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Bob Iger, just over one year after returning as Disney‘s CEO following the company’s board firing of previous chief Bob Chapek, said publicly that he was dismayed at the Mouse House’s performance under Chapek’s tenure.
Iger, who had selected Chapek, formerly head of Disney’s parks division, to succeed him in February 2020, made the comments Wednesday at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in New York.
“I was disappointed in what I was seeing in the transition period and while I was out,” he said, per the Times. “I worked hard at distancing myself from it.” He said Disney’s current CEO succession planning “is robust right now.”
Iger was Disney CEO from 2005-20 and returned as interim chief executive after the ouster of Chapek in November 2022. In one of his first moves in returning as CEO, Iger dismantled the Chapek-instituted Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution (DMED) division, which had put oversight of content distribution and monetization under a separate group from its production units. In a memo to employees at the time, Iger wrote that the restructuring “puts more decision-making back in the hands of our creative teams and rationalizes costs.”
Earlier this year, Iger had said at an investor conference that Disney overall had a “disconnect” between what it was spending on content and how it was monetizing that — and that the company needs to become “more judicious” about content investments as production costs have skyrocketed.
More to come
