Did Disney Get Its Magic Back?

The Town with Matthew Belloni

The Ringer

Society & Culture

4.3 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Matt is joined by media analyst Rich Greenfield to discuss Disney’s latest quarterly earnings report, as well as a slew of new announcements from CEO Bob Iger. Matt and Rich run through each announcement, including their new $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games, a stand-alone ESPN streaming service, their bundled sports streaming service with Fox and WBD, Moana 2, Taylor Swift's concert movie coming to Disney+, and the Nelson Peltz proxy battle. Later, the pair determine whether they can prove to the creative community that they are officially back. Matt finishes the show with a prediction about the Gina Carano–Disney lawsuit. For a 20 percent discount on Matt’s Hollywood insider newsletter, ‘What I’m Hearing ...,’ click here. Email us your thoughts! thetown@spotify.com Host: Matt Belloni Guest: Rich Greenfield Producers: Craig Horlbeck and Jessie Lopez Theme Song: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Issa Kwanga and I'm Ryan Hunt and we co-host Stadio, a football podcast on the Ring of Podcast Network.
0:06.7	If you like soccer or football, make sure you search for Stadio, a football podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:15.8	It is Thursday, February 8th.
0:19.0	Yesterday's earnings released by the Walt Disney Company wasn't a normal
0:22.7	quarterly call. It was the last earning before a proxy fight showdown with Nelson Peltz, the
0:28.1	activist who wants a board seat for himself and Jay Rizzulo, the company's former CFO. So it was
0:34.6	crucially important that Disney kill it. We've talked about this fight and how much Disney CEO Bob Eiger wants to keep these guys off the board,
0:42.0	especially considering they're backed by Ike Perlmutter, the former Marvel chairman, who is now
0:46.7	Iger's nemesis.
0:48.3	So Iger released its first quarterly earnings, and they were good.
0:51.7	The financials are turning around.
0:53.5	The streaming losses have
0:54.5	narrowed. He's on track to meet or exceed the $7.5 billion in cost cuts that were demanded.
1:01.8	And the projections are mostly strong, which led the stock to jump about 12% today.
1:06.8	Just what the shareholders want to see. And not great news for Peltz, whose only statement
1:10.4	after the earnings was,
1:11.9	it's deja vu all over again.
1:13.8	We saw this movie last year and we didn't like the ending.
1:17.0	I'm not sure what that means.
1:18.6	Iger also announced a whole bunch of new things, partnerships, projects.
1:23.5	Part of what Iger calls his building phase.
1:26.4	First and foremost, is this new joint venture for sports streaming that we talked about yesterday.
	...

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