Center stage at Disney after a career out of the spotlight

LOS ANGELES — The second that Robert Iger stepped down as Disney’s chief executive on Tuesday — almost two years sooner than expected — Hollywood broke into frenzied gossip.

“The king abdicates the throne!” a prominent film producer texted a reporter. “Surprising and baffling,” a senior executive at a rival studio said in an email. Another asked, “Do we think Iger might run for president after all?”

And then came a second round of questions: Chapek who?

Bob Chapek, who replaced Iger effective immediately, is well known inside the Walt Disney Co., where he has quietly worked for 27 years, mostly in unflashy businesses like consumer products and film distribution. Most recently, he ran the Disney division that includes theme parks and cruise ships.

But a larger-than-life executive Chapek is not. To large swaths of Hollywood, in fact, he is an unknown.

Chapek, 60, would gladly skip a red-carpet premiere to spend a quiet night at home, friends say. He lives on the outskirts of Los Angeles, far from the fashionable Brentwood and Pacific Palisades neighborhoods where most power players reside. He and his wife, Cindy, have been married for 38 years. At media events, such as the 2018 opening of Toy Story Land at Walt Disney World in Florida, Chapek amiably performs his role (in that case, yukking it up with Buzz Lightyear on a stage). But he is happy to not be the center of attention.

Chapek, known as “Bob C” inside Disney, has almost no experience in television, which remains a $25 billion annual business for Disney and where Iger — cool and charismatic — made his name before taking over as chief executive in 2005.

But comparing Chapek to Iger may be missing the point.

No one can reasonably be expected to fill Iger’s shoes, not only because he has a singular personality but because the company has changed so much during his tenure. When Iger took over as chief executive, Disney had two movie studios. Now it has eight, including Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Blue Sky and Searchlight. The company had two cruise ships in 2005. It will soon have seven. Annual theme park attendance has grown to 159 million worldwide, from about 115 million. Disney has two major new streaming services, Hulu and Disney Plus, both of which are making original programming to compete with Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and the coming HBO Max.

With all of the sprawl, not even Iger can run Disney the way he has run it.

“In thinking about what I want to accomplish before I leave the company at the end of ’21, getting everything right creatively would be my No. 1 goal,” Iger told analysts on Tuesday. “I could not do that if I were running the company on a day-to-day basis.”

And despite his low profile in the broader entertainment industry, Chapek is not a surprising choice. Iger signaled that Chapek was a leading candidate in his memoir, “The Ride of a Lifetime,” which was published in September. At one point, Iger recounted a moment in 2016 when Chapek rose to multiple challenges at once — opening the Shanghai Disney Resort, handling a secret security threat at Disney World in Florida and dealing with the death of a toddler (by alligator attack) at a Disney World lake.

“The bond you form in high-stress moments like this, when you’re sharing information that you can’t discuss with anyone else, is a powerful one,” Iger wrote of Chapek.

Chapek also has training wheels. For the next 22 months, he will report to Iger, who took the title executive chairman, and to the Disney board. Iger will serve as a type of chief creative officer. “My intention is to really spend time on all of our creative endeavors, whether at ESPN or the Fox studios or our media networks,” Iger told analysts.

People inside Disney described Chapek as no frills. He is known for setting clear goals and empowering lieutenants to accomplish them. Colleagues admire his work ethic and the manner in which he has climbed from humble roots in blue-collar Hammond, Indiana.

He doesn’t let sacred cows stand in his way, numerous Disney executives said.

Under Chapek’s reign, the theme park division used expansions, new fees (like charging for parking at some Disney World hotels) and higher ticket prices (annual increases of as much as 9% for daily entry) to deliver five consecutive years of growth. The division generated $6.8 billion in operating profit last year — 46% of Disney’s total income.

“He’s classy and, at the same time, he can put on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt and be as blue collar as the next guy,” said Gill Champion, president of POW! Entertainment, which counts the comics legend Stan Lee as a co-founder. “Lives and breathes the Disney lifestyle.”

The announcement allows Iger to crown Chapek at Disney’s annual meeting on March 11. It was also seen as a move by Iger to head off any potentially distracting executive jockeying inside the company.

The abruptness of the announcement, however, led to rampant speculation about a reason. Some noted that Disney is set to have a difficult financial year. The company’s 2020 film slate boasts fewer surefire blockbusters; there will be no “Star Wars” movie this year, for instance. Cord-cutting seems to be accelerating, putting ESPN under more pressure.

And the coronavirus has already closed Shanghai Disney Resort and Hong Kong Disneyland and threatens other resorts and Disney Cruise Line. Chapek told CNBC on Tuesday that the coronavirus was “certainly a bump in the road” but said the company was prepared. “We’ll come through this like we’ve come through every other challenge that we’ve had,” he said.