Disney Headlines for January 30th, 2024
This week: a Mickey Mouse giveaway tweaks some sports fans, The Wrap makes a wild accusation, and Disney’s 2023 films threaten to have the last laugh.
We’ve got a diverse set of topics that San Francisco Giants fans are gonna love.
A Funny Troll
I’m a diehard baseball fan, and I had to laugh about a recent sports story.
As you know, players spend their entire lives trying to achieve one dream: winning a World Series.
However, not all World Series victories are created equal.
I mean, the Miami Marlins have won a couple of them, so how hard could they be?
Apparently, that’s a shared opinion about a recent World Series title.
Remember 2020, the pandemic season in baseball? Yes, that’s the forgotten year where teams played 60 games each.
Afterward, everyone pretended it was a full season and skipped straight to the playoffs.
Do you remember who won that year? It’s integral to this story.
While the Los Angeles Dodgers have remained a perennial powerhouse for years, the high-spending team has only won one World Series.
Their championship occurred in 2020, the baseball season with an asterisk.
Now, don’t get me wrong. As an Atlanta Braves fan, if we’d won in 2020, I’d totally claim it.
Of course, we DID win in 2021, which is much better because nobody accuses us of winning a Mickey Mouse title.
The same cannot be said of the Dodgers, and their mortal enemies, the San Francisco Giants, are trolling them about it.
On Sunday, June 30th, San Francisco will give away Mickey Mouse Ears to the first 15,000 fans in attendance.
On a not-at-all coincidental note, the Dodgers are the visiting team on that date.
So, this giveaway counts as a great night for Disney fans in the Bay area, but it’s soooo much better for Dodgers haters.
Of course, the Dodgers just signed Shohei Ohtani for the cost of a utility infielder, so who’s really having the last laugh here?
The Strangest Disney Rumor
The Wrap recently posted an evaluation of Bob Iger that you can read for free on Yahoo!.
This article includes some frankly bizarre extrapolations of what Iger has done and what might happen next.
I thought about writing a full article about the piece, but I just couldn’t take it seriously enough to do so.
Part of the reason is a prediction by Peter Csathy of Creative Media, an entrepreneur frequently quoted by tech and business sites.
I feel weird criticizing Csathy because his career successes are impossible to ignore.
The businessperson has recently developed a reputation for making some clickbait-ypredictions, though.
His Disney one is WAAAAAAY out there. According to Csathy, Candle Media could purchase Disney.
As a reminder, Candle Media is the entity run by former Disney execs Kevin Mayer and Thomas O. Staggs.
Many analysts, myself included, have floated the possibility that Disney might purchase Candle Media for $2-$5 billion.
Csathy believed that the opposite might occur, which is so preposterous that my first thought is, “Please show your math.”
As a reminder, Candle Media currently cannot pay its creditors for what it already owns due to a brutal couple of years.
According to Csathy, a company currently seeking debt relief can somehow come up with the $200+ billion needed to buy Disney.
Frankly, I don’t see any path where Candle Media could get there from here, but it underscores Bob Iger’s current problem.
Armchair quarterbacks are game-planning what Disney does next because its current situation appears challenging.
Disney Won’t Sell Linear Networks Why?
The cause for The Wrap article – and The Wrap is a publication I respect – is a quote from an alleged Disney insider.
This person has expressed frustration that Iger has refused to sell Disney’s Linear Networks thus far.
That philosophy from the unnamed source underscores the current divide among Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley analysts.
Some investors believe that media companies should cut the cord.
Meanwhile, a MoffettNathanson paper recently described tearing down linear to build streaming as taking wood from your house to build a shed.
Obviously, nobody should do that. The statement reinforces that Iger has aligned with MoffettNathanson with his perspective.
Iger fully believes in Linear Networks as a viable revenue stream in the short term, one that more than justifies keeping the assets.
The Wrap found a source who argued that Iger has chosen this path for a different reason.
“The Disney CEO is worried that unloading the non-sports TV assets, which brought in $11.7 billion in revenues in 2023, or 13% of Disney’s total of $88.9 billion, could make the company too vulnerable to being acquired…”
In other words, someone evaluating Disney believes that Iger won’t sell Linear Networks as a form of protection.
If Disney lost 13 percent of its revenue overnight, its market cap would fall, thereby making it more likely to get purchased.
As far as conspiracy theories go, that one’s more plausible than most, but I think it’s Occam’s Razor.
During the most recent earnings call, Iger sounded extraordinarily confident that his team has cracked the math on digital/linear.
If so, Disney would legitimately be the first media company to do it, which explains the skepticism.
We’ll likely learn more about this at Disney’s next earnings call on February 7th.
Wouldn’t It Be Funny?
In December, I discussed the horror show of Disney’s 2023 film campaign.
Okay, horror show is an exaggeration, but it was Disney’s worst year in a decade.
I tried to be fair with my conclusions in that article. So, I removed the original summary I had written.
I initially stated that Disney still held unlikely hope for the end of the year with an obscure Oscar bait film named Poor Things.
I took it out because I felt like it didn’t match the tone of the rest of the piece, and I really regret that now.
When the Academy Awards announced its 2024 nominees, Poor Things gained 11 nods.
The only film that garnered more was Oppenheimer, which is good company to keep.
Oddsmakers have since installed Oppenheimer as the favorite, but Poor Things is a solid second.
Oppenheimer will probably win the Academy Award for Best Picture, but if it doesn’t, we’ll get a fascinating footnote.
In the wake of one of Disney’s worst film years of the 21st century, it would win Best Picture. Wouldn’t that be hysterical?
Thanks for visiting MickeyBlog.com! Want to go to Disney? For a FREE quote on your next Disney vacation, please fill out the form below, and one of the agents from MickeyTravels, a Diamond Level Authorized Disney Vacation Planner, will be in touch soon!
Feature Photo: Disney