By In an interview with CNBC on Thursday morning following the defeat of activist investor Nelson Peltz in a proxy fight, Disney CEO Bob Iger dismissed questions about Elon Musk’s trolling of the company.
He tells the interviewer: “There’s no relevance to The Walt Disney Company or to me. People have been coming after me and the company for years. I don’t get distracted by those things.”
Iger did however acknowledge critiques of Disney’s content in recent years as being too “woke” and company too focused on identity politics and pushing messaging in its films at the cost of actual storytelling.
Iger says the criticism may have a certain degree of merit, but it’s also an overused term that some don’t understand the definition of:
“The term woke is thrown around rather liberally, no pun intended in that regard. I think a lot of people don’t even understand really what it means.
I think the noise is sort of quieted down. I’ve been preaching this for a long time at the company before I left and since I came back then our number one goal is to entertain.
The bottom line is that infusing messaging as a sort of a number one priority in our films and TV shows is not what we’re up to. They need to be entertaining, and where the Disney company can have a positive impact on the world, whether it’s, you know, fostering acceptance and understanding of people of all different types, great.
But generally speaking, we need to be an entertainment-first company … And understanding that look, we’re trying to reach a very, very diverse audience.
And on one hand in order to do that, what you do, the stories you tell, have to really reflect the audience that you’re trying to reach, but that audience because they are so diverse, really, first and foremost, they want to be entertained, and sometimes they can’t be turned off by certain things.
And we just have to be more sensitive to the interest of a broad audience. It’s not easy, you know, so that we can’t please everybody all the time, right?”
Iger also indicating that the Disney+ service will be launching its foray into password sharing in June, with a full rollout planned by September.
Source: THR
The post Bob Iger Talks ‘Woke Disney’ Criticism appeared first on Dark Horizons.
