When Bob Chapek assumed the helm of the Disney empire in February 2020 as Bob Iger’s personally picked successor, it felt like the well-earned pinnacle of decades of hard work at the Magic Kingdom.
But in less than three years, Chapek’s dream was destroyed: He was abruptly dismissed in November 2022, and Iger returned as CEO. In Chapek’s memoir “Behind the Castle Walls,” set to be released Sept. 29, he points to Iger as the “real reason” he was canned. Chapek claims Iger, who is mentioned 121 times in the 272-page book, simply couldn’t cede the crown.
Iger “seemed to initiate a relentless three-year campaign to push me out,” he writes. “I’d never expected to endure a drawn-out, purposeful undoing of my leadership.” (Reps for Iger and Disney have declined to comment.)
Variety spoke with Chapek to discuss his book, his legacy at Disney — and his lingering resentment about how he was kicked out.
A repeated theme in your book is that you think Bob Iger’s unwillingness to give up the CEO role is what led to your ouster, and you write that you did “nothing” wrong. Do you think you really made no mistakes?
I don’t know if I can say that I made no mistakes during the time, but nothing that would warrant the action that the board took. In other words, no one is infallible. No one’s going to go through almost a three-year tenure as CEO and not make a mistake, but I don’t think that was causal in any way to the act [of Chapek’s termination].
Your book recounts some painful episodes from your time as CEO. Why did you decide to write it?
You know, I was approached right after I was dismissed from Disney, and I pondered it and thought that “Nah, I don’t really think I want to get involved in it.” But I figured I’d let some time go, because I think with distance and time comes a little bit of clarity, and I would lose whatever emotion I had over the situation and be able to, at the right time, respond appropriately with facts as opposed to emotions. And I did that, and as it turns out, I saw so many examples of sort of the rhetoric that had been planted after I left the company that I thought was honestly not based in fact, not based in the truth, and it was a diversion, and I just couldn’t have the record forever point to what I thought was you know fiction.
Did you consider taking legal action against Disney?
No.
Why not?
Just don’t want to go there.
When’s the last time you had any communication with Bob Iger?
Since I’ve been gone, nothing. But since the time he left the company, I ran into him once at Sun Valley [the business-titan conference in Idaho, in July 2022]. But I’ve not seen him since I left or had any communication whatsoever.
Did you speak to him at Sun Valley?
Oh yeah, I shook his hand. He was speaking with a group of people on one of the walkways, and I saw him there and shook his hand, said hello. We had a brief exchange, very brief, and I moved on, and he moved on.
In a nutshell, why do you think Iger was so intent on undercutting you as CEO?
I think he wanted to return.
So you’ve never asked Bob Iger, “Why did you do this?” and explain to him that you feel betrayed?
No, although there were degrees of that as we were still working together, him as executive chair and me as CEO. Particularly after the New York Times’ Ben Smith article [in April 2020, which reported that Iger was “reasserting control” at Disney and quoted an email from him saying about COVID: “A crisis of this magnitude, and its impact on Disney, would necessarily result in my actively helping Bob [Chapek] and the company contend with it, particularly since I ran the company for 15 years!”]. I mean, if you’re going to point to something, I think there was some resentment [on Iger’s part] from the very first announcement when we sat together and he looked very tense and uncomfortable. But if you’re going to point to one thing that really showed his intentions it would be that article, and I think that’s what it did. It foreshadowed his intention.
Did Iger or anyone on the board ever tell you, “You need to do X, Y, or Z, otherwise your job is in jeopardy”?
No.
What do you feel is the biggest misperception about your time as CEO?
I think that somewhere in the mix between the Florida “Don’t Say Gay” controversy [over legislation to prohibit discussion about gender and sexual identity in state schools from kindergarten through third grade], the “Black Widow”-Scarlett Johansson controversy, and pointing to one quarter’s performance in the market. I think those are the things that tend to be brought up most often. While those were difficult times, it was a difficult time for everybody because we’re in the middle of COVID, by the way, and we had just acquired Fox with the enormous tens of billions of dollars of debt, and so you have no revenue streams. You have to pay off your debt. You have to take on more loans, and the company is essentially shut down. You have to do the unpopular work of furloughing 110,000 people while at the same time going through these social controversies and having internal friendly sniper fire.
What are your thoughts about [recently appointed Disney CEO] Josh D’Amaro? You worked with him for many years at the parks division.
Josh is an excellent executive. Josh has a very nice combination of business savvy and business acumen, and he’s also very personable guy. He was on my succession list basically the whole time I was in parks and as CEO. So I think he’s I think he’s the right guy, and I wish him well.
One of the criticisms about you as CEO is that you supposedly didn’t have a handle of the entertainment side of the house. Was it surprising that that Disney picked D’Amaro, who also came up through the parks division?
Yeah, see, I don’t know how real that was. That’s one thing that gets pointed to. But if you go back to the original announcement where I was made CEO, it said that Bob Iger would continue to retain control over creative product. So it’s a little hard to hold me accountable over something that I was encouraged to give him a very wide berth on, and then you back that up with the fact that it was COVID, and I spent the first 18 months at my home. And so I’m not sure that’s really a valid thing to point to, other than again part of this rhetoric that was spread after I departed the company. So you know, if it was such a horrible situation that somebody from parks comes in and can’t manage the media, entertainment, creative business, then they wouldn’t put Josh in that role. So I just use that as that point to support my thought.
Is it a fair conclusion from reading your book that you’re still angry about what happened?
I’m disappointed. I don’t think I’m qualified for angry anymore. I think I was angry for the first year or so, and again, with time comes a little bit of perspective, and so I’ve healed — not fully — and what’s left is disappointment. You know, I put 30 years into the company and felt that no matter what business they put me on, I delivered results and had the full support of Bob Iger — the full support of Bob Iger — until the day that I get the job [as CEO]. And then it all felt like it changed. And you know, I felt like I at least had the board of support five months before I got let go because I got an extension to my deal [through July 2025], which is curious as well. So yeah, I feel that disappointed is probably a better word, but not angry.
RELATED: 12 Takeaways From Ousted Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s New Book
Iger’s first move back as CEO was to dismantle Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution, a group you created. Iger, as he put it, said this would put more “decision-making back in the hands of our creative teams and rationalize costs.”
Kareem Daniel, who ran that group, had none of those creative people reporting to him. What it did, it put distribution decisions in the hands of distribution, and once again, it’s a perfect example of the spin that took place after the fact to try to again justify [Chapek’s ouster]. The interesting thing about that particular situation is when I was in studio distribution, Bob [Iger] came to me and suggested to me that he really wanted to integrate distribution across the studio, across digital, across DVD, across television. You know, all the different ways that you monetize the content, and asked me to integrate that under one central decision-making hub, which would then essentially catalyze sort of the holistic decision-making revenue stream over any piece of content. So I did that, and you know who I made head of that group? Kareem Daniel. Fast forward five years, I get the CEO job, and guess what I do? The exact same thing, led by the exact same guy, and now it’s bad. So essentially, the thing that he came to me suggesting five years earlier as a really good idea — and it led to a lot of interesting things like the shortening of the theatrical window — when I do it on my own accord, it’s all of a sudden now bad. The only difference was I was now the CEO. It was exactly the same move.
Iger essentially undid that structure. Was that the right thing to do at that time?
I think not, but that’s water under the bridge at this point.
Let’s go to the critical Q4 2022 earnings report on Nov. 8. Disney missed Wall Street forecasts. The streaming business posted a $1.47 billion loss. This is Monday-morning quarterbacking, but should you have cut back on content spending and try to get the streaming business profitable sooner?
You know this business as well as I do. Those content decisions that led to that cost in that quarter were generated three, four years earlier when that content was greenlighted in an organization that was run by Bob Iger. Plus, content decisions were not in my realm. This is pretty straightforward, I think.
Now about the decision to release “Black Widow” simultaneously on Disney+ and in theaters in 2021. Again, for context, we’re still in COVID. A lot of theaters aren’t open. Scarlett Johansson sued you over that, alleging that Disney cheated her out of box office upside. Was that something you might have done differently?
Well, I wish it had been handled differently with her and her agent. I think the move was actually the right one, but you know, oftentimes the situation changes. Those deals are cut four years earlier before the film ever comes out. Something very significant happened in that four-year time frame. COVID shut down theaters. You know, there’s no way people can see movies. So something obviously had to be done differently, unless you want to sit on a movie for three years, which then upsets the cadence of all the Marvel movies. Because as you know, from a storyline standpoint, they’re interdependent, right? And so you can’t just say, “Let’s go ahead and stop this one and just let the rest of it play out.” Couldn’t have happened. We had to have that movie come out. So we had to have new terms and conditions for that. Theaters weren’t open. That gave us one option, right? That gave us only one option to release the movie, and so it had to happen by default. It had to happen. It’s just the way that it played out was not advantageous. I don’t think to either party. It went really quickly through a lawsuit, which typically, and again, as you know, these things get negotiated between the agents and the studios on behalf of their clients. And you know, it all gets worked out for whatever reason. On this particular one, it just went right through to the lawsuit.
Tell me about your firing of Peter Rice. He was Disney’s head of general entertainment. This was June 2022, and you promoted Dana Walden to replace him. I don’t think you discuss Peter Rice in your book. What happened there? It surprised people.
It surprised people. But Peter’s a great executive, long track record of success, and great history. It just furthered the direction that the company wanted to go at the time. It was deemed that they wanted to go with Dana as the leader, and you know, Dana and Peter were sort of two people doing essentially similar things. So it was as simple as that.
You said “they” wanted to go with Dana. Who’s “they”?
Well, there’s more to a decision like this. It’s not that I wake up one day and say, “Oh, I think I’m going to do this.” There’s a lot of people we consult with.
In the book, you say “I kept my head down” and that you believe Iger picked you to be CEO because you never tried too hard to promote yourself. But in the book you tout a lot of your accomplishments, including driving the direct-to-video business and raising pricing at parks. Are those narratives in conflict with each other?
I don’t think so because they’re at different points in time. While I had the [CEO] job, I did not do pretty much anything to promote myself. But now again, looking back and seeing how unfairly my years have been categorized, I thought it was important not only to tell the story of how I grew up, sort of the American dream piece of it, but also the middle part of the book, which is why I even got put in a position to be CEO. And you know, because I wasn’t tooting my own horn, people sort of forgotten what I think is a fairly remarkable history that I had at the company. So is that something I’m proud of? Absolutely. Did I talk about it though when I was still a cast member employee at Disney. No, I did not, which is why this book is sort of revealing.
Do you wish you had done more, not self-promotion, but explaining to the company and to employees and to Wall Street that you had these wins?
Yes, probably. But in my sort of Midwestern humility, that really wasn’t part of my game plan, and it probably did not help myself. I did still get to be CEO, so it kind of worked out. But I think you know, if had a chance to do it again, I probably would have figured out some way to promote those ideas and the facts of my accomplishments, rather than sort of being that guy in the shadows who everyone seemingly thinks just miraculously leaps to the front of the line when other people were being speculated as being much higher chances of being the next CEO.
Let’s talk about the Florida Don’t Say Gay controversy. You say in the book that, when you spoke out against it after not addressing it publicly, you were accused of backtracking. But that’s what happened, right? You flipped on the decision.
100%.
Do you wish, looking back, you had initially come out with a strong statement of support for LGBTQ people?
I think what I did originally was the appropriate course of action for the Walt Disney Company, not necessarily my own personal beliefs, but was the right course of action for the Walt Disney Company. But suffice it to say that there’s a lot of powers that influence what decision a CEO makes and what statement a CEO makes. Anyone who thinks that that that’s made in a vacuum would know that’s significantly mischaracterizing the situation.
Who are the powers to be that influenced that decision?
People that have influence over those decisions within the company. I’m going to keep it generic.
In the book, you also write it was outside political groups and not Disney’s employees behind the demonstrations in protest of the lack of stance on the Don’t Say Gay bill. But there were clearly hundreds of Disney employees who were very upset about that.
Oh yeah, there were a lot of Disney employees that were upset by it. There’s no doubt. But my point was that those demonstrations were organized and largely populated by outsiders. Not to in any way dismiss the subject matter or [employees’] passion for complete representation within the company. So I was just talking about those particular protests.
Fans of Disney theme parks still seem to be mad at you for the pricing changes you put in place when you were head of parks. Do you have any regrets about how that all went down?
I think it was the right thing to do. When you’re CEO, you’re really torn by a lot of different constituents. Wall Street wants high returns. Cast members want high wages, and these all sort of tug in the opposite direction of each other. The fans want lower prices and more access to the parks without restriction. So you have to sort of figure out where in that three-dimensional stretch, you’re going to land, right? And given the situation at the time with the company having no growth vehicles other than parks, with cable television waning, with network television waning, with ESPN cost skyrocketing, you know, nobody was going to be around there long if the company didn’t have some positive performance. And you know, when I was in parks, Bob and the board applauded those moves with every earnings release. Nobody ever said, “Don’t do this.” So it is a very tough thing, tough place to land. By the way, even within the world of parks, there’s two different large groups of constituents: It’s the locals and the annual pass holders who come very frequently, and the people that come from five hours away that come for pilgrimage every once every five years. And you know, that’s a balancing act. So there’s just a lot of push-pulls there. Hard to make everybody completely happy at all time. I understand the animosity from some of the people there, the loyal annual pass holders, but you know I think given the situation we were in at the time, the nature of my role, I had to make those decisions.
You talk in the book about how your family visited Disney World, and you went in 1971 when it first opened. What kind of remains a thread to your childhood memories of all that?
Cast members, you know, and I’ve said this a number of times. My whole time I was running parks, I didn’t get letters about how great attractions were. I mean, shockingly, as great as the attractions are, you don’t get many letters about, “Wow. Hey, I just want you to know I went to Walt Disney World or Disneyland Paris, and this one attraction is really great.” It’s always about the guest-cast interaction, and that’s what I felt. I was young, but that’s part of the magic. And it was that thread that you just said that I 40 years later still felt.
Did you take your own kids to the parks?
Oh, all the time, all the time. Yeah, we did. Every kid’s birthday was always at the park at Disneyland… We always went to commemorate that birthday. So yeah, did that all the time, and then followed that up with my grandkids. I was there quite a bit, and then we would take our own pilgrimage, if you want, once a year to Orlando.
Do you ever see going yourself going back to the parks in any way?
Ever is a long time. Anytime soon, though, no.
Why not?
I feel let down. I feel, you know, you go into Disneyland, you go into Disney World, you go into It’s a Small World, and you buy in to the magic of Disney. And then you go through what I went through the last four years, and it’s kind of head scratcher. There’s several ways you can handle a situation like mine. The company made a decision to remove the sign at Castaway Cay [Disney’s private island in the Bahamas] commemorating my getting the board to rebuild three new ships [which said “Bob Chapek, Master Ship Builder”]. Was that necessary? Probably not. Was that spiteful? Yeah. The company’s timeline has been edited since I left to remove me in my time as CEO. So you know, it’s got to be a symbiotic thing where I show love, they show love. And I feel that the love’s been missing the last four years. And more than that, it’s actually they’ve attempted to erase me. So I’m sorry if that doesn’t comport with the idea of [visiting Disney’s theme parks], but it doesn’t.
How did you find out about Disney removing that plaque?
It was published all over everything, on social media. That in itself is unusual, and I think speaks to the fact that they’ve attempted to erase me. Now, “they” is a big word, by the way. You know, that person attempted to erase me.
That person being Bob Iger?
I presume.
What are you most proud of from your 30-year Disney career?
I think my brand stewardship would be the first one. If I had a second one, would be the performance of the company that warranted larger investments in capital to create new attractions and be able to continue the flow of content. As you said, I have a bit of a track record in terms of successful management of the businesses. And then the third thing is the way I carried myself for all 30 years. I never really got involved in situations like this because I felt that I really supported the company, the brand and all its ideals. And it’s a shame that all came tumbling down.
What are your professional activities today? What are you most excited about — what gets you up in the morning?
I am involved in a variety of advising and consulting businesses, most of them through private equity and entrepreneurs. One of the things I’m really excited about is an artificial intelligence company called NinjaTech AI. It has a 24-7 AI agent employee sort of structure that knows all, sees all, can do all, and it can be done at one-tenth the price of those type of AI agents that operate on a token basis… I’m dabbling in private-equity real estate. And something I’m very excited about: My wife and I got engaged [as producers] in a musical called “Midnight,” from Todrick Hall, which premiered here in New York [Sept. 27]. Todrick is just an amazing artist. You know, he sings, dances. He’s a choreographer. He’s the director, the producer, and it’s a very timely story about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. And so I get to scratch my creative itch by doing that as well. So I’ve got a whole bunch of things. Of course, the book that I’ve worked on for the last two years. So, yeah, got a bunch of things that I’m involved in, all the way from AI to a musical off Broadway.
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