4min chapter

Decoder with Nilay Patel cover image

Disney’s CEO drama explained, with Julia Alexander

Decoder with Nilay Patel

CHAPTER

How Will Bob Chapak Return Disney to a Path of Real Profitability?

Niele: Bob Chapak as a leader could not instill confidence in investors in the street, whereas Bob Eiger may have. He says Netflix realized Disney was going to play its game and decided to play a different game. "It's almost like comparing apples and quads," Niele says.

00:00
Speaker 1
And that is where Bob Chapak as a leader could not instill confidence in investors in the street, whereas Bob Eiger may have. I want to get to how Bob Eiger is going to instill confidence in his investors that he's going to return Disney to a path of real profitability because I think the changes he might have to make to do that are also pretty big and might mirrors in the stuff Chapak would do. Well, come to that in a minute. I just want to focus on the numbers here right now. So the initial guidance that Eiger gave when he was CEO and was launching Disney Plus was 60 to 90 million subscribers by 2024. When Chapak took over, he upped that by a huge number. He went from 60 to 90 to 230 to 260 million subscribers by 2024. So this massive increase more than double the previous guidance at the same time Netflix is saying, stop looking at our subscriber numbers, start looking at our
Speaker 2
profit. That's a
Speaker 1
big shift. It seems like Netflix realized Disney was going to play its game and decided to play a different game. It's too pronged. One, it's the same thing that if you remember, Niele, back a few years ago, the biggest criticism that Netflix got from reporters and from analysts was they didn't know how shows and movies are performing. Netflix didn't release numbers. And so Netflix's answer to this finally was to say, okay, we're going to publish our top 10 every single week. Here's our top 10 movies and TV shows and English speaking and non-English speaking, also a very key decision globally. And here's the hours viewed. The only reason they did it was because they know they're the only company that can boast those types of hours. So now there's pressure on Disney and HBO Max and Peacock and Paramount Plus and Amazon Prime Video to release those similar numbers, knowing they're never going to reach that. So they're never going to do it. So it makes Netflix look good and they get better press out of it. Same as the reason that they're doing it with non-English speaking titles. They get to say, look, we have a global audience. No one else can say that at that level at this point in time. So that's part of it. The second thing though is if you speak to people who are kind of involved with the numbers at Disney when they were looking at what's up those subscriber numbers too, there were a lot of people in the room and outside of her former Disney executives who said, I don't understand why you would triple or quadruple that count based on data that we know is not necessarily going to hold. We know that this is accelerated data. We know that we're not going to continuously add 15 million subscribers every single quarter because eventually two things are going to happen. One, you're going to hit saturation in certain countries like the United States and Canada, which is kind of the key market that we're seeing saturation in. And two, you're going to run out of country cilantro. This is the issue that we don't really talk about enough with earnings when we compare these companies. Netflix no longer has country cilantro. But they don't have an easy two, three million people to say, yes, we're going to be there and then you can come on. Disney still does, but it's running out of its room. So all these things combined, you know, when Bob Chapek is looking at what he can do, this is part of the reason, in my opinion, that he doesn't make a great leader. And this is why he loses some of the confidence. Instead of saying, we're going to pivot our strategy, we're going to try to determine how we can lower cost to then increase revenue so we can cover our overhead and then really figure out a way to expand in years to come, but make it sustainable. He keeps on pushing into this kind of stubbornness. He keeps saying, we're going to really hit these numbers. That's our whole goal. When you have the chief financial officer, Christine McCarthy and others saying, I don't know if this is necessarily the best case scenario that's been reported by publications like the Journal and Bloomberg, you know, it's not necessarily what they're going to do. And the other thing too, to point out about Disney and Netflix, because it's almost like comparing apples to come quads, right? It's Netflix gets to say we're no longer going to give guidance on subscriber growth because we're focusing on revenue because again, like the top 10, they're the only company that can't. They're the only profitable streaming service. So they can say, yeah, we're going to focus on revenue. It's only going to increase with our ad here because we're charging $60 CPMs. Like we're in a really great position. We have a huge base. So we're going to focus on that and that makes the street then ask everyone else, well, what's your revenue? So all these other companies are still focusing on catching up to Netflix to subscribers or spending more than they're making on these streaming services for the most part.

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