On Thursday, as Hollywood actors prepared to join writers on strike, Disney CEO Bob Iger shared some fascinating thoughts about his colleagues’ goals—which he described to CNBC’s Squawk Box as “not realistic.”
Iger collected $65 million from Disney in 2018—which is 1,424 times the company’s median employee salary. (Forbes placed Iger’s net worth at around $690 million in 2019.) He retired in 2020 but returned to Disney’s helm in 2022 for a cool target annual salary of $27 million, with all bonuses. On Wednesday, he signed a contract extension that grants him $4 million more in possible bonuses, bringing the annual target to $31 million.
Speaking with CNBC, however, Iger was very concerned about writers and actors’ quest for equitable compensation—even if he swears he understands where it’s coming from.
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“It’s very disturbing to me,” Iger said. “We’ve talked about disruptive forces on this business and all the challenges we’re facing, and the recovery from COVID, which is ongoing. It’s not completely back. This is the worst time in the world to add to that disruption.”
One major disruptive force on the industry over the past decade has been streaming, which has decimated residuals and made it harder for writers, support staff, and others to make ends meet in Los Angeles—the fourth most expensive city to live in the world.
In March, the WGA released a report stating that more writers are working for the union’s negotiated minimum wage now than were a decade ago—including 49 percent of showrunners. On his Scriptnotes podcast, screenwriter John August noted that today’s writers assistants have less upward mobility in the industry than before, and that writers assistant wages haven’t budged since his time as a writer in the 1990s.
Nevertheless, Iger persisted.
“I understand any labor organization’s desire to work on the behalf of its members to get the most compensation and be compensated fairly based on the value that they deliver,” Iger told CNBC. “We managed, as an industry, to negotiate a very good deal with the Directors Guild that reflects the value that the directors contribute to this great business. We wanted to do the same thing with the writers, and we’d like to do the same thing with the actors. There’s a level of expectation that they have, that is just not realistic. And they are adding to a set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.”
In June, the Los Angeles Times reviewed executive compensation at 10 publicly held media and entertainment companies and found that Hollywood’s top executives’ pay had skyrocketed during COVID-19, “climbing to $1.43 billion in 2021, up 50% from total pay in 2018.” Total executive pay, however, had dropped. Even Iger’s salary pales in comparison to the top industry earners like Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who reportedly collected $498 million over the last five years—which, per CNBC, amounts to 384 times what the average writer took home.
When CNBC’s David Faber asked Iger what, precisely, made striking workers’ demands so unrealistic during their interview this week, Iger declined to specify.
“Again, I respect their right and their desire to get as much as they possibly can in compensation for their people,” Iger said. “And I completely respect that. I’ve been around long enough to understand that dynamic and to appreciate it. But you also have to be realistic about the business environment and what this business can deliver. It is and has been a great business for all of these people, and it will continue to be, even through disruptive times. But being realistic is imperative here.”
Needless to say, Iger’s comments didn’t go over well on Twitter.
Iger’s comments about realism and priorities bring to mind a quote from Abigail Disney, who has spoken out against the company’s labor practices (and his salary) in the past. During an interview with The Daily Beast last year, Disney said she’d first chosen to speak out against the company that her grandfather, Roy Disney, co-founded after a cast member had reached out to her in 2018.
“I went out there and wanted to sit, one human being to another human being, and get to know them,” she said. When she emailed Iger about the matter, she said, she received “a very unsatisfying answer.” Disney added that there’s “no way” the company doesn’t “know that people aren’t putting food on the table. There’s just no way.”
Later on, the heiress asked a prescient question: If you’re, say, the CEO of a Hollywood conglomerate, “Shouldn’t you be like a ship’s captain and stay on the bridge of the Titanic until everybody is on the lifeboats—then you can have your $66 million?”
