Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, where you can still celebrate the holiday season even though your company party has been canceled or downsized due to the strikes.

🚨🚨 We’ve got a new contributor at WIH: Scott Mendelson is gonna do a semi-regular Sunday column on movie box office. I’ve long admired Scott’s no-B.S. reporting and analysis at Forbes, and he’s been on The Town. He goes way beyond the weekly numbers and studio spin, so look for his insights in WIH on Sundays when big movies debut.

As always, if you were forwarded this email, tell Santa to click here to make you a Puck member.

Let’s begin…

• Elon vs. Bob vs. Reality: Everyone’s laughing at Elon Musk’s “Go fuck yourself” attack on Disney C.E.O. Bob Iger and other Twitter/X advertisers, which dominated yesterday’s DealBook conference. But it feels like people in Hollywood and legacy media are laughing even harder. It’s not just that Elon seems to think media businesses are entitled to advertising—in which case, on behalf of Puck, go fuck yourself, Jake from State Farm and Flo from Progressive! He also suggests that by withholding ads due to the toxicity of the platform, the advertisers, and not X itself, are “going to kill the company.” Delusional.

  The sad irony—and what makes television executives shake their heads here—is that brand safety is the only thing Musk needed to care about when he bought Twitter. It certainly wasn’t the cost or quality of the content itself, which is the primary concern of Iger and everyone who runs platforms that showcase professionally produced programming and not the flaming hot takes and double rainbow pics of their own users. And can you imagine how fast P&G would pull its Pampers ads if a Nazi appeared on Dancing With the Stars? We’ll see if the ad boycott actually kills X (I doubt Elon will let it die), but if it does, it will be because Musk got a taste of what Hollywood executives deal with every day: Content has consequences. As Franklin Leonard put it on, yes, X, “These guys always love the ‘marketplace of ideas’ until it’s an actual marketplace.”

• The Saudis’ blood red carpet: $1 million was the standing offer that went around the talent agencies for major stars to walk the carpet at this week’s Saudi Boondoggle of Image Laundering—sorry, the “Red Sea Film Festival.” Will Smith may have even gotten more than that, and I’m told CAA negotiated a little less than $1 million for Michelle Williams to attend (the agency declined to comment). Sofia Vergara, Sharon Stone, and Joel Kinnaman are there, plus Johnny Depp, of course, though he isn’t getting a bounty, per se, but the festival’s “foundation” backed his recent Jeanne du Barry film. And they sent a plane. Full credit to Mohammed bin Salman, the journalist-dismembering crown prince, who knows the only thing celebs love more than red carpets is money and red carpets.

• Speaking of the Middle East: Tomorrow, I’m told Arnold Schwarzenegger is hosting three family members of Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas. It’s a Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem event at Arnold’s office in Santa Monica, and Rabbi Marvin Hier is expected to be there too.

• A Silver lining on Road House: The funniest part of famously asshole-ish producer Joel Silver getting dropped and replaced on Amazon movies for asshole-ish behavior is what wasn’t in today’s trade reports. Silver, director Doug Liman, and Ari Emanuel (a Silver buddy whose WME reps star Jake Gyllenhaal) were so pissed that Amazon Studios chief Jen Salke refused to give Liman’s Road House remake a theatrical release that Ari convinced Jeff Bezos to screen the film on his yacht, with the hope that Bezos would love it and push for theaters. Salke knew it was happening, and it didn’t change her mind, but an A+ effort.
• Yet more Hoop Dreams: Who wants to make shows for the latest vanity media company started by a pro athlete? NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo is looking for a V.P. for a not-yet-announced outfit co-founded with ESPN’s Jay Williams, among others. Between putting up 25 points a night for the Bucks, Giannis is “on a mission to redefine the world of branded entertainment.” Exciting!

• Box office over/under: Domestic tracking for Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé dipped to about $17 million today, which would be less than a fifth of the $93 million debut for Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour but still big for post-Thanksgiving. I’m gonna bet on the tradition of tracking services underestimating Black audiences and take the over here.

But the Disney “go woke, go broke” narrative persists. “Once an unassailable and uniting brand, [the] Disney brand is now negatively associated with activism by a significant number of consumers,” Jonathan Turley, the legal scholar and Fox News contributor, wrote this week in The Hill. Disney was ranked the fifth-most-polarizing brand in the recent Axios Harris Poll. South Park just tapped into that sentiment, though it targeted Lucasfilm’s Kathy Kennedy as the Disney avatar who repeatedly screams, “Put a chick in it! Make her lame and gay!”—which struck insiders as a bit weird because, internally, Kennedy isn’t exactly considered a social justice warrior.

If you leave the L.A./N.Y. bubble, you hear it—not necessarily backlash, but skepticism toward Disney. The fans, right or wrong, have noticed a shift, and some don’t like it: The racially diverse Little Mermaid; a nonbinary character in Elemental; the Latina lead of the new Snow White; the interracial parents/gay teen/disabled dog (for real) in Strange World. I saw that movie in a theater half-full of families in Arizona, and there were some audible groans during the gay courtship scenes.

Part of me is like, Screw them. And I suspect that Iger, who has long championed diversity in Disney’s storytelling, feels the same way. But instead, he’s now sounding a little more like DeSantis than Newsom. Speaking at the DealBook conference yesterday, Iger—for the first time, really—blamed part of the company’s recent box office woes on the “messaging” in Disney content.

“Creators lost sight of what their number one objective needed to be,” Iger said. “We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.” When pressed by Andrew Ross Sorkin, he continued: “I like being able to entertain if you can infuse it with positive messages and have a good impact on the world. Fantastic. But that should not be the objective. When I came back, what I have really tried to do is to return to our roots.”

I’m pretty sure there’s no way the Iger of 2023 would allow the Lightyear kiss. (If he would’ve even allowed it then. He said the messaging got worse “while I was gone,” which was nearly all of 2022—though that’s a bit of revisionist history. Movies like Lightyear and Strange World and Little Mermaid were greenlit either before Iger stepped down as C.E.O. in early 2020, or while he was supposedly in charge of all creative output as executive chairman, until the end of 2021.)

And now, seemingly, a pullback. Interestingly, there’s been little backlash over the Iger comments from Pixar or elsewhere. That’s partly because Iger commands greater faith and respect from the company’s employees than Chapek did. After all, Chapek was the new guy navigating his first public controversy in Don’t Say Gay, which he and his then-communications chief, Geoff Morrell, botched from the beginning. Iger greenlit Black Panther.

More importantly, both Iger and the leaders of the individual units like Pixar are in a much different place these days, having to explain underperformance and thus focus more acutely on their core competency: making and releasing entertaining content that appeals to the most people possible. It’s not that diversity is a luxury; it’s actually the opposite: Studies show that more diverse entertainment is more successful, and studios leave money on the table when it’s not. But Iger now seems more acutely conscious that while quality is the leading driver of success, the perception of the brand might be hurting the performance of the products—and he has more shareholders than just Nelson Peltz and his Mar-a-Lago buddy Ike Perlmutter who believe that. Peltz said he wanted a board seat to cut costs, and Iger slashed $7.5 billion on his own. Now Peltz is back, and talking about the failures of the Disney “agenda.” So Iger is again preempting by signaling a content shift.

That proxy fight is likely to play out all winter, with Disney and Peltz’s Trian fund exchanging press releases today. Content-wise, Peltz and Perlmutter would almost certainly be a negative influence. Remember, Ike refused to make Black Panther and Captain Marvel. He literally got on an internal strategy call back in 2014 and said “Schvartze” superhero movies didn’t work. (That’s a derogatory Yiddish term for a Black person.) And the Sony hack revealed that Ike pressured then-Sony Pictures C.E.O. Michael Lynton about the perils of female superheroes. When those two movies were eventually announced, in October 2014, Ike still wouldn’t commit to actually making them. Iger had to personally step in and force the development, according to his book.

I’d never given much credence to the whole “go woke, go broke” narrative, which still seems mostly like social media and Fox News noise. But it’s real, and now it’s clear that Iger thinks it’s a problem. His response will almost certainly impact Disney’s approach to storytelling, but whether it improves the bottom line is less clear.

Correction: I said on Sunday that RedBird Capital is “Abu Dhabi-backed,” but it’s not. I mixed it up with RedBird IMI, the joint venture between RedBird and IMI, which is backed by Abu Dhabi. Apologies.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or someone you’d like to tell to go fuck themselves? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.