping of US support for the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he has advocated for Israel to build more illegal settlements on the land that would make up a hypothetical Palestinian state, saying it “would bring more peace, prosperity, and freedom to both Israelis and Arabs.” Six days before the announcement of his hiring, Novak led a presentation at Bar-Ilan University titled, “Defending Israel Against Media Bias — How to fight news media and social media bias against Israel: The best defense is a good offense.” It was an update of a talk he had given in 2016 about defending Israel’s reputation, which the host described as “an absolute master class in public relations in diplomacy.” There is certainly a political tilt in Nexstar’s political donations. Over the 2016 election cycle, the company’s PAC gave 80 percent of its money to GOP-affiliated PACs, a number that rose to 100 percent in the 2018 cycle. Its CEO donated six times as much to high-ranking Republican congresspeople as he did to Democrats over the past ten years, no matter which party was in power. Its giving is more balanced now, but the Democrats Nexstar does donate to tend to be of the more centrist, establishment, and pro-Israel variety, like Jerry Nadler, Jamie Raskin, Kathy Castor, and Hakeem Jeffries. If Nexstar is being driven by a pro-Israel slant that it enforces in its programming, it’s a serious concern. After buying Tribune Media in 2019, Nexstar became the largest local broadcast TV owner in the country, outstripping the explicitly right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group. According to an August 2022 filing with the SEC, the company now reaches nearly 40 percent of all US television households, and it owns, operates, and provides services to 199 television stations and one AM radio station across Washington, DC, and thirty-nine states. In the filing, the company notes the Supreme Court’s April 2021 striking down of FCC limits on local media ownership. Halper is far from the first left-wing commentator to be fired for pro-Palestinian speech. Marc Lamont Hill lost his position at CNN for a speech calling for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” while Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson lost the regular column he had written for the Guardian for four years after sarcastically tweeting that Congress “is not actually permitted to authorize any new spending unless a portion of it is directed toward buying weapons for Israel.” This month, a report Facebook itself had commissioned determined the company’s censorship policies “have had an adverse human rights impact” on Palestinians, thanks to the company’s double standard on “moderating” Palestinian posts versus Israeli ones.
Molly Ringwald criticizes cancel culture as 'unsustainable': 'We're basically a bunch of puritans' 'The Breakfast Club' star Molly Ringwald said not everyone who is 'canceled' belongs in the same category as Harvey Weinstein https://www.foxnews.com/entertainme...ulture-unsustainable-basically-bunch-puritans