I’m guessing they’re for it. If you spent a half a second googling it, they’re pretty anti-gay, and have been for a while. In fact, they pissed off several thousand of their own employees by banning the Pride flag.
As a person who reads regulatory filings for fun and profit, I hope to bring some insight to this thread by quoting from Disney’s latest 10-k, the annual report which is filed with the SEC.
Some of you are familiar with these reports, some are not, but a 10-k (and the attendant 10-q, filed every quarter) is a standardized regulatory filing where the company must disclose their financials, their risk assessments, more. As a general rule, one doesn’t really want to lie on a government filing, but one can use these filings to obfuscate, de-clarify (I just coined that), and hide all sorts of chicanery… and it takes people willing to dig through the footnotes to find this shit out.
Enron, for example, was undone merely by a reporter, Bethany McLean, who wrote a story in March, 2001, about what she found in Enron’s 2000 10-k, asking “Is Enron Overpriced?” (PDF). Enron effectively disclosed, for years, that it was a criminal enterprise, but did so in a way that you had to painstakingly read this 300 page document to figure this out. This process, begun by McLean and then added on by others alerted to her findings, eventually collapsed the company 10 months later. And none of it was new information, it was just information everyone ignored, partly because Enron hid it.
So I want to tackle the question of how important is diversity to Disney as expressed in their government filings, really, the best way to see how a company thinks of itself and how it approaches what they do. I also want to look at their risk assessments - knowing that corporate executives were prepared for this eventuality would help me, as an investor, rest easy.
Diversity and the Disney Business Model
Fortunately, to answer the question of 'where does diversity and LGBTQ fit in the Disney business model?" we don’t have to dig into footnotes.
In Disney’s latest 10-k, filed 11/24/2021 which is causing this hate filled activity, on Page 1 we find that diversity, equity, and inclusion… far from being ‘not what the company does’… is, in fact, the prime driver of future business growth:
(DPEP is “Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products”)
So… diversity is a core business strategy? What else do they say?
Holy shit! No wonder conservative heads are asploding. “This is Disney’s freaking financial blueprint and they’re talking about… diversity? Education? Health care? Environment sustainability? WT actual F? What about parks? What about Snow White? What about ESPN? Why all this hippy-hoppy woke shit???”
(For those who want to learn about ESPN and parks, that’s page 3. But the above is what Disney led their financial report with, and let’s focus on that.)
Let’s look at the Disney model, 30,000 foot view, no moral judgements: They started as a company which mines cultural touchpoints from across the globe, modifies them according to their own internal artistic sensibilities, and then produces a product which, hopefully, resonates with the American audience they produced it for.
And this model worked great for a damn long time, from 1926-2000ish. There was a massive market for cis-heteronormative productions featuring white people and Disney worked, ruthlessly, for 75 years to market and sell into that pipeline (and they’re still selling into it!)
But, like all markets, that one became saturated. And Disney realized that there are other pipelines, one not featuring white kids or with the white kid as the central figure in a cringingly-diverse group setting.
Disney doesn’t “run theme parks”. They create art, UV, and to create art which touches as many people as you can… because the capitalist ethos states all of are are to be sold to, and that companies need to relentlessly push for growth… a company which produces art in such an economic environment literally needs people who can speak to all of humanity, not just middle-aged white guys like me. They need to speak to blacks. To gays. To Filipinos. To Uyghurs and Chinese. More. Everyone.
This is why the 10-k, the most important filing of the year, literally started with diversity. Diversity and human resource development is their announced growth strategy, i.e., the development of stories which I, a cis-heteronormative white guy, may ignore but still makes $500,000,000 in revenue. They’re still making movies for me, my God, are they, but their growth strategy must include making stories for Not Me.
And this is stated, page one, of their business model. And Ron DeSantis knows this, and he is knowingly crippling Disney’s efforts to be fiscally responsive to their shareholders by limiting the company’s products to only those which appeal to the most bigoted and hateful subset of the American population.
This is why diversity matters specifically to a company like Disney. They produce art which needs to sell to all people and art limited only to the aesthetic sensibilities of men like me has reached its economic saturation point.
Disney’s Risk Assessment Model needs changing
And, frankly, so does every other corporations in America.
In all 10k’s there exists a section called “Risk Factors”, usually pretty early in the document - in the Disney 10-K it’s Item 1.a, on page 18. Disney’s is pretty significant, going on for 9 pages. I’d like to highlight two of them:
I do not see the potential loss of the district listed as a potential risk. In fact, issues regarding legal changes in “ownership restrictions” only appear in the line about foreign governments.
Next paragraph:
This is about foreign governments.
However, I do think that future 10-k’s would be prudent to include governments within the United States which are expressing corrupt intent, including purposely damaging a corporations business model as to bring it to heel, such as forcing a company to align against a politically marginalized community.
UV, you are arguing for camps. This step of bringing corporations on the side of fascists against marginalized communities… especially a corporation which must reach out to these communities in order to reach their growth targets… is but one step which leads to those communities being placed into ‘hospitals’ (camps), prisons (camps), or just camps.
Stop it. You are wrong. Business-wise, legally, morally. You have lost this argument.
Diversity has been a key part of Disney’s business strategy, even just from an on-screen point of view, for more than a decade now. We’ve had a black Disney Princess, a Pacific Islander tribal princess, and an insanely popular film that took place in Colombia. We also had Raya and the Last Dragon, which took place in the fictional southeast Asia-analogue world of Kumandra. Two decades before Raya was Mulan.
And we’ve been seeing less of the damsel in distress trope and more of the action princesses, showing Disney’s dedication to the idea that women can do anything men can do.
But. But. But. Goofy is going to be literally raw-dogging Mickey. Satan!
Checkmate. QED. American exceptionalism. MAGABLTLOL. Got your nose.
In some ways, but as recently as 2019, ‘diversity’ doesn’t even appear in their 10-K.
Putting diversity initiatives at the top of the 10-K signifies a significant, purposeful change in corporate strategy because, as a company creating art in an economic world increasingly not cis-heteronormative American white, they admit they must focus on attracting creatives who can speak to those audiences. Our market is tapped out, there is no more growth. Plenty of revenue and cash-flow in the future, yes, but growth? No.
They just can’t be as, er, blunt as the above.
Now I want a BLT…
I certainly hope both sides lose.
So they have a fiduciary responsibility to not do what they think will enable them to sell more mouses?
In what way would you like them both to “lose”?
Warner Bros. buys Disney and sends Bugs Bunny to saw Florida off the continent?
We’ll be a Ken doll, but without Florida. So that’s worth considering.
In this argument for making DC a state, at the end, John Oliver and the kids sing,
And if you’re totally convinced that there should be just 50 states,
Well then, let’s all kick out Florida, 'cuz no one thinks they’re great.
Morally yes, so long as done without discrimination.
But, if considered as a business matter, they need to cater to people with lots of money. The potential for Han Chinese, with rising incomes, to go to Shanghai Disneyland, is high. So advertise where they will see the ad. But Uyghurs? While a lot of them have been released from re-education camps, they are often travel-restricted. And if Disney stands up for the Uyghurs, they could hurt their core business in China. The U.S. isn’t the only country with a culture war.
More generally, if a community is marginalized, it doesn’t have much money.
There is a big demographic consisting of affluent whites who could afford to go to Disney but don’t want to, like my wife and I. Just from a business extension standpoint, isn’t that the biggest unserved U.S. market?
It isn’t obvious to me that appealing to Filipinos in the Philippines is going to work. They are mostly, by Western standards, too poor. U.S. Filipinos? A lot of them do have money. And if they recently immigrated, they are used to hot weather, like Florida in the summer. I guess Disney could try a partnership with Jollibee.
I don’t think diversity moves are going to grow their business. The real bottom-line benefit of diversity efforts would be to have as big as possible pool of potential employees so you don’t run into staff shortages forcing you to pay living wages high enough so your staff can take their own kids to Disney parks.
And if a community is marginalized, it won’t be able to make much money. Just an observation.
They may not have to specifically go after certain groups, but they do need a sort of broad appeal to them, rather than ignoring them, or, worse, alienating them.
Plus there’s the fact that Americans in general have become more inclusive. Adding inclusivity can give an edge if someone is on the fence on which content to buy, theme park to go to, etc. It’s good for their brand to be seen as the more inclusive company.
It’s also just generally easier to embrace inclusivity in general rather than having to pick out which groups it’s still okay to exclude.
That said, you’re not wrong about it having to do with employees. I was, however, under the impression that those who worked at Disney World or Disneyland could get their loved ones in at reduced costs during the weaker seasons. Are you talking about other Disney workers? Or am I mistaken?
Poor people might not be able to go to Disneyland, and that’s relevant, because the theme parks are the largest chunk of Disney’s business. But they can still go see Disney movies and buy Disney T-shirts and so on, and those are big, too.
And of course, the relevant demographics to this particular case are LGBTQ, and they’re found in every socioeconomical stratum.
That floored me, but checking up on it it appears to be true. I’d have for sure thought it would be its movies that make Disney most of its money.
Well, as somebody on this very message board once said:
I think you are right.
And it wasn’t a matter of LGBTQ people traditionally being less willing than others to go to Disney parks, or attend Broadway Disney musicals. It’s a matter of the risk of alienating existing customers and employees.
On another board, a lesbian posted that, despite Disney standing up agasinst the Don’t Say Gay law, something she liked, she now will boycott them, having learned of their history of contributing to GOP political compaigns. That’s the real risk – losing existing customers… People already know they have long welcomed patrons of all ethnic groups and gender identities. Disney diversity initiatives can’t seriously grow the business – at best, they can heal the damage the culture war is causing. And maybe not that, because of the risk of losing conversative customers. (This isn’t to say Disney World will die, just that the lines may get a little shorter.)
Businesses should treat customers and employees fairly not to grow the business, but because it is right. John_T mentioned Filipinos and Chinese and Ugyurs, and I jumped on that a bit because I don’t think they are part of this story. Now, Trumpers – they may be more a part of the story.
About 30 years ago my family want to Walt Disney World. This was before they instituted a system where people could pay to queue jump. That is reason enough for us to not go back, with or without grandchildren. We prefer Sarasota.