100 time December 23–30, 2019
As history will show, the auricles delivered.
Disney+ signed up 10 million people by the day
after its Nov. 12 launch. It is not yet a threat
to the big tech companies that dominate the
stream: Netflix has 158.3 million subscribers,
Amazon Prime has 101 million, and Google’s
YouTube has about 2 billion users a month.
But if streaming is the future of entertainment,
Disney—the ultimate legacy player—now has a
credible vessel in which to get there.
Iger’s tenure as the leader of the world’s
most lucrative dream factory has been one
long CEO highlight reel. But 2019 was an apex
year, when many of his carefully incubated eggs
hatched. Creativity is a messy affair, technology
is an expensive, glitchy one, and business plans,
like military campaigns, rarely survive the first
battle. Yet in 2019, Iger managed to blend all
three into one epic, deal-packed 12 months.
And in a year when the tide has shifted against
Big Business, Big Media and Big Tech, Iger has
transformed his enormous media company into
a gargantuan media and tech business while
ensuring that the Walt Disney Co.’s products
remain widely beloved. As other corporate
chiefs face steepening criticism, the worst thing
he’s accused of is being a promising presiden-
tial candidate. He has rebuffed the idea. Why
bother? In the post-information age, myth-
makers carry more weight than lawmakers.
In many ways, Iger is the Western culture’s
Secretary of Stories, with the power to choose
what narratives are given the most resources.
“I think the Disney+ launch has been amaz-
ing,” says Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who
was on the company’s board from 2010 to 2018.
“It’s a big risk, but Bob’s really good at under-
standing the landscape further out as well as ex-
ecuting a strategy. It’s rare to be able to do both.”
“This has been probably one of the most
productive years we’ve had as a company in
the 15 years that I’ve been in this job,” says
Iger, 68, who lives in L.A., but is in his native
New York to host an East Coast board meet-
ing. “This time last year, we had not closed the
deal for Fox,” he says, referring to the $71 bil-
lion acquisition of most of Rupert Murdoch’s
entertainment assets. “We had not opened up
two Star Wars Lands, we had not launched Dis-
ney+. We had not closed the deal for control
of Hulu.” Iger was also not yet a best-selling
author. His seven-figure earnings from his
memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime, are going to-
ward journalism scholarships.
Iger managed all those moving parts while
still making moving pictures. Even before
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker arrives, Walt
Disney Studios has already released six of the
eight most lucrative movies of 2019, and broken
the $10 billion global box office barrier. Aveng-
ers: Endgame is now the highest-grossing movie
of all time, selling $2.8 billion worth of tickets
globally since it was released in April. Inves-
tors are thrilled; the stock is up 34% this year.
The entertainment business isn’t just about
money, though. When Disney generates a suc-
cessful franchise, the characters and myths it
creates occupy the culture to a degree that they
can amplify or dampen people’s understand-
ing of who they are and what they stand for.
Movies like Black Panther and Frozen take up
so much of the national attention span that the
communities and identities those films portray
become less other, more central.
Of course, not everyone celebrates Iger’s
choices. Many bemoan Disney’s blanding ef-
fect on the culture—including director Mar-
tin Scorsese, who in November wrote in an ex-
coriating New York Times op-ed that movies
from Disney’s Marvel studio lacked “revela-
tion, mystery or genuine emotional danger.”
He claimed that the focus on franchises—a key
Iger strategy—was contributing to a situation
that “was brutal and inhospitable to art.”
Iger, famous for his Mandalorian-like imper-
turbability, calls Scorsese’s comments “nasty”
and “not fair to the people who are making the
movies,” but brushes them off. “If Marty Scors-
ese wants to be in the business of taking artis-
tic risk, all power to him,” he says. “It doesn’t
mean that what we’re doing isn’t art.” In true
Hollywood fashion, Iger says his people and
Marty’s people are arranging a get-together.
Whenever he’s accused of taking no risks, Iger
points to Black Panther, which he considers one
of his top five career achievements. “I expected
Bob’s [advice] to be more conservative, but it
was actually the opposite,” says Panther direc-
tor Ryan Coogler. “He wanted us to be more ag-
gressive and ambitious.” Iger encouraged him to
build out the theme of transgenerational trauma
as it relates to race. “He wasn’t afraid from a
cultural standpoint or a business standpoint.”
Nearly every story about Iger’s tenure at
Disney contains a variant of the sentence This
is his biggest gamble yet. In 2006, he made a
$7.4 billion deal to buy Pixar from a guy who
hated Disney. Then he bought Marvel, a com-
pany built on the mercurial fantasies of adoles-
cent males, then Lucasfilm, when the Star Wars
stories seemed burned out. And this March,
he persuaded the mulish Murdoch to sell him
nearly all his marshmallows too.
Disney+, however, makes those other bets
look penny-ante. Iger had slowly and somewhatCREATURE
CURATOR
Like Walt Disney,
in whose shadow
he stands, Iger loves
a good character(^2019) BUSINESSPERSON OF THE YEAR