Disney's broken money printer

Hello From The Airport

Once again, travel has gotten in the way of Garbage Day's typically consistent publishing schedule. So Garbage Day researcher Adam Bumas is taking over today’s issue while I make my way to the UK.

Before I hand things over to Adam, however, I thought I'd write a little bit about why I'm doing all of this. Because this is not just the halfway point of Garbage Day's admittedly overly-ambitious summer tour, but, also, a bit of a full circle moment for Garbage Day Live.

When I was in my early 20s, digital publications weren't just for journalism. There were comedy sites, culture sites, music sites. It was a lot of young people using what they could get ahold of post-recession to make stuff. And by the 2010s, these blogs had not just become big business, but they were publishing books, throwing events and parties, and felt like real fixtures in culture. And then, one day, that all went away. The closest thing we have now are probably podcasts. And so, when I was first imagining what Garbage Day could be, deep in the fevered mania of COVID lockdown, the sort of the moonshot goal if this newsletter actually survived its first year was using it to bring that back somehow, someday.

After lockdown lifted, I started working with some friends on a New York-based events project called Digital Void. We'd put a bunch of journalists, academics, and comedians on a stage and talk about the internet. And slowly I ended up with a bunch of little talks and bits that audiences seemed to resonate with. Much to my surprise, lockdown had made everyone a little more online. All of this eventually caught the attention of the organizers of Latitude, the music festival I'm headed back to right now. Last year, they approached me with kind of a wild proposition. Did I want to do a Garbage Day live show at Latitude? Here I was, solidly in my mid-30s and, after trying and failing to play in bands all my life, I was getting asked to perform at a music festival... because of my newsletter. Life is very funny.

In the year since my first Latitude set, I've continued to work on Garbage Day Live. I've performed it in cities around the world, and, now, I get to bring it back to Latitude and I'm really excited about it! I realize when I talk about Garbage Day Live, it all sounds very vague, but one of the joys of working on it over the last year has been that it doesn't need to fit inside a box for algorithmic consumption. I will eventually release a recording, but for now, if you want to see it, you have to come out. 

And my hope is that it keeps evolving and I can bring it to more and more people. So thank you to those of who have seen it and I hope I get to meet more of you soon.

Alright, Adam, take it away.

What Does Disney Mean In 2024?

—by Adam Bumas

On Friday, Disneyland workers almost unanimously voted to authorize a strike. They’re not the only Disney employees concerned about their future, since billionaire Ike Perlmutter withdrew his support for board member Nelson Peltz yesterday. Peltz is one of several executives who have spent years battling to replace CEO Bob Iger, who they needed to coax out of retirement after a disastrous performance by his initial replacement in 2022.

Lately, Disney has spent a ton of energy going back on basically all the decisions they made over the last few years. Disney+ has lost the company four billion dollars, and its non-direct-to-streaming movies included four of the five worst box office bombs of last year. Traditional TV isn’t doing much better, with the Disney Channel losing more than 90% of its audience in the last decade (the kids are all on YouTube instead). And thanks to Jenny Nicholson, this summer gave us a whole second round of discourse about closing their ambitious Star Wars LARP hotel after 18 months.

Other than utterly trouncing Ron DeSantis, very few of Disney’s recent bets have paid off. So it might be finally time to ask a question that would have seemed unthinkable even five years ago. What is Disney’s future as a company?

Now, before the Disney adults reading this get all riled up, let’s be clear: Planning for the future has always been Disney’s secret weapon, all the way back to when Walt was in charge. He pioneered ideas like vertical integration and brand synergy, decades before those terms became industry cliches. When Disney dominated film in the 2010s, people drew parallels between that old strategy and Bob Iger’s focus on IP. He pushed to acquire Star Wars and Marvel, presided over the continued success of Pixar, restarted their princess movies, and turned live-action remakes of their old ones into a money printer.

Since the launch of Disney+, however, the future has become a lower priority than keeping subscription numbers stable. Now, all that IP has become a lot less valuable after five years of constant streaming shows. Pixar is making a terrified retreat to sequels, Star Wars has more scrapped movies than released ones, and the MCU is now taking a page from Disney corporate and bringing back the guys who made it work last time.

A dip was probably coming no matter what. Remember how Wreck-It Ralph 2 was basically The Emoji Movie? But the pandemic era pivot to streaming has been an unqualified failure. Now, Disney is slamming the brakes on pretty much anything they planned to make for Disney+, especially as Netflix has maintained their grip on the market. While other streaming services are dying off as rapidly as they appeared a decade ago. Even Apple TV and Amazon Prime, two subsidized arms of tech giants, are both reportedly rethinking spending billions of dollars on shows no one watches. (If streaming as an industry dies and Netflix is the last man standing, what does that mean for their own long-term health? A question for another day.)

Disney+ also isn’t the company’s only streaming service. Though, outside of Hulu, the rest are in a murky stew of combo deals just like the rest of the industry. They’ve played mix-and-match with streaming packages so often that they’re even partnering with Warner Bros. on a sports app.

OK, so, let’s ask a more interesting question. What has worked for Disney lately? For a start, their Fox acquisitions, which have managed to avoid the worst of the streaming push. FX has broken Emmy records thanks to shows like Shogun and The Bear. Disney’s second-biggest movie this year is the latest Planet of the Apes, a reliable big-screen franchise for over 50 years. And it’s about to lose its place to Deadpool and Wolverine — technically part of the MCU, but banking on goodwill for the Fox X-Men films. That franchise has actually avoided any sort of streaming spin-off up until X-Men ‘97 earlier this year, which instantly became one of Disney+’s rare crossover hits.

And, oh yes, a Fox holdover was the top-grossing movie released since the pandemic, starring bankable leads such as Jake Sully and Payakan the Tulkun.

Outside of that, a lot of Disney+’s recent success has come from partnerships and licenses rather than straight-up acquisitions like Marvel or Lucasfilm. Plenty of people streamed the Eras Tour movie, even after a record-breaking run in theaters. Bluey, which Disney licenses from the Australian public network ABC, is consistently one of the platform’s most-viewed shows. And it co-produced the latest season of Doctor Who, which is apparently a smash hit by normal BBC standards, even though its actual Disney+ ratings are so low they’re flirting with canceling it. Which, once again, brings us back to how unsustainable this all is. 

When streaming analyst Julia Alexander wrote about the battle over Disney+ in April, she made the important point that none of this is really hurting Disney’s overall reputation or recognition. “All roads lead back to Disney+,” Alexander wrote, only months before they hired her as a strategist (lol congrats!). None of these failures could even begin to make a dent in Elsa backpacks or ABC ratings or the line for Space Mountain at Disney World.

But a strike at Disneyland is another story, and it wouldn’t be the only battle for the future Disney is losing. The company is losing its monopoly on childhood, both in terms of what kids watch and their own talent incubation machine. Two of the year’s most popular movies star Disney Channel alum Zendaya. Another alum, Sabrina Carpenter, has practically run a presidential campaign for “song of the summer”. But Disney has yet to do anything with all these newly-minted zoomer icons.

Disney is also losing its grip on brand management as everyone else catches up to the playbook they pioneered. Nintendo’s theme park opens next year, DC has poached James Gunn, and Paramount tried its own Avengers with Patrick Stewart, Master Chief and Hey, Arnold (Ethan Hunt’s absence spoke volumes). While Disney clearly seems to understand this is a problem — they made an enormous deal with Fortnite earlier this year — they can’t seem to line things up the way they used to in the 2010s.

And Disneyland workers being ready to strike shows that brand loyalty isn’t cutting it anymore. From what I’ve seen, Disney park fans are consistently siding with the employees over the company. The CEO succession crisis doesn’t exactly give the executives a strong position, especially after Bob Iger fought hard and lost badly during last year’s WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

As I said, Disney has always been good about reimagining its future. But that future increasingly looks like one where they must accept that they’re not the only game in town anymore. They will have to accept that they need to make more equitable deals, whether with other companies or their own employees. They spent the 2010s trying to acquire the future, now they’ll have to work with what they can get.

Some Stray Links

• “What Happened to The Boys?”

• “This Was Never About Anything Other Than Hate”

• Nieman Lab on the fractured media landscape

P.S. here’s exploring England until it’s ugly.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***