Disney CEO Bob Iger Says Disney Isn’t Woke, But Is It True Or Is He Gaslighting the Audience?

After the Disney annual shareholder meeting, Bob Iger went on a victory tour with some interviews. During the Q&A and proposal segments of the shareholder meeting, the same message came up a couple of times about Disney’s political leanings and messaging choices in entertainment. Then, on CNBC, an interview question about Disney being “woke” was brought up.

Here’s how Bob Iger responded:

..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.”

According to Merriam-Webster, the term “woke” means to be “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)”

Dictionary.com defines “woke” as “having or marked by an active awareness of systemic injustices and prejudices, especially those involving the treatment of ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities.”

By both definitions, Disney’s choices of late would appear to qualify as “woke.” When he continued his comments, it further indicated that they are indeed “woke.”

Personally, I hate the word “woke” because it is often over used but in Disney’s case I think it does fit. 

He continued saying, 

“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?”

In recent years Disney, Marvel and Lucasfilm have all actively pushed into an era that many consider “woke” messaging.

Many films and shows that performed poorly, and many felt were agenda-driven, were green-lit while Bob Iger was CEO.

Several prominent Marvel characters are now race or gender-swapped. Star Wars replaced Luke Skywalker with Rey and Leia.

Obi-Wan should have been protecting Luke, but suddenly, it’s all about little Leia. Live-action adaptations have swapped characters. Peter Pan and Wendy was more about Wendy than Pan.

And Entertainment co-chief Dana Walden openly discussed passing on a great show because it “didn’t meet the standards for inclusion” saying, “I will tell you for the first time we received some incredibly well-written scripts that did not satisfy our standards in terms of inclusion, and we passed on them.”

Here are the standards she was referring to.

Or Willow, which performed so terribly that it had to be taken down within weeks of its release. People were expecting the show to be about the titular character, and it really wasn’t.

Latoya Raveneau, then executive producer for Disney Television Animation was caught on film bragging about her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” to kids shows saying, “In my little pocket of Proud Family Disney TVA, the showrunners were super welcoming . . . to my not-at-all-secret gay agenda. Maybe it was that way in the past, but I guess something must have happened . . . and then like all that momentum that I felt, that sense of ‘I don’t have to be afraid to have these two characters kiss in the background.’ I was just, wherever I could, adding queerness. . . . No one would stop me, and no one was trying to stop me.”

Star Wars The Acolyte has been downvoted severely. 

Snow White is a disaster

The live-action ‘Snow White’ is now about a girl boss and until there was backlash the Disney said the dwarfs were going to be replaced with “magical creatures.”

Meanwhile, Disney’s box office and shows are plummeting and they are trying to walk back and reshoot current Marvel shows and films to try to mitigate the damage. 

Then there was the “reimagine tomorrow” drama. 

Or the posturing over the Parental Rights in Education bill that cost them the Reedy Creek Improvement District in Florida. 

Theme Parks

Splash Mountain is being re-themed to Princess and the Frog because it was too “racist.”  The Jungle Cruise has the natives replaced by chimpanzees and Trader Sam is no longer seen but is basically fencing the lost and found items. Disney even put out an article on D23 discussing how they wanted to make sure the animatronic chimpanzees were represented authentically. I am serious. 

Entertainment should come first.

While I agree that entertainment should always be the priority, Disney has trained its audience to expect changes, and it’s a running joke over what lazy swap they will make instead of making new stories or characters. 

For years, Disney has been diverse, but its focus was on story and characterization.

They did it well, and people loved it. However, lately, the focus has been on how diverse a film or show is rather than the story. This is clearly turning people off, including the minorities it claims to represent. 

We can’t simply blame “the bigots” because most people didn’t watch a lot of the recent films, which is why they failed. Not everyone can be “bigots” to dismiss criticism. 

Disney has definitely gone “woke” by definition.

Not because they make content that features diverse characters but because they leverage and lead with “diversity” to the point that it feels forced. As a woman, when I see the stereotypical “strong female character” tropes, I am turned off. Sadly, that’s been a big part of “Star Wars” and “Marvel” lately. 

In conclusion, no, Bob. People do understand what “woke” means. There is more than enough evidence to suggest that Disney has been so focused on the message that it’s lost the entertainment. They can easily coexist and existed for years until around eight years ago. 

Stop gaslighting your audience and just make entertaining content that happens to have diversity.