Editing Disney (section)

=== Rats in the walls ===
After Euro Disney, company leadership was placed in the hands of Bob Iger, who shifted to a model of growth through acquisitions that turned Disney into the Borg we know today. First they bought The Jim Henson Company, though they had planned to do that in the 80s before talks were derailed by Henson's death. Then they bought ABC and ESPN. Pixar. Marvel. Lucasfilm. 20th Century Fox. Even National Geographic. If there's a profitable-looking set of Intellectual Properties that fits a niche in the current media environment, they'll be there to snarf it up. And as is the case with many media empires, everything they touch has a bad habit of turning to shit; Star Wars especially has gone from embattled-but-strong to a zombie franchise. They even started cannibalizing their own franchises again, first with crappy direct-to-video sequels to the Renaissance movies and again in the 2010s with a slate of unnecessary (but bankable) CGI/live-action remakes.

They probably would have been fine despite that if not for one thing: [[Nurgle]] left a charming gift basket to kick off the 2020s and forced all the parks to close. This started the dominos falling:

* The parks are the backbone of Disney's massive profits, so closing everything put a significant dent in their financial picture. That means less money to invest in park improvements and new content, which means lower sales later as they have less product to sell.
* Even before COVID Disney [[Games Workshop|had been constantly looking for ways to charge more for less, squeezing ever-more money out of an ever-smaller number of "Disney adults" to drive growth.]] Not only is this the antithesis of Walt's vision of drawing in large swathes of Middle America to milk dry, after COVID a tough job market combined with the shift in spending habits from being boarded up in your own home for a year and the lukewarm appeal of Disney as a brand in that time led to even fewer families making the trip, and a much harder time hiring staff to keep the place running.
* For that matter, Disney has no idea what to do with the parks in general. Many key Imagineers have moved to Universal and the people who stayed are more preoccupied with rebranding or replacing classic rides like Splash Mountain with whatever IP the higher-ups want to push than improving or renovating what's there, let alone creating something genuinely new that could inspire future blockbusters the way Pirates of the Caribbean did. Budget cuts strike seemingly at random and rumors persist of Iger and friends stealing from the till.
* Bob Iger's ego combined with lockdown measures forced the company to go all-in on their own streaming service before they were ready, and combined with all the other studios doing the same thing the industry collectively fell into the same trap that allowed Netflix to kill cable TV in the 2000s: too much content fighting over a finite and shrinking pool of customer dollars to the point where piracy has started making a serious comeback after Netflix almost wiped it out.
* [[SJW|Identity politics]] came to town, and as we all know [[Racial Holy War|identity politics is the bane of creativity]]. Disney was already suffering from brain drain across all segments because the genius execs thought the "magic" of working for Disney was more important to creatives than good pay, good working conditions and creative freedom; this is why [[Approved Cartoons|Gravity Falls]] ended after two seasons and many third-party animators refuse to take contracts with the company. The pipeline of lefty "artists" fresh from California art schools plus previous generations either retiring, being forced out or moving to other studios exaggerated the problem until there was a clear sense that "the message" was more important to most of their writers and directors than making something people actually wanted to watch. The rest simply seem to have an utter disdain for their target audience.
* Iger's drive to snap up as much IP for Disney+ as possible has introduced massive overhead costs and forced the theatrical side to make harebrained scheduling choices around the releases they've already acquired, often leaving their own movies to rot in suboptimal release windows or outright cannibalizing one film in favor of another with higher marketing spend. This is not a good position to be in when your output is already creatively weak, post-COVID box office is weak as hell and your traditional ways of making up for that (home video, video-on-demand, merchandise) are all turning into sunk costs for already-mentioned reasons.