Pandora's Box, page 29
If it were possible for an old-guard legacy studio to big-foot tech companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple at a time when research indicated most Americans subscribed to no more than two streaming services, Disney was the one to do it. An old friend, Barry Diller, observed that Iger was “absolutely determined not to turn the world over to Netflix and Amazon.”25 Indeed, many regarded Iger as the white knight who would slay the Hastings dragon, send the Albanian army back to Albania. Disney’s deal with Netflix for its Marvel shows was said to be worth between $200 and $300 million in licensing fees, but when that agreement ended in 2019, Iger was happy to let it lapse and eat the loss so that it could gather those films under the studio’s own roof and air them on Disney+.
It was one thing to be convinced that Disney needed a streaming service; it was another thing to figure out what kinds of shows it should air. It was not a decision to be taken lightly. Disney had so thoroughly colonized the imaginations not only of America’s children but of children everywhere, that veteran animator Glen Keane observed, “The Disney version becomes the definitive version.” He had animated Pocahontas, and he said the first likenesses of her that appear on Google Images are his.26 The answer seemed obvious: It was time for Disney to wake up its sleeping beauty, that is, its library of classic animation, and what a beauty it was. Not only would kids watch these shows over and over, but their appetites extended to endless knock-offs that allowed Disney to CRISPR franchises like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, turning them into gifts that never stopped giving.
There was, however, a problem. Most of Disney’s classics were honeycombed with racism, sexism, and homophobia, all of which were axiomatic at the time they were made, so as to make them virtually invisible. Two decades into the twenty-first century, however, Critical Mouse Theory had made the racial and gender biases of the classics all too apparent—and Disney was kept busy scouring images and attitudes that were unacceptable in today’s woke culture.
When Toy Story 2 was released on DVD, Disney cut a casting couch joke that appeared after the tail credits wherein Kelsey Grammer’s Stinky Pete comes on to a pair of Barbie dolls by promising them a part in Toy Story 3.27
A snip here and a snip there were enough to sanitize most of these movies, but they weren’t going to work when the bad stuff was baked into the plots themselves. In Disney’s beloved Dumbo, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the circus hands are exclusively voiced by Black actors, and in one scene where they are erecting circus tents, they are singing “Song of the Roustabouts” that contains the lyric, “Grab that rope, you hairy ape.” The black crows whose leader is named Jim Crow and who speak in cadences lifted from blackface minstrel shows are missing from Tim Burton’s 2019 remake. When it was impossible to excise racist, sexist, or homophobic elements, as in Song of the South, the movie was canceled entirely.
Then there’s that vein of gold, the original Lion King, with its overriding theme: In the natural order of things, the strong rule the weak, the predators lord it over the herbivores. Extrapolating the power dynamics of one type of social organization that many critics derided as “fascist” to the animal world serves to naturalize it, normalize it, make it seem like “this is just the way things are.”
Eventually, time caught up with the Mouse House. After the parade of Snow Whites, Cinderellas, Ariels, Auroras, etc., etc., Disney got around to a Black princess in its forty-ninth animated feature in 2009—Tiana in The Princess and the Frog.
Doc McStuffins, created by Chris Nee, known as the “Shonda Rhimes” of children’s animation, featured a cartoon doctor who restores broken toys to health. Disney customarily cubbyholed its characters according to their ostensible appeal: It argued that boys wouldn’t watch girls’ shows, and girls wouldn’t watch boys’ shows. Nancy Kanter, then creative head of Disney Junior, the Disney preschool channel, and eventually promoted to executive VP of content and creative strategy at Disney Channels Worldwide, suggested making the character a Black female all the way back in 2012. The Consumer Products division suffered a collective heart attack, insisting that white children wouldn’t buy Black dolls. Nee recalls, “The prevailing wisdom was that that would hurt the chances of the series.” Kanter insisted, and she proved that that was not the case. On top of selling dolls, the show won a Peabody Award. Nee goes on, “It opened up opportunities for other series to be more diverse in a way that really broke what people thought about the product lines in the kids business.”28 Diversity, in other words, wasn’t just about doing the right thing; Doc McStuffins proved it was good for business. Disney’s 2023 live-action Little Mermaid featured a Black actress, Halle Bailey, in the lead, and in its 2024 Snow not-so White, Latina Rachel Zegler plays the lead.
When Stephenson retired in 2020, Stankey became AT&T’s new CEO. Merging two giant companies with different cultures is not for the faint of heart, especially when they were as disparate as AT&T and Time Warner, which included not only a storied film studio and HBO, but Turner Broadcasting—TBS, TNT, and CNN. While Casey Bloys ran programming for HBO, Turner had been run by Kevin Reilly since 2014. In June 2017, Stankey put him in charge of content strategy, finding a way to enter the streaming wars with its own version of Netflix. The problem was HBO, at once Stankey’s rarest jewel and biggest headache because its reputation demanded that it be handled with kid gloves. “Quality,” however, was not a word AT&T knew how to spell, and the company believed that branding as such rendered HBO too narrow. It wanted a streaming service with wider appeal, hence, HBO Max. It made its debut in 2020, airing Warner’s Friends and the Harry Potters alongside Game of Thrones.
One of the reasons Bewkes chose AT&T as a buyer was that he thought Stankey’s ignorance of the entertainment world would be to Time Warner’s advantage, meaning that he would leave its team in place. That turned out to be an illusion. Too late, Bewkes regretted it, saying, “The level of malpractice is something I would never have believed possible,” referring to AT&T. “The value destruction has been monumental.”29
Stankey’s solution to his organizational problems was to hire more executives. He hired Bob Greenblatt in March 2018, over Reilly, which struck many as a boneheaded move, since the two had almost identical résumés. A major problem, according to multiple sources, all NDA’d, was Stankey himself. Says Greenblatt, “No strategic thinker, he made decisions off the cuff. It was all just seat-of-the-pants, figure it out as you go.”30
On April Fools’ Day, 2020, he announced that he’d made wunderkind Jason Kilar, formerly of Hulu, CEO of WarnerMedia for a reported $52 million. Kilar wasted no time getting off on the wrong foot. In August 2020, he abruptly fired both Reilly and Greenblatt with no more than an hour’s notice before news outlets broke the story. Says one executive who worked with both Reilly and Greenblatt, Kilar “took out a huge chunk of experienced, talent-friendly personnel, and that says a lot about the way AT&T viewed the company, as a commodity. They cut the heart out of the place.”31
Plepler is said to have been miffed that Stephenson never invited him for lunch, and felt that Stankey disrespected both him and the HBO brand. Stankey is said to have met with Bloys virtually behind his back, further angering him. He eventually resigned in February 2019, to be replaced by Bloys.
It’s difficult to assess Plepler’s tenure at HBO. There’s a lot to praise, and a lot to not. As he himself says, “Executives get more credit than they deserve for things that work and more blame for things that don’t.”32
In any event, with Reilly, Greenblatt, and Plepler gone from WarnerMedia, the company was left with an open wound. Who, if anyone, was going to replace them? For a long time, AT&T had had a female problem. At a time when the entertainment business was trembling before the power of #MeToo, all the important posts at the company were held by men, and Stephenson was actually quoted saying, “I also have to protect this telco guy culture.”33
Back on March 6, 2019, before the bloodletting, the company held a town hall meeting in New York, a highly anticipated event that was beamed back to LA, where the division heads—including Reilly, Greenblatt, CNN’s Jeff Zucker, Turner Broadcasting chief David Levy, Warner Bros.’ Kevin Tsujihara, plus Stankey—faced an audience of 250 people. Speaking was Stankey. With his hulking size, he looked like “the ultimate white guy,”34 as one source puts it, with a deep, booming voice, virtually a walking and talking commercial for toxic masculinity. Peppered with questions, his responses, according to a source, were “dismissive, borderline offensive,”35 and tangled up in telecom jargon.
Tsujihara sat through the whole thing looking ashen, because he knew what was coming. The Hollywood Reporter was about to out him for having an affair with an actress. He was quickly #MeToo-ed off the lot. AT&T was virtually forced to hire a woman to replace him. Several experienced female executives turned it down. Three months later, the studio accepted Ann Sarnoff, almost by default.
Meanwhile, Kilar was watching theatrical exhibition struggle with the pandemic. Exhibition was in a bad way. Not only was there a shortage of customers, but there was a shortage of movies, as production ground to a halt. Many screens were sited in “zombie malls,” according to one analyst, while Regal, the second biggest US theater business, with 542 multiplexes, declared bankruptcy, predicting that box office wouldn’t re-up to prepandemic levels until 2025, and claimed the US was overscreened, to the tune of as many as twenty thousand theaters.36 The nation’s biggest chain, AMC, was also struggling with a heavy debt. When the curtain fell on 2022, ticket sales were 35 percent under their 2019 prepandemic totals.
Watching exhibition in flames, in December 2020, Kilar added fuel to the fire with his so-called Project Popcorn, which broke the heretofore, more or less sacred theatrical window that gave exhibitors a seventy-five- to ninety-day lock on new releases before they went to DVD, cable, or affiliates. He announced that Warner’s features would henceforth be streamed on HBO Max at the same time they were released in theaters, outraging not only exhibitors, but agents and talent whose back-end payouts depended on ticket and DVD sales, as well as syndication to secondary markets. Spielberg felt that filmmakers were being thrown “under the bus” by Warner Bros.37 One studio bigwig commented, “Without question, Kilar fucked things up so badly in terms of the general health of our industry that we’re going to be feeling those reverberations for a long time.”38 The studio’s highest-profile director, Christopher Nolan, left for Universal. Wags began calling it “Former Brothers.”
The Disney classics—Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, and so on—might have been the backbone of its new streaming service, but Disney still needed new product, especially shows to feed its new streamer, Disney+. The issue of what that was going to be like became a stumbling block that Disney never quite surmounted.
Disney gave creative oversight over Disney+ to Ricky Strauss, head of marketing. According to several sources, Strauss was good at stroking talent, but had no idea what, exactly, he wanted. Said one Disney veteran, “Ricky’s expertise, outside of marketing feature films, was zero.”39 In essence, however, Strauss said he didn’t need creative experience. He told the press, “To be successful in making content, you need to have a marketing lens on everything you do—who are the people you are driving toward?”40
Disney was structured hierarchically. “Everything had to bubble up to Ricky for a final approval,” a source recalls. “You had to go through a whole lot of layers to get there.”41 Strauss’s responses to the material before him that were life-and-death matters to creatives were, they felt, at once too personal and too generic, too personal in the sense that he was fifty-one and single, and he would say, “‘Would I want to watch this?’ Well, maybe you wouldn’t, but we’re not actually making them for you. We’re making them for six- to fourteen-year-old kids.” And too generic in the sense that they seemed like he had spent too much time reading screenwriting gurus like Syd Fields or Bob McKee: “We need to understand more about this character’s emotional journey,” “We need to understand more about the backstory to this character.” The notes read like a checklist: “Emotional journey,” check; “Backstory,” check.
None of this helped to solve the overall problem of what that Disney+ programming should be. On the one hand, there were powerful executives like Gary Marsh, head of the Disney Channel, who had a very “conservative view of what content would work for kids,” remembers a company veteran, “and much of it was, Let’s do what we’ve done in the past. And that’s rebooting the shows they had been making for fifteen years.” For them, that meant lots of prequels and sequels.
On the other hand, there were dissenters who felt that sticking to the same stories over and over again was a losing formula. Explains Kanter, “Disney is filled with people who have dreamed of working there from the time they were six years old. They want to go to Disneyland and look up and see the light in Walt’s office. Once when I was going through Customs, they asked me, ‘Where do you work?’ And I went, ‘The Walt Disney Company.’ They beamed and said, ‘Oh my God, the happiest place on earth.’”42 But if Disney were going to develop the happiest streaming service on earth, she goes on, “You were going to have to bring in people other than just the ardent Disney fans, and that meant millennials, that meant single people, and people who wouldn’t necessarily show up at a Disney movie.”
Which was it going to be, the old way or the new? Backward or forward? Or just standing still, frozen like Anna’s heart in the 2013 Disney hit Frozen?
The muddle at the top over the direction of Disney+ trickled down through the ranks and wreaked havoc with some of its biggest hits, most prominently Lizzie McGuire. The original Lizzie McGuire premiered in 2001. It starred fifteen-year-old Hilary Duff, who was so popular that Vanity Fair called her the “Tween Queen” and put her on the July 2003 cover with a handful of other junior stars. From 2001 to 2004, Duff’s thirteen-year-old Lizzie negotiated the fraught journey from tween to teen—pimples, first dates, training bras, bf’s and gf’s, school, parents, and the pressure to be popular. Like other Disney productions, it is riddled with upbeat Life Lessons like “Be nice,” “Tell the truth,” “Obey your parents,” “Treat everyone as equals.” Perceived betrayals are not real betrayals, never motivated by real malice, but by misunderstandings, adolescent confusion, or miscommunication.
Terri Minsky wrote the pilot, as well as one other episode, and was given “created by” credit before Disney-owned ABC picked up another pilot of hers and she was taken off Lizzie, but nevertheless she had become synonymous with it. Minsky confesses, “I don’t know shit about teenagers,” but her script was nominated by the Writers Guild of America.43
Lizzie McGuire was a cash cow, and spun off at least twelve books, published, naturally, by Disney Press; a soundtrack that went platinum, issued, naturally by Disney’s Buena Vista Music Group; and a feature film, produced and released, naturally, by Disney’s movie division. The consumer products division marketed and licensed Lizzie dolls, sleeping bags, pencils, notebooks, and a clothing line. Disney milked it like Clarabelle, and the franchise raked in an estimated $100 million.
Lizzie McGuire was so successful that, looking for surefire hits without stepping outside of Disneyland, the company rebooted it for Disney+, picking up Lizzie seventeen years after the original had ended, when she was thirty years old. Minsky was again hired to write and run. The script for the pilot is a fizzy, light-as-air confection filled with witty banter that at its best is in shouting distance of the screwball comedies of the 1940s, but unfortunately for Minsky and the show, “screw” was the operative term. As an adult, Lizzie has adult problems that are different from pimples and training bras. She is living in New York City with a boyfriend who runs a hip restaurant in Brooklyn. She discovers, however, that he has someone on the side: her best friend.
The reboot had hit written all over it, but it wasn’t family-friendly enough for Disney. When Lizzie’s boyfriend cheats on her, it’s a real betrayal, not a faux betrayal that can be explained away. Worse, Lizzie was to have a gay roommate, and sleep with her old high school boyfriend. Then there were the three naughty words in the script for the second episode, where characters sing a bar or two of “Dance: Ten, Looks: Three” from the musical A Chorus Line. Unfortunately, the three words they chose were “tits and ass.” When the second episode was shot, those words were gone. Infidelity, promiscuity, off-color language, and homosexuality—it was all too much.
If there was a tug-of-war between the Disney Channel and Disney+, the Disney Channel was winning. Even though Lizzie was thirty, she was supposed to behave as if she were still thirteen. According to one person attached to the show, “There was never any discussion about having it be for a family audience. They knew about it, they approved it, they applauded it, they presented it.”44 Adds actor Robert Carradine, who played Lizzie’s dad, the cast did two read-throughs of the script, and “There were literally three rows of chairs and in each chair was . . . a Disney executive. I mean, there were 25 of them . . . and they were laughing their asses off.”45
Nonetheless, Disney cited the dread phrase “creative differences” and paused the show, even though, according to one account, no one in a position of authority at Disney+ had ever said, “We want this, we don’t want that” at the development stage, but instead waited until the first season was in the can to lay down the law. Says the source, “You don’t give notes on the completed show, you give notes on the script so that when you shoot the show you know what they want. That’s how you do television.”46 Disney fired Minsky and looked for another writer, but when Duff refused to do the reboot without Minsky, they killed it.
