Former Disney CEO Bob Chapek is out for blood.
The latest salacious excerpt from his hotly anticipated forthcoming memoir “Behind the Castle Walls: My Thirty Years at the Happiest Place on Earth,” recounts how Chapek was coldly fired from his role as CEO with a phone call and how he believes that he was fired because of intervention from Bob Iger, the CEO who had appointed Chapek to the top job.
“I believe the real reason I got fired lay with Iger. From the moment he announced my appointment, he clearly regretted it and seemed to initiate a relentless three-year campaign to push me out,” Chapek wrote in a passage excerpted by Vanity Fair. “From day one as CEO, I had respected the board’s decision to have him remain as executive chairman, directing creative endeavors and overseeing the transition until late 2021. I’d always made it clear I had big shoes to fill. But I’d never expected to endure a drawn-out, purposeful undoing of my leadership.”
Chapek also recounts going to Iger’s official retirement party, and sidestepping a fan event in Orlando (Josh D’Amaro, now the current CEO of Disney, filled in). He said that Iger made a cheap shot at him, that Iger’s wife Willow Bay was more interested in talking to legendary Disney executive Thomas Schumacher (understandable) and the fact that, during his grand exit speech, Iger never even mentioned Chapek by name, instead cutting the speech off early. (There were contemporaneous reports of this dinner; at least we know the source now.)
“That moment encapsulates how Iger treated our professional transition. He could have said, I turn the reins over to my successor, and I wish him all the luck in the world,” Chapek wrote. “That’s all he had to say. It didn’t need to be an endorsement. It just didn’t need to be venomous. He couldn’t even stay neutral. That proved too much for him. He had to disrespect me and my background.”
During his brief, disastrous tenure as CEO, Chapek said, “Iger seemed to spend his time finding ways to politically outmaneuver and undermine me.”
“Throughout the pandemic, he never missed an opportunity to imply he could do better. He interjected himself publicly in a way that would of course blow up on me, as I believe it was intended to, in the company’s response to the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill,” Chapek wrote. “While I was under pressure to keep the company afloat with no revenue and mounting debt, he appeared to actively work against me. As I pushed for bold streaming strategies to transform Disney into a streaming media powerhouse, he fueled an ego-driven power struggle.”
Chapek continued: “Iger told people that naming me his successor was one of the worst decisions he’d ever made, and he returned to the top by working against me every step of the way.”
What’s so fascinating about Chapek’s recounting of events in excerpts released so far is his lack of accountability or even acknowledgement that his time as CEO, defined by a series of missteps and outright boondoggles, was ever his fault. He got into a bitter public feud with Scarlett Johansson, one of the company’s biggest and most important stars, after sending “Black Widow” to Disney+; made a catastrophic response to the Don’t Say Gay bill that sent the company into another war with Ron DeSantis; devalued most of the Disney’s most storied brands with an emphasis on streaming content; made the parks a pricier and more inhospitable experience, using the COVID-19 shutdown to strip longstanding perks; furloughed or fired thousands of employees (“cast members” in Disney-speak) during the pandemic; and more.
Elsewhere in the excerpt he recounts giving Iger a coin for the new super-yacht he was building. “After that moment passed, I went back to running the company, and I believe he went back to trying to get me fired,” Chapek wrote.
“Behind the Castle Walls,” written with Don Yaeger, will be published by Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books on September 29.
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