Disney hasn’t had a particularly strong 2023, especially by its previous standards. Panic not, though: boss Bob Iger got rich again.
The end of 2022 saw dramatic change at the top of The Walt Disney Company, with arguably its most successful ever CEO in pure business terms – Bob Iger – returning to the job he’d retired from a few years before. His hand-picked replacement, Bob Chapek, was pretty brutally defenestrated, with Iger expected to work his magic and turn around what’d been a difficult couple of years for the company.
However, the last 12 months have hardly gone to plan for Disney. Expensive films such as Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania, Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny and Wish have fallen short of financial expectations. Meanwhile, Iger – unusually – read the room badly when Hollywood writers and actors went on strike.
He said of the strikes that “it’s very disturbing to me”, and accused those going on strike of not being “realistic”. He said those words from a billionaire’s summer retreat, and faced immediate pushback for doing so.
Throw in around 7,000 job cuts, a Disney+ business that’s not in the green, and the challenges faced by its Marvel, Lucasfilm and Pixar subsidiaries to recapture former glories, and it’s been an extremely tough year for a once-bulletproof company.
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No matter, though. In what’s generally been regarded as a year of disappointment for the company, Iger has been awarded, in time-honoured corporate fashion with a very handsome paycheque. For the financial year running to the end of September 2023, Iger was remunerated to the tune of $31m, Deadline reveals.
Furthermore, fresh challenges lie ahead. In particular, the name Ike Perlmutter may be familiar to those who’ve followed Marvel over the years. A man regarded as being on the tight-fisted side of things, he was eventually let go by Bob Iger when a power clash emerged between Perlmutter and Marvel’s now-boss Kevin Feige.
Perlmutter is now part of Trian Fund Management, a group that has put forward nominations for the Disney board from outside the company. Disney is fighting those attempts, but should Trian be successful, Perlmutter’s days of being a thorn in the side of Bob Iger may be about to return. Iger, for his part, has confirmed a drive towards quality over quantity.
Fun times, Still, at least Bob has a few quid to get some books and a nice bottle of wine in. All that, and still have change to buy a $30m+ piece of property, should he choose. Chin chin!
