Soon after Iger retired, however, he watched his achievements crumble. The brands he had built and polished so lovingly felt mundane once you could simply stream, say, the latest Pixar offering at home. In 2022, Disney’s stock price plummeted by 40 percent. The blame couldn’t be laid entirely at Chapek’s feet. The pandemic affected every sector of the global economy, and Disney Plus, which was hemorrhaging money, was a project he had inherited from Iger. But Chapek never had the ability to weave a convincing story for anxious shareholders; that was Iger’s gift. And so, in November 2022, the
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