How Mickey Mouse Is Coping With Covid-19

How Mickey Mouse Is Coping With Covid-19  Walt Disney is a media and entertainment giant, with beloved franchises and diversified revenue streams. But it's been feeling pressure from practically all sides during the coronavirus pandemic. Movie theaters are closed around the world, delaying new film releases. Companies pulling back on spending are slashing their advertising budgets, hitting Disney's networks. ESPN in particular is hurting, without live sports to broadcast. Theme parks like Disneyland are shut and Disney's cruises aren't operating. Even the relatively new streaming service Disney+—which surpassed 50 million subscribers today—isn't helping to offset losses in other divisions: All those new subscribers aren't yet profitable for Disney. Barron's Jack Hough caught up with Disney's executive chairman Bob Iger earlier this week. Iger recently relinquished the CEO role to Bob Chapek, but is staying on to guide the company's creative efforts. Here are a few highlights from Jack's conversation with Iger: On Disney’s financial strength, and ability to bounce back: We’re fortunate as a company that we have access to capital that will keep us more than solvent through a prolonged period. Now when I say prolonged, I don’t necessarily mean forever. No one’s got that. That said, we’ve taken steps during this period of time—you know, the furloughs—to reduce costs out of necessity. We started with the senior executives. We felt that was necessary, not just in terms of reducing costs, but also sending a signal. Others obviously will feel the impact as well as we look to preserve the long-term health of the company financially. In addition to that, I don’t think we’re ever going to see a return to business as usual in the sense that, I can’t speak for all companies, but Disney will take this opportunity to look for ways to run our businesses more efficiently when we come back. So what we’re doing is thinking, OK, as things start to return, one, what must we address in terms of making people feel safe, but secondly, what must we address in terms of running the company more efficiently, given what we believe business conditions will dictate. On reopening the parks after the virus passes: One of the things that we’re discussing already is that in order to return to some semblance of normal, people will have to feel comfortable that they’re safe. Some of that could come in the form ultimately of a vaccine, but in the absence of that it could come from basically, more scrutiny, more restrictions. Just as we now do bag checks for everybody that goes into our parks, it could be that at some point we add a component of that that takes people’s temperatures, as a for-instance. On what is being done with films already in production: There are some we’ve decided to put on Disney+. We already announced one, Artemis Fowl, that would have been released in theaters. Others we’ve simply delayed. In some cases we’ve moved things onto Disney+ faster than we would have. Frozen 2 was one of them, but Onward would be the biggest example. It was in theaters when this happened. We moved to a pay-per-view period for a couple of weeks where people could buy it and own it. And then we ended up putting it on Disney+. On streaming: Unfortunately, or fortunately, it’s going great. The launch in Europe has been strong. France is just launching, because we delayed them, because they had some concerns about bandwidth. India just launched. We’re going to have launches in Latin America coming up. But the bottom line is that I think Disney+ was going to be popular no matter what. In this time, it’s probably far more popular than we ever imagined it would be, in part because it’s a welcome relief and a great alternative in terms of entertainment, for people who don’t have access given all the restrictions. Find the rest of Jack's Q&A with Bob Iger here.