What are some implications or changes that can happen now that they're on the board? It seems that Disney is in for some serious trouble
I wouldn't anticipate the company undergoing some massive overhaul, but I would expect things to return somewhat to the 2010-2015 output of media and park supervision...that being, still obnoxious, poorly-made, and suffocatingly-corporate, but with more critical voices leashing them in and forcing them to be accountable. You might notice these last couple of years, Disney and their corporate overlords have shrugged off almost all criticism and negative press about their failures from theme parks to shrinking financial returns on films--almost displaying an arrogance, a handwave at investor meetings and financial reports, as if operating under the mentality that they're too big to fail. "Oh, what's that?
Onward, Lightyear and
Strangeworld all bombed? No worries! The MCU and all the fatass consoomers at the Theme Parks will make all that money back for us!" The growth of both of these and domination of several markets has allowed this mindset of theirs to bloat, and essentially block out or handwave the dissenting voices of disgruntled shareholders. Everyone at the highest level stays safe, executive grunts like
Catherine Powell take the fall for their failures, and they get to continue the trainwreck without anyone on the board of directors twisting their arm.
I say all this because one of the major sticking points by both Peltzer and Perlmutter in their activist shareholder outcry is that they believe that Bob Iger spent a great deal of his time as CEO evading accountability, arranging things to benefit him and his ilk handsomely, and above all else, avoiding having to answer to anyone. Where his predecessor Eisner accepted a cut to his salary when the company was underperforming, Iger
tripled his salary. Where Chapek was forced to take most of his hired hands with him on the way out, Iger is currently placing people who will work to his best interests to stay rooted in key parts of the company after he leaves...effectively stamping his influence in these branches of the company and appointing people loyal to him in top positions, despite the fact that he's supposed to be on his way out. It's these actions that would only be stymied if someone from
outside the Disney echo chamber was on the board of directors, and not just one of Iger's sycophants...which is precisely what both Iger and the company are racing desperately to prevent.
In fact, if you want to know why Ike Perlmutter in particular is part of this investor war, it's because he himself was burned by Iger's sneaky tactics
when he had control wrested from him over the Marvel films, in one of many moves that has allowed Disney to grow insular and sceptic like a toenail, creating an echo chamber that placates to internal decisions and interests. And if you want to know the end result of Disney exercising more control and ousting Marvel's original top execs, the article paints a pretty clear picture:
In his memoir, Iger wrote that Perlmutter had stood in the way of Marvel’s first films with Black and female leads. “I called Ike and told him to tell his team to stop putting up roadblocks and ordered that we put both Black Panther and Captain Marvel into production,” Iger wrote.
This is not to say Perlmutter is some kind of saint; he did a fair share of his own cutthroat corporate damage to Marvel...but it's clear that his focus was solely on profit, and would never compromise profitability or alienation of foreign markets in pursuit of chasing social and political trends...which is precisely the situation Disney finds itself in now, with most of its Marvel films banned in China thanks to them aggressively pursuing the likes of
Black Widow, Eternals and soon crap like
The Marvels. No inside voice has been there to slap down this prioritization of trend-chasing over profit, and no one has deigned to sabotage the board of directors to become that voice....until now. If Peltzer and Perlmutter get their way, there will be a loud opposing voice on the inside that will force them to be more of a cutthroat business that prioritizes safe returns like their rivals at Warner Bros., and take David Zazlav-tier measures in axing whole projects and throwing PR to the wind to meet shareholder interests.
Make no mistake: the quality will not improve. In fact, we'll probably start seeing more of the banal, "safe" projects they were belting out before, like their 2010's assembly live-action crap like those Burton
Alice in Wonderland films,
Tron: Legacy, the
Pirates sequels,
Oz the Great and Powerful, Wrinkle in Time, and of course, plenty of soulless remakes like
Lion King and
Mulan. They will continue to dick-ride social trends and cringe politics, race-swapping and defiling source material galore. But unlike the last five years, they won't be able to shit out those kind of productions with the frequency, the carelessness, and the dismissal for financial repercussions as before. Someone will be holding their feet to the fire, making greater demands for course-correction and executive firings every time something goes wrong.
That is, of course, if all of this comes to pass. It's too early to say.
them running out of animated movies to remake(doubt they have the balls to do Black Cauldron)
Oh, they certainly lack the balls to adapt
The Black Cauldron in live-action. And what makes that doubly-frustrating is that no other studio can attempt to adapt the series of fantasy novels it was based on, either.
Disney purchased the film rights to Lloyd Alexander's
Chronicles of Prydain novels all the way back in 2015, and they not only have done fuck all with them, they're just
sitting on those rights like eggs, preventing any other studio from taking a stab at re-doing a more faithful adaptation.
It's such a bitch move; they aren't willing to do anything with those rights themselves, and they're obstructing anyone else from doing anything with that material either. When I say this shithouse company is more than just a plague on stuff like Marvel and Star Wars,
this is what I'm talking about.