It is no surprise that of recent, the Disney Corporation has recently been on a decline, taking the blows of much criticism. Many preach that Disney has lost its touch, overall straying from its extremely creative and famous style of storytelling. The classics and action-packed, childly simple films seem to be a thing of the past. Instead, under new leadership, Disney has taken a turn for the worse trying to implement many woke and political aspects into their movies. This has ultimately removed the innocence and simplicity of Disney movies leaving them in a difficult pit after receiving immense amounts of backlash. 

February 25, 2020, marks the day of a significant change for Disney, the former CEO Robert Iger abruptly stepped down from his position, and within the same day, he was replaced by Bob Chapek. Chapek had many different leadership roles across Disney and was seen as experienced enough to take on the leadership role after Iger’s resignation. The switch was not received well amongst the people and the criticism rolled in in mass waves. Ever since the change in leadership Disney as a whole began to slowly decline and stray away from what it once was. 

Disney was struck hard in many different ways but most noticeably they received extreme backlash, particularly in the film and movie industry. Under Iger’s leadership though, Disney was on top of the world, setting a new box office record in 2019 accumulating $11 billion across the movies they released that year. Post-CEO change, Bob Chapek and Disney had a massive downfall in the box office, only accumulating $2.6 billion in 2020 compared to 2019’s massive income. The numbers don’t lie, Disney was critically underperforming under Chapek, and fewer and fewer hits were being produced.

In 2019 alone. Disney released 7 films that all accumulated over $1 billion marking the high point for Disney. The most successful movie that year, Avengers Endgame was released with a $356 million budget, breaking the record for the most expensive budget for a Disney film since Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. The film produced a whopping $357 million on its debut achieving an incredible feat of breaking even solely on its release. Endgame in total made around $2.4 billion worldwide marking it as the second highest-grossing movie of all time behind Avatar. Furthermore, under Iger, hit after hit was being produced such as Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker ($875 million), Aladdin Live Action ($983 million), and Black Panther ($1.1 billion), and several more films exceeding $1 billion. Disney saw much success and was seemingly at its peak under the CEOship of Robert Iger, the film industry was up big time but Disney also saw success in the acquisitions of 20th Century Fox in 2019 and the Opening of Disney+. DIsney+ was a massive success accumulating $4.5 billion in its first year and raising Disney’s stock value from $48 billion in 2005 to over $250 billion in 2020. Overall Disney was a massive global success under Robert Iger and truly stuck to the creative storytelling that Disney has portrayed for so many years. Below are the statistics of Disney movies released under the leadership of Robert Iger.

However, despite the extreme success of Disney for many years prior it all took a turn for the worse when Chapek took hold of the CEO position. With high expectations to further build up the company on the platform Iger had left him were put on him and quite the opposite occurred. Under Chapek’s leadership, Disney released failure after failure and the quality of films declined enormously. Whether from Marvel to animated films there seemed to be no success and these films often portrayed very obvious woke ideologies that quickly received backlash and criticism. For example, the film Eternals was one of the first Marvel movies released in 2021 with a main character who was gay and other woke elements leading this film to become one of the worst and lowest-grossing Marvel movies ever. Eternals had a budget of $236 million and accumulated an unflattering total of $402 million worldwide, an extremely unsuccessful total for such a large budget as well as unflattering for a Marvel movie. Where Disney took the most criticism was the releases of its animated films, Lightyear and Turning Red were two Disney animated films that truly changed the perception of Disney. Turning Red had many confusing aspects and woke tendencies in the film and ultimately went negative, losing a staggering $154 million at the box office. Lightyear on the other hand barely broke even only gaining $26 million. Below is another chart revealing the statistics of movies released under Bob Chapek.

Many parents and Disney enjoyers complained about their films losing their creativity and touch, they turned away from what made Disney memorable and haven’t recovered yet. The public is outraged and has let Disney feel it, the mass underperformance of the company has shown through its recent works. It is quite interesting that even in a time of such a “woke” society it seems that these ideologies do not merge well when implemented in Disney films. They attempted to be “inclusive” with these implications but it is simply not what the public wants to see. It seems that if Disney wants to return to its formal glory it must take action in reverting back to its infamous pure story-telling ways.