Where this was said
Eisner's Decline & Save Disney Campaign (2001-2004)
At 1:23:50 · chapter starts 1:21:26
The late 1990s and early 2000s were a study in strategic drift. Eisner made shrewd moves (declining AOL's merger overtures before the dot-com implosion wiped out Time Warner) and disastrous ones (acquiring Infoseek and creating a Disney Internet assets tracking stock at the peak of dot-com mania). Disney Animation continued its descent, releasing films so forgettable that an entire generation — anyone born after about 1990 — has no Disney film from their childhood like Aladdin or The Lion King. September 11th, 2001 brought an immediate crisis: parks business went to near-zero, consumer spending cratered, and the Bass family — Disney's largest shareholders and Eisner's strongest supporters — faced margin calls on other investments and sold a $2 billion block of Disney shares in a single transaction. Overnight, Eisner's shareholder support vanished. The stock had already been declining for years. Then Roy E. Disney, keeper of the Disney spirit, resigned from the board in November 2003 and launched Savedisney.com — a first-of-its-kind public grassroots shareholder campaign — calling on Eisner to resign. His resignation letter cited seven specific failures including the creative brain drain, micromanagement, destruction of the Pixar relationship, and lack of a succession plan. At Disney's March 2004 annual shareholder meeting — held, hilariously, in Philadelphia, Comcast's headquarters — 43% of shareholders withheld support from Eisner.
Between 2008 and 2011, Disney's cable networks segment — roughly three-quarters of which was ESPN — accounted for 60% of the entire company's operating income, over $5 billion in profit.
In 2004, Comcast launched a $54 billion hostile takeover bid for Disney — a cable company attempting to acquire the most storied entertainment brand in America.
