Why Bob Iger’s strategy for the next decade of growth at Disney promises a magic carpet ride for the Magic Kingdom’s future

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Steven Tian

As the heated proxy fight between activist investor Nelson Peltz and Disney’s board reaches its grand finale this week, it’s easy to forget that amidst the gripping drama of the fight for control of Disney, and a fusillade of personal barbs from both sides, the proxy fight is nothing more than a time-consuming distraction for CEO Bob Iger, who is running Disney at a time when the entire traditional media and entertainment industry is under siege with an unprecedented array of competitive threats from Big Tech and its disruption.

Already, we have shown how, in terms of their past performance, Peltz and Disney CEO Bob Iger could not be more different. While Peltz is one of the chronically poorest-performing activist investors, with a long history of destroying value when he sits on boards, Iger has towered over media peers in stock performance across his two stints as CEO, generating over $160 billion in shareholder value, with Disney being the top-performing stock on the Dow this year.

Looking beyond past performance, and towards the future of Disney, Iger is doing more than keeping the lights on: he is pulling off one of the most remarkable turnaround and transformation stories in media and entertainment history. A close look at Bob Iger’s strategic roadmap for the next decade of growth across business lines at Disney clearly shows that if there is any traditional media company that will emerge from the streaming era with even greater profitability than its traditional linear and cable businesses ever achieved, it will be Disney.

Streaming: Disney was first mover among traditional media peers thanks to Iger’s prescience

Over a decade ago, Bob Iger was one of the first media executives to see the decline of the traditional “linear bundle” coming. Observers not steeped in the media business may not understand just how lucrative the linear bundle was for traditional media companies, as they raked in windfall advertising revenue from advertisers on top of “carriage fees” for providing content to cable customers. But with the popularization of streaming and subsequent cord-cutting, more customers are canceling their cable TV packages, which leads many media analysts to believe that the linear bundle business model is now in secular decline.

Unlike some of his media industry peers who were disrupted and caught off balance, Iger sought to be a disruptor, proactively preparing for a world where the linear business is not as strong as it used to be, and leaning into the cable-to-streaming migration early on. When Iger launched the flagship Disney+ streaming service in 2019, although a chorus of critics said at the time that Disney could never successfully launch a streaming platform, 10 million subscribers signed up on the first day alone, and 100 million within the first 15 months before Iger left office.

Iger had already been preparing for its launch for years, buying a stake in streaming tech company BAMTech in 2017. As a result of Iger’s vision and prescience, Disney is way ahead of traditional media peers in bridging the linear-to-streaming transition, with its streaming business driving billions more in revenue than any of its legacy competitors. Furthermore, Disney’s streaming platforms boast a total subscriber count greater than all its traditional media peers combined, with 190 million global subscribers across the Disney streaming platforms (compared to less than 100 million for Max run by Warner Brothers Discovery; ~60 million on Paramount+, and ~30 million on Peacock, run by Comcast’s NBC Universal; and dwarfing the 25 million subscribers of the much-ballyhooed Apple TV).

While Netflix remains in the lead with ~250 million subscribers, Disney is making fast progress, with even Netflix acknowledging that “it will be….the two of us duking it out for a long time.”

Disney possesses many significant advantages that Netflix does not have, including a deeper historical library and more timeless franchises with synergies across consumer products and parks and resorts, as well as pure scale–despite vastly divergent stock market valuations.

Disney’s total net income surpassed that of Netflix’s last year, with a revenue base three times larger. Not to mention Disney’s creative engine, when working at full force, remains unparalleled: Some may be surprised to know that in 2023, the first full year of Iger’s return, six of the top 10 most streamed movies across all streaming platforms in the U.S. belonged to Disney.

Streaming: Still potential for exponential future revenue growth ahead

Despite Disney’s success in signing up subscribers, many analysts fear that the monetization opportunities from the streaming era will never catch up to the windfall profits historically reaped by media and entertainment companies from the traditional linear/cable bundle–and that revenue growth will be hard to drive moving forward amidst shrinking profit margins. But it may be too early to ring the death knell of media and entertainment profitability. It’s clear that the streaming business is still in its earliest innings of development. Indeed, Iger is the first to acknowledge that streaming is still a “nascent” business for Disney, merely four years old, and that Disney is still learning in real time and making in-game adjustments.

Already, Iger has overseen dramatic improvements in Disney’s streaming business–including reducing expenses and scaling the pricing structure appropriately–to build the streaming platforms toward long-term growth and profitability. As a result, the streaming business has inflected from generating $2 billion a year in losses when it started in 2019 to full profitability this year. Iger has managed the growth of the streaming platforms responsibly, far outpacing the decline of the linear business, without falling into the self-destructive streaming arms-race war that his predecessor Bob Chapek fell into, cannibalizing the rest of the company and wrestling control out of the hands of creative officials into the hands of hand-picked deputy Kareem Daniel to fill Disney+ with too much poor quality content nobody wanted to watch.

However, there are abundant massive untapped opportunities for Disney to accelerate not only subscriber growth but also revenue and margin growth. In many public interviews, Iger has identified streaming advertising revenue as an area where there is potential for exponential growth, especially with more personalized and targeted digital advertising which is far more valuable to advertisers than the old model of generic ads on linear TV. Growth in streaming advertising revenue could really accelerate if Disney continues to widen the pricing gap between its ad-free and ad-supported streaming subscriptions, as virtually all its competitors have done. It is surprising that Disney still has the single cheapest ad-free streaming monthly subscription across its peer competitors, with the $13.99 Disney+ ad-free subscription cheaper than Netflix’s $15.49 ad-free subscription and cheaper than Max’s $15.99 ad-free subscription. It is also surprising that Disney does not have a premium tier, while competitors such as Netflix rake in profits from its $22.99 premium version and Max’s $19.99 premium version. At least on paper, Disney has considerable room to raise prices on its ad-free subscription. Raising prices does not have to hurt accessibility and affordability: The ad-supported subscription tier of Disney+ at $7.99 remains highly affordable for consumers and highly accretive to Disney’s advertising revenue.

There are also untapped opportunities from the planned full integration of Hulu with Disney’s fully-owned streaming platforms, Disney+ and ESPN+, later this year, once Disney closes on its agreement to purchase full ownership in Hulu from Comcast.

That Disney even owns Hulu to begin with is a testament to Iger’s prescience. Had Iger not purchased 21st Century Fox from Rupert Murdoch in 2018, Comcast would have bought Fox, with Hulu as a part of Fox, and Comcast would very likely be leading Disney in streaming today rather than trailing far behind with only ~30 million subscribers on Peacock, less than a sixth of Disney’s subscriber count. Perhaps the most compelling critique of Iger’s Fox deal is that maybe he ought to have pursued an acquisition of Time Warner from its legendary CEO Jeff Bewkes in lieu of 21st Century Fox, as the Time Warner assets including HBO, and the Warner Bros. content library, might have been a better match with Disney’s brand family.

Another underappreciated opportunity arises simply from the gradual maturation of the nascent streaming industry. The days of streaming arms-wars, with streaming losses totaling over $10 billion in 2022 across traditional media companies, are likely over amidst more disciplined content creation and spending. And while Big Tech companies continue to loom large with forays into the media and entertainment business, many of their streaming platforms are hardly getting off the ground, hamstrung by a lack of access to content. Thanks to the unfavorable antitrust regulatory climate, it is hard to see how they will be able to purchase the content libraries they so desperately need through inorganic mergers and acquisitions, providing significant competitive advantages to Disney alongside Netflix with their leading streaming platforms.

Linear: Bridging the transition and cutting costs while smartly avoiding selling at depressed prices

Iger has managed to navigate the streaming revolution in a way that genuinely bridges the transition from linear and allows the linear businesses to continue to flourish, as a best-of-both-worlds scenario.

Although the linear business model is under severe strain, Disney’s ABC and ABC-owned television stations continue to bring in healthy revenues and profits, and there is some revenue growth potential should the market for linear advertising recover to more normalized levels, as many expect it will, especially with a presidential election (and related advertising spending) looming this fall.

Iger has smartly refused to sell at depressed prices, despite an abundance of offers from prospective buyers, while focusing on bringing down costs, with a large chunk of Disney’s $7.5 billion in cost savings coming out of linear. Iger is also streamlining the linear business to focus on core channels, cutting down on tertiary channels with lesser economics and viability moving forward.

Disney’s recent negotiations with Charter provided a win-win blueprint for how Disney can continue to support the traditional linear business model while also bridging the gap to streaming smoothly, with Disney providing discounted ad-supported Disney+ streaming subscriptions to Charter customers at wholesale rates, providing cable customers an easy and affordable streaming option to complement their existing cable subscription.

Studios: Focusing on quality, not quantity

During Bob Iger’s first term as CEO, Disney produced eight of the top 10, and 13 of the top 20, biggest box office openings of all time, all of which crossed $1 billion in box office revenues. In contrast, Bob Chapek produced zero films crossing $1 billion.

Unlike Chapek, who centralized authority and alienated creative talent with high-profile spats, Iger understands that Disney at its core is a storytelling company–and knows how to make good movies.

As a part of that, Iger has prioritized focusing on quality over quantity. As he candidly said, “Volume sometimes can be detrimental to quality. And in our zeal to greatly increase volume, some of our studios lost a little focus. So the first step we’ve taken is we’ve reduced volume. We’ve reduced output, particularly at Marvel”.

Disney Experiences (Parks & Resorts): Setting new records across the board

The top line numbers across Disney Experiences, including its prized parks & resorts, speak for themselves: Not only are new attendance records being set continually, with attendance twice what it was before the pandemic domestically, but 2023 represented all-time records in revenue, operating income, and operating margin.

Even more importantly, Iger recognizes the essential importance of parks and resorts to the Disney brand and to families across the world, moderating the draconian and unpopular consumer price increases seen under his predecessor Chapek, who used price hikes at parks as the cookie jar to backfill streaming losses.

Instead of cannibalizing parks and resorts to fund pet projects, Iger is investing in both growth and affordability, and his plans to invest $60 billion in continued growth over the next decade reflects the fact that parks and resorts have seen some of the highest returns on invested capital across any business line at Disney over the last decade–and is one of the few business lines which are impervious to competition from Big Tech companies.

Sports: Standing tall in a sea of tremendous choice

As Iger likes to quip, “Sports continues to stand tall in a sea of tremendous choice” within entertainment, and Iger has committed to Disney’s future in sports by building out ESPN as the single leading digital sports platform.

New add-ons such as ESPN Bets reflect this vision, but this is only the tip of the iceberg: The launch of the immersive flagship ESPN direct-to-consumer product next year is expected to include integrated betting, fantasy, shopping, statistics, and customization and personalization designed to appeal to every sports fan, from casual followers to die-hards. Iger has smartly resisted bringing in strategic partners with questionable value-add or selling off ESPN on the cheap.

Furthermore, Disney’s new sports joint venture with Fox and Warner Brothers Discovery is off to a strong start with the appointment of veteran Apple executive Pete Distad as its head. The bundling of sports content will not only alleviate existing customer frustrations but also tap into a massive growth market. After all, of 125 million households in America, more than 60 million are not in the traditional bundled cable ecosystem, and desperately searching for a way to watch more of the sports they want, on a single platform.

Disney has already found that churn rates are down significantly wherever “bundled” packages are available, so it stands to reason that further bundling will take place across streaming services and with cable customers to ensure a less confusing customer experience across the board.

New business lines such as gaming

The legendary Disney flywheel–as drawn up by Walt Disney himself–is constantly expanding, with each new business line building off and contributing to the momentum of complimentary adjacent business lines. Iger has never been afraid to take bold leaps to expand the flywheel, with masterstrokes such as Disney’s new $1.5 billion investment in video game maker Epic Games. Millennials spend as much time gaming as they do watching TV or movies, and video games represent not only a high-margin additional business for Disney, they are natural add-ons to enhance the value and depth of Disney’s existing brand-name franchises, in particular Marvel and Star Wars.

Iger’s compelling vision for the future is why even other activist investors–such as the savvy, constructive Mason Morfit of ValueAct, who was up 46% last year–have come out in strong support of the Disney CEO.

Iger’s track record at Disney cannot be ignored–but he is not caught up in the past. Rather, while media analysts wring their hands on the sidelines and complain that the golden days of media and entertainment companies are over, that revenue growth will never return, or that streaming will never bring the profits that the linear bundle once did, Iger has built a thoroughly novel vision and an innovative blueprint for what a modern entertainment company should look like.

Film critic Roger Ebert once quipped, “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough!” Bob Iger’s careful growth plans across business lines will ensure that the Magic Kingdom continues on the magic carpet ride which has defined his tenure as CEO of Disney for many years to come.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the Lester Crown Professor in Management Practice and Founder and President of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute. In 2023, he was named “Management Professor of the Year” by Poets & Quants magazine.

Steven Tian is the director of research at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute and a former quantitative investment analyst with the Rockefeller Family Office.

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