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(Maybe even more menacing is Amazon, which, as long as it keeps selling toilet paper, can afford to make as many movies as it wants.) Iger has watched two of his once powerful brands, ESPN and ABC, flounder in the era of cord cutting. Disney has wagered on content, beloved but mutable stories with loyal audiences meanwhile, Netflix has made so much money on subscriptions that it suddenly gets to spend billions on content of its own. To get the measure of Disney’s might, consider that during that same period, the other major studios-Universal, Paramount, Sony, Fox, and Warner Brothers-have collectively produced only thirteen billion-dollar movies.īut despite his success, Iger and his venerable brand face an existential threat from Silicon Valley, in particular from companies like Netflix and Amazon. In his time as CEO, Disney’s annual profit has tripled, its stock price has quadrupled, and sixteen of its films have earned more than $1 billion globally. Pixar provided a technologic boost to the sagging cornerstone of Disney’s business, animation, while all three acquisitions have brought the company vast catalogs of content not only for the big screen but for pajamas and lunch boxes and ice shows and, of course, Disney’s theme parks. His reputation rests on three critical purchases-first Pixar, the computer-animation studio then Marvel, the comic-book publisher and moviemaker and finally Lucasfilm, holder of the priceless Star Wars and Indiana Jones libraries.
It’s protective.” If that’s hard to believe, it’s because Iger has spent the last thirteen years relentlessly growing Disney, announcing plans to retire on four occasions, only to extend his reign each time.
“People think I must always be scheduled and therefore don’t try, and I like that. “I have more time than most people would imagine, and that’s a dirty little secret,” Iger confesses. But Iger can program sunrises, shooting stars, and the aurora borealis, and when his grandchildren visit from the East Coast, he can get Pinocchio to scamper across the heavens. The designers surprised him by asking NASA for a photograph of the night sky in New York City on the day he was born, which is now the planetarium’s default setting. The room’s ceiling, a programmable planetarium modeled after one at the offices of Pixar, which Iger acquired in 2006 (he pitched the idea to Disney’s board on only his second day as CEO), may be a Trojan horse in the polite battle for the most glamorously kitted-out home theater on Los Angeles’s West Side. If no one knows where Iger is, chances are he is here. We descend, finally, to his personal sanctuary, the screening room.
We walk past Iger’s prolific vegetable gardens, where the first snap peas of the season have popped, and around the citrus trees, from which he has a tendency to pluck fruit prematurely, according to his wife, Willow Bay, the face of Estée Lauder in the 1980s who went on to become a television anchor and is now dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. No, with his V-shaped chest (Iger is a famously fit 67-year-old) and well-drawn features, tinted by the violet light of the tent, he was a superhero himself: acquisitor, empire builder, and snagger of lucrative franchises. In a dark Tom Ford suit with wide lapels and a waistcoat, Iger looked rather like the hero of the Ian Fleming novels he devoured in junior high. The tiered tassels of Bassett’s marigold jumpsuit swished every which way, the jewels sewn into the bodice of Lupita Nyong’o’s Atelier Versace gown trembled excitedly, and actors in dashikis greeted executives in suits as preadolescent Marvel Comics mega-fans in glittering orthodontia swirled around them.Īs if by design, all this traffic seemed to flow toward Robert Iger, chairman and CEO of Disney, known far and wide as Bob, who was hanging at a safe distance from the step-and-repeat. The rapper Kendrick Lamar, arriving with an entourage of about fifteen, had flown in that afternoon from New York along with Janelle Monáe both had performed at the Grammys the night before. The triumphal march down Black Panther’s purple carpet and into the Dolby Theatre signaled that this was the latter, clearly-an occasion not just for Hollywood’s cyclical ritual of self-celebration but to toast a presumptive billion-dollar blockbuster written, directed, and starring people of color, a bet no studio had dared make before. “There are premieres,” said the actress Angela Bassett, “and there are premieres.”