Dear Gossips,
The billionaire business daddies ended their fight this week, as Nicola Peltz-Beckham’s father got his ass handed to him in the proxy fight for seats on Disney’s board. I originally covered the proxy fight here, basically the whole thing boiled down to former Marvel CEO and Friend Of Trump Ike Perlmutter is still big mad that Bob Iger ousted him from Marvel in early 2023. Nelson Peltz, father of Nicola, is buddies with Ike Perlmutter, Ike threw in his substantial shares of Disney stock to pool with shares owned by Peltz’s firm, Trian Partners, and Peltz tried to get board seats for him and James Rasulo, a former Disney executive who failed to make the cut in Iger’s previous succession plan (obviously a man with no axes to grind!). But Peltz & Co. lost their bid this week, when Disney shareholders voted overwhelmingly to affirm the board slate put forth by Iger and Team Disney.
On the one hand, it’s SO BORING. On the other hand, this is estimated to be the most expensive proxy fight in history—nothing better than billionaires wasting their money on popularity contests they lose—and it was an unusually public and sh-ttalking fight, too. Reader Melanie shared some of the inside scoop from the materials Disney sent to shareholders about the proxy fight and board vote, which included THREE PAGES of receipts regarding Disney’s contact with Peltz and his plans as a potential board member. These include:
Mr. Iger asked Mr. Peltz what courses of action he would recommend to the Board to address his concerns. Mr. Peltz again offered no strategic insights or proposed courses of action [responding] that he was not there to put forth a plan…
My guy, what do you think board members do?
…re-iterating the Board’s desire to find a way to work constructively with Mr. Peltz, and to let them know that the Board has an open door and an open mind if he were willing to present his ideas to the Board…
When you’re done sulking in your room, the grownups are willing to listen to your ideas, should you, you know, have any.
Mr. Perlmutter urged Mr. Iger in the early 2010s to seriously consider [James] Rasulo as a successor, and told Mr. Iger “you broke my heart” when he was notified that Mr. Rasulo was not on a path as a potential successor to Mr. Iger.
What in the Fredo hell?
…in a two-year quest for a seat on the Disney Board, Mr. Peltz had not actually presented a single strategic idea for Disney; that his assessment of Disney seemed oblivious to the ongoing secular change in the media industry; […] that Mr. Peltz had no experience in a business that is primarily driven by creative talent and focused on delivering uniquely memorable customer experiences…
The emphasis is mine, but you get the picture—Disney business sh-ttalked Nelson Peltz for three pages and it WORKED.
But then, it was always transparent that Peltz was acting on behalf of Ike Perlmutter. He even went fully mask-off with comments about “woke” Disney, asking, “Why do I have to have a Marvel that’s all women? Not that I have anything against women, but why do I have to do that? Why can’t I have Marvels that are both? Why do I need an all-Black cast?”
This is Ike Perlmutter. In the 2010s, Iger had to tell Perlmutter to stop stalling projects like Black Panther and Captain Marvel, because Perlmutter rather famously thinks female-led superhero movies are “disasters”. He was correct in citing Electra and Catwoman as failures, but he never seemed able to see how audiences were changing. Marvel ate a lot of sh-t in the early to mid-2010s for not developing films with more diverse leads fast enough to suit changing audience tastes (Perlmutter was a huge reason for that). But when they DID get around to it, Black Panther earned over $1.3 billion at the box office. Captain Marvel earned over $1.1 billion.
Now, it is true that The Marvels flopped. But the two Black Panther movies have earned over $2.2 billion together, and based on the success of Captain Marvel in 2019, it was within reason to expect more from the sequel. Meanwhile, Black Widow and Shang-Chi were released into the unfriendly pandemic box office and still earned a combined $811 million. Going “woke” has NOT caused Marvel, or Disney, to “go broke”. Disney’s current stock price woes—they’re trading at $117 per share as of this writing—are down to debt from the Fox merger, which was compounded by the COVID crunch. But Ike Perlmutter has never been able to get over being wrong about Black Panther and Captain Marvel.
It's over for now. Peltz, and by extension Perlmutter, was thumped soundly in this shareholder vote, losing by a “substantial margin”. The vote tally will be disclosed later, but Iger wouldn’t allow crowing if he wasn’t confident the numbers will back him up. For Disney, that means Iger and the other executives can refocus on actually running the company, and for us it means…nothing, really. Nothing is changing. The same people are in charge as before. But we NOW have an image of Disney telling Nelson Peltz to either share his ideas or go the f-ck home. Can’t spell “Nelson” without taking an L.
Live long and gossip,
Sarah
