Former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly took to her podcast to trash the Walt Disney Company and CEO Bob Iger over the company’s recent losses at the box office. Still, more importantly, she criticized Disney for including characters of other races and LGBTQ+ characters in their films.
At the start of her podcast on Sirius XM, Kelly devoted a segment to discussing Disney’s recent box office failures. She explicitly cited a story that said that Disney lost more than $900 million over the last 12 months with box office bombs like Lightyear (2022) and Strange World (2022), and she even cited this year’s Elemental.
Those three films also have in common that they all feature either gay or non-binary characters, which Kelly also took exception to.
Kelly said of Disney’s recent box office struggles and “woke” content:
The people are not buying this content. They don’t want this content. Hopefully, they’ll (Disney) learn their lesson.
Kelly also attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion positions at companies like Disney. She noted that Disney’s head of Diversity, Latondra Newton, recently left her work at the Mouse House. The Heads of Diversity at Warner Brothers and Netflix have also left their positions in recent weeks.
It wasn’t so much that Newton left her position with Disney that riled Kelly; it was that the position existed at all. Of Disney’s DEI position, Kelly said:
Bit by bit all these media companies and big tech companies are eliminating their heads of diversity, because it’s just a wasted position where somebody just glorifies their wokeness. So it’s failing.
Megyn Kelly linked Newton’s time with Disney with the company’s increased wokeness, citing the casting of Halle Bailey in The Little Mermaid live-action film. The Little Mermaid that Kelly criticized, has made over half a billion dollars, and Elemental became the first original animated film to gross over $100 million since 2018.
Disney has also made the most money in 2023 of any movie studio. And while Kelly would like to point to DEI or Disney’s ‘wokeness’ for the box office flops, sometimes the movies aren’t that good regardless of the types of characters in them.
Kelly started her career at Fox News but left in 2017, citing the toxic nature of the company. She had a brief tenure hosting her show at NBC, but she was let go in 2019 after making controversial comments about blackface being “acceptable” on Halloween. She has now taken to her own Youtube podcast and SiriusXM show.
We will continue to update this story at Disney Fanatic.
