Some commenters have concluded that a town hall by Disney CEO Bob Iger shows the company has rejected left-wing LGBT politics, but Disney employees disagree.
In the town hall, Iger, who returned to run the media empire, told employees he didn’t like the company being “embroiled in controversy.” He answered several employee-submitted questions about Disney’s political future.
“It can be distracting, and it can have a negative impact on the company. And to the extent that I can work to quiet things down, I’m going to do that,” said Iger.
Iger replaced Bob Chapek, Disney’s CEO from 2020 to 2022. Before that, Iger served as Disney’s CEO from 2005 to 2020.
But Iger also reaffirmed his commitment to the left-wing social agenda and the company’s “core values” of “inclusion and acceptance and tolerance.”
“We’re certainly not going to lessen our core values in order to make everybody happy all the time,” he said at the town hall.
But Iger’s leadership decisions led to the company’s fight with Florida, a longtime Disney “cast member,” as employees are called, told The Epoch Times.
“He himself chose to go political,” Nick Caturano said. “He himself steered the company in that direction, and Bob Chapek just went the natural course of it.”
Since the shift in Disney’s “company values,” Disney has also seen a shift in stock value. In the last year, Disney’s stock price dropped from a high of $157 per share to $99.43 per share as of today, according to the NASDAQ.
A Tale of Two Bobs
Of Disney’s 17 movies and shows with LGBT characters, Disney released eight during Iger’s tenure. An additional film was planned for release in 2019 but got delayed.
Iger attempted to please parents as well as activists by keeping “a foot in both worlds,” Caturano said.
“They were offering or presenting themselves as a family-friendly safe option at the same time while they were appeasing the wokeness and the activists by injecting things into its entertainment,” Caturano said of his employer.
The number of LGBT films Disney released doubled under Chapek, and company leaders announced they would push for the “gay agenda” in their film production, as previously reported. In two years under Chapek, Disney released nine films with LGBT characters.
Caturano noted that the company hasn’t gone all-in on LGBT film plot lines. Instead, it started with tiny LGBT moments among extras, then expanded to plot lines that put LGBT characters closer to center stage.
Disney’s latest animated feature film, “Strange World,” bombed at the box office, as previously reported. The movie made under $20 million in its first five days in theater, and cost Disney between $180 million to $135 million to make.
Caturano told the Epoch Times that Disney designed this strategy to push the limits of what audiences would accept.
“A groomer doesn’t come right out and do it. They test the waters. And if they test the waters, and they get the response they’re looking for, then they wait for the next opportunity,” said Caturano. “As I understand it, that’s how grooming works and that’s what they appear to be doing.”
He added that this grooming attempts to change the moral boundaries of not only children but also parents and society.
With “Strange World’s” failure, Disney may have momentarily received a hard “no” from audiences, Caturano said. The company will probably push LGBT ideology later, he said.
Whatever the case, Caturano said he doesn’t know if economic pressure will get Disney to give up its social agenda.
“They always push the envelope to shock people. And they back down a little bit when the pushback is too much,” he said.
Under Iger’s leadership, Disney threatened to cease its work in Georgia if the state passed an abortion ban.
“I don’t see how it’s practical for us to continue to shoot there,” Iger told Reuters in 2019.
In 2016, Iger called Disney’s decision to open a new park in China the company’s “greatest opportunity since buying land in Florida,” according to Variety.
China has harvested the organs of religious dissidents, put Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps, and created a “surveillance state” to deprive its citizens of civil rights, as previously reported.
Inside the Castle
Under Iger’s tenure, pressure within the company intensified against cast members expressing conservative values, former Disney employee Stephen Cribb told the Epoch Times.
Disney employees who refused COVID-19 vaccinations on religious grounds faced intense pressure, he said. Cribb worked for Disney for 19 years before the company fired him for refusing the vaccine.
“When I wouldn’t let them treat me differently, they fired me,” he said. “I can’t help but wonder when I hear Bob Iger talk about such things as Disney being a company of inclusion and acceptance.”
Cribb said Disney fired him when he refused vaccination. Along with several other former employees, he is suing the company.
Even after Iger’s first stint as CEO ended, he played a major role in advising his successor through COVID-19, Cribb said.
“He was an executive chairperson with Disney until December 2021. He was still very involved. And so I tell people he was holding Bob Chapek’s hand when all of this began to happen,” he said.
If Disney were serious about dialing back its left-wing priorities, it would apologize to the employees it fired over the vaccine, Cribb said.
“We haven’t received any sort of an apology, or any sort of indication from the company that they’re going to make things right for the discriminatory actions they took against us for our religious beliefs,” said Cribb.
Emi Mackedon has been a Disney cast member for 30 years. She said the company changed radically during her tenure.
“Disney is not the way it used to be at all. Disney used to be set aside [for family use]. There were rules,” she told the Epoch Times.
Being family-friendly used to determine much about how Disney employees looked and acted, she added.
When Mackedon joined the company, she said Disney employees had to avoid tattoos, wear makeup a certain way, cut their fingernails short, and obey restrictions on how they could cut their hair.
“It was very professional, and families appreciated that and they felt good bringing kids. You go to the parks now and it’s a crazy show… It’s incredible how much it’s changed,” she said.
An anonymous Disney employee provided The Epoch Times with a picture of a bearded man wearing a dress serving children.
The change in Disney comes from both rank-and-file employees and executives, Mackedon said. In some ways, Disney has changed to meet corporate demand for left-wing entertainment, but it has also changed because employees want to go woke, she added.
“This wokeness is partially business-oriented, but at the same time, it’s just in the spirit in the hearts of many people,” she said. “They truly support this stuff.”
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Jackson Elliott reports on small-town America for The Epoch Times. He learned to write and seek truth at Northwestern University. He believes that the most important actions are small and that as Dostoevsky says, everyone is responsible for everyone and for everything. Contact Jackson by emailing jackson.elliott@epochtimes.us