Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s First Year Report Card: High Marks for Not ‘Steering it Off a Cliff’

Bob Chapek just finished his first year as CEO of entertainment giant Walt Disney Co. — and is getting mostly high marks for leading L.A.’s biggest public company through a global pandemic without, as one analyst put it, “steering it off a cliff.” “It was the calm before the storm, literally, when Mr. Chapek took over this role,” Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian said of Chapek, who replaced Bob Iger as CEO on Feb. 25, 2020, just weeks before COVID-19 upended the world and the entertainment and tourism sectors that drive Disney’s revenues. “The stage was set for success, but nobody knew that the whole universe of entertainment, and business in general, would literally be turned upside down.” At the time Chapek took over, Disney had just launched its streaming service Disney+, which had racked up more than 28 million subscribers by early February. Theme parks remained a profit center, and seven Disney films had earned more than $1 billion each at the box office in 2019, including “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” and “Avengers:Endgame,” which raked in $2 billion and is the highest grossing movie of all time (adjusting for inflation). “And then the pandemic hit, and...

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