
One of the most challenging businesses Disney has is its streaming unit. The unit was particularly unsuccessful for years and had a lot to do with the Bob Chapek ousting in November 2022. When Disney CEO Bob Iger came back to take the helm of the world’s most renowned entertainment company, one of his main tasks included cleaning up the mess that the Walt Disney Company found itself in at the time—a large part of it was making sure streaming became a sustainable business and was profitable for the company.
On Monday, April 3, 2023, the Walt Disney Company had its annual shareholders’ meeting, wherein a lot of news came to light. For one, shareholders of the Walt Disney Company once again put forward a proposal to demand CEO Bob Iger and the rest of the Board of Directors be more transparent in their dealings with the CCP—the Chinese Communist Party—which was an issue that was voted on.
For another, we got some news on a beloved animated feature getting a live-action remake.
On the subject of streaming, Bob Iger said,
“In order to achieve the goal of getting into the streaming business very successfully, we felt we had to take control back of the content that we had licensed to third parties,” he said. “At that point, most of it was going to Netflix and we actually enjoyed a good relationship with them over the time when we licensed content to them. But we licensed very valuable content, content that we felt we absolutely needed.”
“We’re proud of our track record, though we recognize we have challenges ahead of us, namely to get to profitability,” Iger said. “We’re not looking to license our core Marvel, Disney, Pixar or Star Wars product to third parties. We will consider on occasion licensing other product to third parties.”
This wasn’t the only update from the meeting. Disney CEO also hit back at Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and accused the Florida Governor of being “anti-Florida.” Disney is certainly not pulling punches in this fight.
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