Bob Iger Has a Brand Problem, But Does It Matter?

Exactly how big a brand problem does Bob Iger have these days? It’s a tough question. You can definitely feel it in the culture—the heightened politicization of Disney thanks to the fights with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and now Elon Musk, who is waging war in a very Elon way, by backing Gina Carano’s dubious discrimination lawsuit and tweeting years-old Disney “inclusion” standards as if they were the Pentagon Papers. But when it comes to the actual movies and shows, Disney has always dismissed the “woke” outcry as just noise. Even if Trump Country may not love Disney as a company, they’re not gonna not see a Pixar movie or watch a Marvel show just because it’s from big, bad Disney.

Or at least that was the thinking. Then the movies started flopping, Star Wars got eviscerated by South Park, and in November, Iger himself publicly criticized the company’s push toward more agenda-driven storytelling. If you remember, he dropped this declaration at the DealBook conference: “We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages,” adding that when he returned as C.E.O., “what I have really tried to do is to return to our roots.”

Iger wasn’t explicit, and the comment could simply be taken as a call to refocus on Disney’s core competency, which is pleasing family audiences. But many in the creative community interpreted his words as, Okay, people. We did what WE wanted for a few years. Let’s lay off the lesbian kisses and revisionist Black mermaids and disabled dogs for a while. That’s probably overstating his mandate, but Iger doesn’t use a public appearance to call out Disney “messaging” unless one of two things is true: Either he sees the “wokeness” of the past five to seven years as negatively impacting the creative process, and ultimately the output; or he fears the escalating culture wars and the polarization of red and blue America as having a potentially significant impact on the ubiquity of the Disney brand. Most likely, it’s both.

Disney under Iger has always leaned left politically, and nobody cared much until his successor/predecessor Bob Chapek enraged both his own employees and DeSantis by flip-flopping on Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law. But now, it’s a problem, and for many, each Disney miss is viewed through the lens of whether a flawed process focuses too much on virtue signaling over creative execution. In the current proxy fight, Nelson Peltz and his fellow spite store proprietor Ike Perlmutter haven’t expressly gone after the politics of the Disney content. But given that both are Palm Beach residents with Trumpy politics, they kinda don’t have to.

Granted, many of the recent movies have simply not been good, irrespective of casting or inclusive storylines. After all, people are still packing the Disney parks, to the tune of nearly $9 billion in operating income in its “experiences” division last year, up 23 percent from 2022. But the overall political climate, which has also ensnared brands like Bud Light and Target, has made it harder for Disney—perhaps the most famous American corporation—to remain apolitical while also satisfying its largely liberal-leaning workforce.

But how big is this problem? And does it actually prevent people from going to see Disney movies? That was the impetus behind a study called “Left and Right: Are Political Divisions Impacting the Box Office?” that was prepared for Puck by The Quorum, which has done other branding research for us. This project surveyed 2,000 people over five days in January to test the conventional wisdom that Republican-leaning audiences feel alienated from Hollywood in general and Disney in particular.

Respondents were presented with 29 companies in various industries (Pepsi, Kraft, Toyota), including 13 media companies (all the major Hollywood studios and a few new entrants like Apple and Amazon, which bring their own general brand profile), and asked if they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of those companies. (They could also answer “no opinion” or “not familiar.”)

The results were a bit unexpected. All 29 companies have high favorability ratings (that’s consistent with most opinion surveys of major companies), and people actually carry pretty positive feelings about the major studios. But Disney clearly scores the lowest, with 21 percent unfavorable. No other entertainment company had an unfavorable rating above 11 percent, meaning Disney is nearly twice as disliked as any other Hollywood entity we included. (Hulu, which is owned by Disney, scored especially well at only 8 percent unfavorable, indicating the problem is the Disney brand, not any of its sub-brands necessarily.)

disney poll unfavorable views of media companies

Obviously, Disney is a lot more well-known than, say Warner Bros. or Paramount, so people will harbor stronger feelings about Disney than the others. And we included the larger studio name, not sub-brands like Marvel or Pixar, or individual projects, which people might feel more strongly about. But we compared the media companies to other mass-market and potentially controversial brands like Google and Chick-fil-A, and the unfavorables for Disney are still higher. Respondents were also asked about ESPN, which is owned by Disney and is the second-least liked of the big media brands. (ESPN has endured its own journeys through the culture wars, of course, most recently with the Pat McAfee–Jimmy Kimmel spat.)

Worse for Disney, polarization by political party is especially apparent in the survey. Fully 30 percent of Republicans and 26 percent of independents have an unfavorable opinion of the company, compared to only 8 percent of Democrats. Republicans also have an elevated unfavorable opinion (about 19 percent) of HBO, and Democrats overindex on negativity toward ESPN. (Importantly, Fox News or Fox was not included in the survey; I think we know how that would poll.) Bottom line: When it comes to Disney, you are much more likely to view it negatively if you are conservative.

Okay, but does any of this Disney sentiment actually matter to moviegoing? The answer, in the aggregate, is probably not much. We asked people why they don’t go to theaters more often, and political messaging in the movies was hardly a factor at all. Overwhelmingly (43 percent) and not surprisingly, people said the cost of going to a theater is the No. 1 deterrent. Only 0.3 percent of those who are not frequent filmgoers said they stay away due to political ideology or “wokeness,” according to the survey. That’s less than half a percent, or four people out of 1,400, way less than the 5 percent who still fear Covid.

Now, the study didn’t ask whether people stay away from Disney movies due to ideological differences, which might have yielded a much higher number. But with so few citing politics as a deterrent at all, it’s unlikely that specifying “Disney movies” would have moved the needle that much. “The data suggests a separation between the brand and the content,” David Herrin, the lead pollster, told me today. “While conservatives give Disney higher unfavorables, it’s not ‘perceived wokeness’ that’s keeping people from theaters. The more immediate issues facing the entire industry, not just Disney, is the quality of the content and the price of moviegoing.” Agreed. People don’t care about the “messages” in content, as long as that content is entertaining. Barbie could have been ignored or pilloried by the Fox News crowd for its feminist messaging. Instead, it sold tickets about evenly between Republicans and Democrats, per polling data.

Iger knows this, which is why he’s talking about the “messaging” in the context of an overall creative turnaround that he’s trying to execute. But he also knows that the impact of the politics stuff is kinda unknowable, and if Disney becomes a general target, its financials could start to look like Bud Light, which still hasn’t recovered from its transgender influencer maelstrom. As the presidential campaign heats up and Iger faces business challenges on all sides, that’s the last thing he needs.

More study details: