Vivek Saxena, BPR
According to a source inside Disney, the entertainment giant has ordered managers/executives to prepare budget cuts and, more notably, lists of employees to be laid off, with the expectation being that firings will begin in April.
This news, broken by Business Insider, comes weeks after CEO Bob Iger announced during the company’s February earnings call that he’d like to cut at least 7,000 jobs (only 4,000 of them are already filled) to reduce expenses.
“Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger said Wednesday that the Burbank company will shed 7,000 jobs in an effort to save $5.5 billion in costs, marking some of the steepest reductions in the company’s history and the latest sign of Hollywood’s retrenchment,” the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.
“The belt-tightening underscores the extraordinary difficulties Disney and other media giants face as they reckon with the realities of streaming economics — which have proved more vexing than many anticipated — and the challenges facing Iger, who took over from ousted CEO Bob Chapek in November.”
At the time of the announcement, the company’s many critics accused it of having fallen into the “go woke, go broke” paradigm.
All this comes as Disney’s stock price still remains at a low of only $93.20 a share, precipitously down from a high of $197.16 recorded on March 12th, 2021.
Making matters worse, Disney is reportedly losing money on streaming.
“In Q4 this year their streaming business lost an eye-watering $1.5 billion. Not only is that crazy high, but it’s way more than the $630 million that it lost the same time the year before. The losses are also expected to continue for some time yet,” Forbes reported in late 2022.
Yet instead of rethinking its “woke” stance, the company has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on “wokeness” in recent months.
Most recently, it was discovered that Disney’s latest “Peter Pan”-themed film, “Peter Pan & Wendy,” is brimming with “woke” changes.
For example, the “Lost Boys” now include girls because of “diversity” and “inclusion.” Likewise, Tinkerbell is black, and Peter Pan is Indian. In the original story, both were white. Meanwhile, Captain Hook, the bad guy, conveniently remains white.
Meanwhile, the classic story of “Snow White” has been completely reworked to be “woke,” according to Alison Boshoff of the Daily Mail. For instance, it no longer features either a prince or dwarves.
“A source closely connected with the film — shot earlier this year — tells me Snow White’s seven ‘dwarfs’ are going to be fully computer generated, and won’t be dwarfs at all,” Boshoff reported back in December.
What’ll they be then? Trolls?
“A source connected with the production explains that they will be rather like the trolls in Frozen, or JRR Tolkien’s hobbits. They will have two legs, two arms and a face with eyes, nose and a mouth . . . but not be actually human,” according to Boshoff.
But why trolls? Because dwarves were too offensive for some “wokesters” like dwarf actor Peter Dinklage:
This isn’t even the worst of it. In February, the latest season of the “Proud Family” debuted on Disney+, and it was a “woke” nightmare.
“The new season contains elements of Critical Race Theory, identifies one of the White characters in the show as guilty of ‘white fragility,’ denounces Abraham Lincoln as not ‘caring’ about ending slavery, and had the children discuss toppling statues of people they disagree with,” according to Fox News.
“The young children in the show chanted that ’emancipation isn’t freedom’ and attacked the 16th president as wanting to ‘deport’ Black people. Lincoln scholar David J. Kent told Fox News the show’s accusations were a mix of misrepresentation, non sequitur, and falsehoods.’”
This “woke” nonsense has been accompanied by “box office bombs, subscriber losses,” and now layoffs to boot.
The biggest box office bomb was what happened to “Strange World.”
“[T]he fall release of “Strange World” lost around $147 million. The film feature[d] the first openly LGBTQ+ teenaged Disney character, who discusse[d] his crush in the movie,” as reported by Fox News.
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