Yahoo Finance The sacking of a beloved British Disney boss has shocked Hollywood – but this is just the beginning
The brutal firing that took down the most powerful Brit in Hollywood is almost worthy of a film in its own right. On June 8, Peter Rice was in charge of a $10 billion annual budget, earning a reported $20 million a year and enjoying oversight of 300 TV shows across Disney platforms including ABC, the Disney Channel and Disney Plus.
The 56-year-old University of Nottingham graduate had a reputation for working well with talent (directors Baz Lurhmann and Danny Boyle were friends after he greenlit Moulin Rouge and Slumdog Millionaire), he had overseen ABC’s news as it overtook NBC in the scorched earth battle of US morning TV, and he had recently overseen acclaimed hit series like Only Murders in the Building, The Dropout and the opioid drama Dopesick.
After a seven minute meeting with Disney CEO Bob Chapek on June 9 – Hollywood sackings never take more than 10 minutes – he was out. Rice asked why, according to insiders. His contract had been renewed the previous year and three weeks earlier he and Chapek had shared a stage in New York at Disney’s impressive presentation of its forthcoming shows for advertisers. Rice, said Chapek, was not the right fit.
As Disney firings go, it’s not the most brutal. That honour might go to Michael Eisner forcing out studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg in the wake of his mentor Frank Wells’s death in a helicopter crash (said Eisner of Katzenberg, by way of justification: “I think I hate the little midget”). But this was 1994, before the internet allowed Hollywood outrage to pour forth.
Why was Rice fired? One theory posits that Chapek let Rice go because Rice was issuing woke statements attacking Florida’s Don’t Say Gay legislation whilst Chapek tried to keep quiet on the subject. “Personally, I see this law as a violation of fundamental human rights,” Rice said. “And I condemn any attempt to marginalize individuals on the basis of their identity.”
Yet the soft-spoken Rice had been a firm favourite of Rupert Murdoch, and ended up at Disney after overseeing 21st Century Fox as it was sold off to the Mouse. Rice’s father, an official with the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union, had also worked for Murdoch and helped him break the print strikes of 1986. Nothing about his background or CV screams “woke”.
Or it was about Bob Chapek worrying that Rice was after his job, seeing as Rice was well-liked while Chapek is still overcoming the PR damage done from Disney’s public legal battle over Black Widow profits with Scarlett Johansson and internal strain with Disney employees over the company’s handling of said anti-LGBT legislation?
According to Matthew Belloni, a former editor at the Hollywood Reporter and founder of LA tip sheet Puck, it’s a sign that hard-nosed Hollywood outsider Chapek “just doesn’t get content. We have the IP [Intellectual Property], he seems to be telling the town, so we’ll treat you Hollywood people however we damn well please. Actresses, creative execs, LGBTQ activists—whatever, they’re all just ‘cast members’ [the job title given to lowly Disney parks employees] whether they wear name tags or not.”
In truth, Rice was the most high-profile - and brutal - example of something that's happening all over Los Angeles in 2022. Sadly, the firings of today aren’t exactly on the level of Jack Warner - the garishly suited co-founder of Warner Bros would fire anyone who didn’t laugh at his jokes and once terminated several people just because it was Tuesday. But the Hollywood bloodbaths are back - so grab the popcorn and enjoy.
Some of the job losses are down to mergers – MGM’s president Pamela Abdy and group chair Michael DeLuca left in April, roughly a month after Amazon forked out $8.5 billion for the not-really-hitmaking studio. This being Hollywood, they turned up on June 1 at Warner Bros, replacing film chief Toby Emmerich and WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar in what is tempting to call a Kilar blow.
Meanwhile the two superagencies CAA and ICM are going through a merger so nerve wracking that… Well, imagine two vast companies whose job it is to get insecure people jobs all fighting for their jobs. “In Hollywood you get sacked for too many flops or if your boss has too many flops, or if you’re too successful or if your face doesn’t fit,” explains one studio insider. “Every top job has always been a temp job.”
These defenestrations sit neatly at the heart of Hollywood’s constant lurching dance to please us all because, as Butch Cassidy writer William Goldman famously said in his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade: “Nobody knows anything… Not one person knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.”
“Frankly, most Hollywood executives are average, meaning they don’t really move the needle one way or the other,” explains the Entertainment Strategy Guy, an anonymous LA blogger. “A very small number are elite – [former Disney head] Bob Iger was one - but most are eminently replaceable.”
This is because, says UK film analyst Stephen Follows, Hollywood is an industry unlike any other. For a start, it can’t really “test” its products before committing to making them. And even if it hits a winning streak, success isn’t guaranteed. Take Peter Rice’s pet Disney Plus, which launched the Star Wars prequel series The Mandalorian in weekly instalments in 2019. It blew the minds of critics and fans alike, subscriber numbers rose, and it looked like a genius move. The Book of Boba Fett, released in 2021, was exactly the same show but it was… I don’t know, did you see all the way to the end? 2022’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series is more of the same. Yet they’ll keep on making them because that's what subscribers expect. Will old Star Wars characters keep attracting new subscribers? That’s unclear.
“Hollywood isn’t really incentivised by money,” Follows explains, somewhat counterintuitively. “It’s incentivised by stories. Why do studios release their box office numbers? Crisps makers don’t say how many crisps they sold. It’s because the numbers aren’t the business, they’re the story.”
Follows points to the Sony email hack as proof. The info dump showed that Sony had an accurate way to predict whether a film would make money, but they routinely ignored predictions if they wanted to make a particular film. “They knew the [Danny Boyle] Steve Jobs film wouldn’t make money, but they made it anyway, and they lost what they knew they’d lose,” he explains.
Hollywood’s love of stories means it’s been in the data game since before the Internet was a twinkle in Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. Box office, takings, TV ratings… All are thrust under the noses of analysts and the public where other companies would consider this proprietary trading information. Stock market traders have sued stock exchanges for making deal information public. Which means your performance is measured in view of the world on a day by day, week by week basis.
But what is even the most talented executive to make of the data being presented to them these days? Yes, cinemas are back, but the box office has become ludicrously lopsided. In the UK this week (beginning June 10), Jurassic World Dominion and Top Gun: Maverick accounted for a whopping 91.5 per cent of the total market - fantastic news for anyone who has a huge franchise blockbuster up their sleeve, but disastrous for everybody else.
Meanwhile Silicon Valley – the data devotee – continues its desperate attempt to out-Hollywood Hollywood. The constant proliferation of in-house streaming services from Apple or Amazon means the hunger for buzzy shows and movies has become insatiable. Wall Street is looking to subscriber growth as the barometer of relevance. The story seems to be changing.
“Rice’s departure is about the collapse of everything in Hollywood,” the studio insider says. “It’s about the old business models falling apart, about studios becoming tech companies where streamers rule. It’s about the way Covid has reshaped the industry and it’s about everyone realising that the algorithm is no more accurate than anything else in understanding what on earth the public will choose to see. Otherwise, Netflix would not be suffering the problems it is right now.”
In recent weeks, there has been no better illustration of Goldman’s “nobody knows anything” mantra than the travails of Netflix. The streaming giant has spent the last few years ploughing untold millions into dreary Oscar bait (The Irishman, The Power of the Dog), with little success. As for hits such as Squid Game or The Queen’s Gambit, absolutely nobody at Netflix saw them coming; in fact, several executives were reportedly so down on Anya Taylor-Joy’s chess drama that they tried to stop it being made.
In May, the streaming service let 150 staff go after revealing it expects to lose millions of subscribers in the first half of the year. Following a stock price drop of 75 per cent, the company now plans to focus on a less is more strategy – fewer shows, larger budgets, one big movie a month. Essentially it’s becoming exactly like a Hollywood studio.
Among the casualties is Pearl, an animated series developed by Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s Archewell Productions as part of a $100 million deal. But Netflix is hardly alone in experiencing a touch of buyer’s remorse regarding “the talent”. Just last week, Warner Bros pulled the plug on a new sci-fi show from hitmaker JJ Abrams (Lost, Star Trek, Star Wars) after taking a long, hard look at his $200 million budget. Nobody, it seems, is safe from the real Hollywood cancel culture – the 10-minute meeting that ends your dreams.
Bob Chapek, the embattled Disney boss, surely knows that all too well. Shortly after he fired Peter Rice, the Disney board issued a statement of support for Chapek almost immediately – a move that resembled receiving a statement of approval from the politburo at the height of the Soviet Union’s power struggles. You know what they didn’t do? Announce that his contract – up in just a few months – would be renewed. Maybe the bloodshed isn't over yet.
