Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
53 published records
01 / belief
“Bob, and he recounts all of this in Ride of a Lifetime, comes up with, I think, one of the most brilliant campaign framings that I have ever heard.”
02 / uncertainty
“The cable side is declining, but the thesis is maybe they can, using the ESPN streaming service, I don't know that Disney would acknowledge that as a declining asset.”
03 / commitment
“Everybody remembers what just happened to the music industry with Napster. Bob is saying, no, we are going to embrace technology.”
04 / uncertainty
“Sure, people are churning off cable, but I don't know, that's manageable as long as your costs stay fixed.”
05 / belief
“Like himself? But I think really, like, what this is really about and Roy's superpower for Disney was that even if he wasn't, you know, the best executive or leader or in touch with the marketplace, as evidenced by the total flop of "Fantasia 2000.”
06 / belief
“The whole thing feels like a high-wire act. And right when we got to Snow White's box office numbers, we realized that a bunch of authoritative sources listed $8 million as the revenue for Snow White's box office in its original release.”
07 / belief
“I think consumers have had some version of that complaint about Disney, ever since Michael Eisner took over in 1984.”
08 / belief
“' Like, Disney Animation is so important to where we all came from in the world, and they fly down and they meet with people and they see, 'Oh, there's actually great talent here, they're just not being led well, and we think we can apply our process and institute a brain trust and change the physical construction of the building and bring in the Pixar way and make this great again.”
09 / belief
“Iron Man had come out. I think a couple of others. And had been hits, but nobody could see what Marvel would end up becoming under Disney.”
10 / belief
“From the outside, we think about the Walt Disney Company as these movies and box office, and that is not the business.”
11 / evaluation
“The Lucasfilm guys are wondering what's going on, and it turns out this is right in the middle of when Steve is getting fired from Apple and ousted from his own company.”
12 / belief
“Avengers: Endgame, which was the 2nd highest grossing film of all time, 2nd only to Avatar, I think.”
13 / uncertainty
“I mean, you can criticize them all you want today for raising prices, but they had, I don't know, 5 to 10x of you can raise the price and it wouldn't impact demand for a second back then.”
14 / observation
“Jack Dorsey happens to also be on the Disney board at the time. So they basically get all the way to a deal.”
15 / belief
“I think there was some dilution, so it wasn't quite a 25x, closer to a 20x of the stock.”
16 / uncertainty
“I guess in theory, like Nabisco was going to get some advertising synergies for their CPG products? I don't know.”
17 / uncertainty
“I haven't been in, I don't know, 15 years or something, but I have a visceral memory of the parade of animals walking down the aisle and just how uniquely they did the costume designs with the faces of the animals that sort of hover above their heads.”
18 / commitment
“We're going to stand and fight toe to toe. We are going to build our own direct-to-consumer streaming company.”
19 / belief
“I remember watching the Obi-Wan TV show on Disney+ and being like, oh man, that kind of shatters how I think about Obi-Wan.”
20 / uncertainty
“Again, I don't know that I actually could come up with a different, better strategy.”
21 / belief
“I would argue, again, very different dynamics, but the same version of the story.”
22 / commitment
“David and I are going to have a live conversation going behind the scenes of Acquired.”
23 / belief
“I think the most interesting part of this is they then take the storyboards and put them together in a story reel where they're able to watch it like a movie, even though they're still frames, and they either narrate over it or they do temp dialogue on top.”
24 / belief
“Yep. So heading into 2022, Bob Chapek does a reorg, basically reorging the entire company around the streaming strategy, consolidates all the studios altogether into one reporting segment, Disney Media, I think, D-Med.”
25 / belief
“I think really it was another version of the same thesis of Pixar, which was there are great stories and storytellers here and let's give them a bigger canvas to paint on.”
26 / belief
“Yep. Well, I think that is probably the perfect tee-up to transition to analysis.”
27 / uncertainty
“Could you run a high-quality skinny service that reaches, I don't know, 30 to 50 million people who really just want the straight drip of Disney, but also make hundreds of millions of dollars licensing that content elsewhere, but just kind of spreading it around to make sure that when you have a big thing that you think is the equivalent of a box office hit, you do release it on Netflix to their 350-ish million people.”
28 / observation
“The only way to answer this question is to answer it with a real thing they could have done differently, because do nothing was not actually an answer.”
29 / belief
“Starwave was basically a web developer that they, I think, paid a couple hundred million dollars for.”
30 / belief
“One of his first calls after he gets the news on, I think, a Sunday afternoon is to Steve Jobs, the then CEO of Pixar, in addition to being the CEO of Apple.”
31 / belief
“You said, quote, "One reason to doubt it—it being Disney+—is, I think, Disney may be underestimating just how much content people need to stay satiated.”
32 / belief
“Yep. And then their first— when they spun out of baseball, they, I think, stood up the streaming backend for the then fledgling HBO Now.”
33 / commitment
“There's even a quote in Bob Iger's book, which we haven't talked about Bob yet, but we will.”
34 / belief
“One of the first things they do that ends up, I think, really setting up all the following success that Eisner and Wells and Katzenberg have is they raise the ticket prices at Disneyland and Disney World.”
35 / belief
“The Disney brand has something to lose. And so if you have a bunch of bombs in a row, I think less of the Disney brand, which again takes away your compounding competitive advantage.”
36 / observation
“I mean, the only way this story could get any more awesome is if they somehow beat Disney at their own game, got bought by Disney, breathed new life into the core of the company, and Steve Jobs became the largest shareholder of Disney itself.”
37 / uncertainty
“The B-team is clearly working on the thing that's going to be lower budget, lower distribution, direct-to-video. We don't know how to do it.”
38 / belief
“I think you can make an argument that ABC fits in with The Walt Disney Company and the Disney flywheel.”
39 / observation
“The only way for a company like Disney to hope to try and still be relevant is to go back to making the very best content.”
40 / belief
“Yep. And I think Steve is so surprised that it opens the door and it leads to this great relationship between the two of them.”
41 / belief
“Even more than that, I think for a lot of startup cable networks, the dollars went the other way.”
42 / belief
“Vis-à-vis streaming, I suspect part of that analysis also led them to the conclusion that, hey, our library just isn't strong enough to be compelling as a streaming product.”
43 / observation
“Pixar's highest grossing film yet, and Disney learns all the way to the bank that sequels can be real profitable.”
44 / preference
“To Bill Block, who formerly led Miramax, to Ben Thompson for his exceptional analysis of Disney over the last decade that inspired a lot of my thinking. I think I read every Strategery piece on the company to prepare for this.”
45 / evaluation
“Honestly, for Roy and for Stanley and their Save Disney Campaign, it was the best thing that could have happened because to many people, they look at this and they're like, how low has The Walt Disney Company fallen?”
46 / evaluation
“But also Michael made one of the greatest acquisitions of all time in the second 10 years. And because of all the drama, doesn't get anywhere near enough credit for it.”
47 / evaluation
“Michael is supposed to get the job that Barry had as chairman of the movie studio over at Paramount, and he doesn't get that job largely because of internal politics and who's making how much money, those sort of games.”
48 / prediction
“Coco and Encanto are probably the best shots at it, maybe Elemental. But it's interesting because those, those did not have big box offices.”
49 / prediction
“It doesn't matter because the next year Nabisco gets taken private by KKR in the Barbarians at the Gate, you know, largest deal in history.”
50 / prediction
“They took those kind of rebuilding years, 5, 6 years in the middle, had a pandemic in the middle of it that shut down all their parks. But I think in 2026, it's looking like they'll set a brand new net income record ever based on the way it's trending.”
51 / evaluation
“There are a few things left, but Iger kind of saw this before anyone else, went in with a bigger checkbook than I think a lot of people would have been willing to go in with, diluted Disney to do it.”
52 / evaluation
“It's going away. They had a very profitable box office, especially in the golden era where you could make and market a film like Avengers, the original one, for, I don't know, $200, $300 million and then gross $1.”
53 / prediction
“Yep. I still think it probably doesn't work. And the reason is the algorithms. Netflix is not the movie theater.”