Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire

Yes, and that is, by far, the best option to fend off these corporate raiders. Dark times. Films and TV, you know, the Disney that you know of, the content business, is basically break-even. In 1984, Disney generated a quarter billion dollars of profit from its parks and consumer products and a mere $2 million from film and TV. The core of the famous Disney flywheel is completely broken.

Yep. So in the wake of all that, in 1984, Roy E. Disney decides enough is enough. Together with the Bass brothers, the new 25% shareholders, Roy and his business partner Stanley Gold, who's also on the Disney board with him, they gang up and they finally force out Ron Miller as CEO, who again is Roy's cousin by marriage, married to Walt's daughter. And they do this via dramatic boardroom coup that happens on September 7th, 1984. And then over a period of just 14 days, because Disney now, like, is without a leader, is in double crisis here. And then Michael quickly brings in his number two from Paramount, Jeffrey Katzenberg, to run the film studios.

Yep. And the way they did it was this famous strategy that they called the singles and doubles strategy. The idea was they would keep their production costs low. Like, do we have the stars?