ESPN pay cuts?

I guess we’ll see. Stock prices can go up for a lot reasons.

I’m not rooting for Disney to fail. I call its output and box office numbers as I see it. Maybe a rebound awaits.

 

Disney was not perpetually successful since 1940. Things change - for good and bad.

 

Also in media this week: Fox agrees to pay nearly $800 million rather than risk the angst of a trial.

 

I didn't know Fox owned ESPN.

 

Might not be a Disney problem. Might be an ESPN cord-cutting / streaming / overpaid for league rights / cable subscriber problem.

Hard to judge Disney performance at the box office or the amusement park coming out of the pandemic.

Not sure that even Iger can make sense of things right now.

 

Disney’s content game is down. Some of this was inevitable; if you can’t create 6 Incredibles films and Robert Downey Jr is mostly ready to be done with Avengers movies, there’s only so much one can do about those developments.

 

Disney's had fallow periods before. See immediately after Eisner left. This isn't a situation like Sears or Jamesway, companies that could never figure out how to pivot to consumers' modern preferences.

 

They're not even having cars. And they're supposed to have kids???

 

Disney's in the content business. The content isn't as good as it used to be.

Critical reaction doesn't mean much, either, unless you know how to gauge critics. The Mandalorian is, at this point, awful. It was leaden to begin with. Now it's like a stone. And the consensus is 7/10 because critics struggle to badmouth stuff these days.

 

The Mandalorian may suck, but at least anecdotally, people are still consuming it. Even if they're not it's fine with Disney, as long as they're still subscribing to Disney+.

 

If you're betting on Disney to fail, best of luck to you. I don't know if that's ever been a major worry for them. Even in their "fallow" periods, they've still been able to churn out movies that make money, and they have an enormous back catalog they can monetize in various ways. Pretty much nothing in the entertainment industry stays popular forever, so I'm sure they'll find some other Next Big Thing if people have truly soured on Marvel and Star Wars. Guardians 3 is tracking at $130M, which is lower than the first two, but still nothing that people are gonna lose jobs over.

 

I'm not betting on anything.

I see what I see and think what I think. Maybe I'm wrong. If anything, I think DeSantis has helped the company, not hurt it.